Red Ventures, which started as a digital marketing company, has attracted serious investments from private equity firms and is perhaps the biggest digital publisher in America, with roughly $2 billion in annual revenues
Ric Elias, Red Ventures’ chief executive, in Indian Land, S.C. on Aug. 11, 2021. Elias is known for his TED Talk about being on the US Airways jetliner that made an emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009. Red Ventures has turned very specific advice into very big business — and is the rare media company that has remained independent of Amazon. (Travis Dove/The New York Times)
INDIAN LAND, S.C. — Lindsey Turrentine first heard of Red Ventures last fall, when it bought the venerable tech news site CNET, where she is the senior vice president in charge of content. She sat down at her kitchen table in Berkeley, California, and frantically started Googling to find out what it was.
Her experience wasn’t uncommon. People working at the tourism guide Lonely Planet, the travel site The Points Guy and the health and medical information site Healthline were similarly blindsided in recent years, when Red Ventures bought up special interest publications in a multibillion-dollar shopping spree.
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