Who Owns Mediavine?

We get asked a lot how Mediavine is structured, especially because of our previous partnership with Condé Nast. Who owns Mediavine? Is it Condé Nast? Are we owned by some other third party venture capitalist or media company instead?

The answer may surprise you!

Mediavine is solely owned and operated. We answer to no one but ourselves, and our 5,000+ publishers.

We get it – we could grow a lot faster if we did take on investors, or get acquired by some big news media company. But just like we don’t offer a referral program that could make us grow faster, we don’t want to be acquired by someone else either.

We’re growing at an exponential rate all on our own, and we get to grow and create projects exactly the way we want, our only motivation being the growth of our publishers.

That’s not going to change. We have too many exciting plans that might not happen if we had to answer to investors.

We don’t necessarily make decisions driven by profit alone, which investors would force us to do. We make decisions that are better for our publishers.

It’s all in that mission statement:

We help build sustainable businesses for content creators.

For example, we’re building an instructible card to provide “most valuable content” to more types of bloggers. Mediavine Create will be free to use. It has some the most robust features I’ve ever seen in a recipe card (and soon to be craft/DIY card) – features someone else might charge an annual fee for.

But our reasoning behind creating a suite of plugins is that we want our publishers’ sites to run faster, and be more user friendly. All of that actually leads to better advertising money too, but it’s not the motivation for building things like Mediavine Create.

Ad management provides enough revenue for us to build all these really cool things that will make blogging a better experience for publishers AND their readers (and our readers too – we still own all our original sites, and run them personally). The only thing investors would do is line our pockets more, and we don’t need that. It’s the same reason we changed our revenue share structure.

What about Condé Nast?
We worked with them in a partnership – they did some direct sales for Mediavine (alongside our own sales team), and in return, held some of the comScore that Mediavine has to offer.

We now operate under our own comScore, and have grown our sales team.

They did not have any say in how Mediavine operates on a day to day basis. Ours was a symbiotic relationship created to benefit your bottom line by giving you access to more advertising inventory, and that’s it.

We’re here for the long haul. We want you to be able to hand your business off to your kids in 20 years. Being your partner means we’re committed to weathering the ups and downs of owning an online business. It’s our job to stay informed and invest in the latest technology so that you’re always at the top of your game and we are too.

Mediavine is for publishers, by publishers. We promise to keep it that way.