Bill Simmons To Move 'The Ringer' Site To Vox Platform

Bill Simmons will move his sports, culture and tech Web site The Ringer off Medium and onto Vox Media's platform.

Vox Media's chief executive, Jim Bankoff, told The Wall Street Journal that Vox will sell advertising for The Ringer, adding the site to Vox Media's portfolio of brands it offers to marketers.

This marks the first time that Vox has hosted a third-party site on its platform. Revenue from ad sales will be split between the two companies.

Simmons will retain ownership of The Ringer, which he launched on the online publishing platform Medium last summer. “This partnership allows us to remain independent while leveraging two of the things that Vox Media is great at -- sales and technology,” he stated.

Bankoff told The New York Times the site will likely move to Vox’s platform later this summer.

Simmons was a sports journalist at ESPN for 15 years. When he left in 2015, he created the site Grantland, which was soon shuttered, followed by the launch of weekly show “Any Given Wednesday” in partnership with HBO, which lived for just over four moths.

The Ringer's move to Vox Media is a blow to Medium, which was created in 2012 by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.

When The Ringer's launch on Medium was announced last spring, 12 independent sites soon followed the migration to Medium, including The Awl, Pacific Standard and The Bold Italic.

But this January, Medium announced it was discontinuing its advertising services to build a new business model, and as a result, it would let go of a third of its staff.

Vox Media owns SB Nation, Eater, The Verge, Vox, Curbed, Recode, Racked and Polygon.

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