• by Sara Guaglione , March 31, 2017

Mic has debuted nine millennial-focused verticals, covering a range of niche topics, such as women’s issues and personal finance, as well as a redesigned Mic.com site.

Mic now has a new logo to unify its channels. It dropped the blue dot, introduced a new font and moved to a color scheme of bright, milky green on black.

Advertisers for the new channels include credit-card company Discover, Goldman Sachs, Hulu and Mercedes.

“Beginning today, we are offering more ways to engage and more content to engage with,” Mic’s publisher Cory Haik wrote in a post on the site announcing the changes. Mic has also introduced an infinite scroll, so when a reader is done with a story, the scroll takes them to the homepage, allowing the reader to interact with more content.

The nine new verticals were formed from Mic’s existing range of coverage topics. Slay focuses on women’s issues; Payoff covers personal finance; and Hype features pop-culture coverage. Navigating Trump’s America will focus on politics, while Strut will cover style and beauty. The Future is Now will look at tech and The Movement centers on social justice issues.

Mic will soon roll out the gaming vertical Multiplayer and the food and travel-themed Out of Office.

“In many traditional media companies, newsrooms make their decisions on which stories to cover based on what they think their audiences might want,” Haik wrote, explaining why Mic launched these verticals. “In our case, we started with the audiences and communities within social platforms.”

For Slay and Strut, he says existing audiences were "hyper-engaged in social channels through stories, issues and influencers. Our new channels will build on that work, giving audiences what we know they're interested in — not just what we think they might want to know,” she wrote.

The idea is to brand each verticals, allowing them to grow outside of Mic. The method is similar to how BuzzFeed launched viral food video vertical Tasty, which became immensely popular on Facebook.

But the brands don’t exist solo. The URLs are all hosted as hubs from Mic.com; each site is featured on the menu of Mic’s homepage. Visually, the sites all look similar, though each has its own individual banner photo and logo. On Instagram, for example, Slay’s handle is “slaybymic.”

“We didn’t want to dilute the brand by just having a number of channels on Mic.com,” Chris Altchek, Mic’s CEO and cofounder, told The Wall Street Journal. That could lead to “confusing people.”

Mic is planning to hire about 35 employees to work on the new properties. The company will also move some current Mic staffers into different positions.

Mic has more than 66 million unique individuals read or view Mic's storytelling each month, according to Haik. In 2015, the company raised $17 million in funding.