• by Melynda Fuller , August 6, 2018

As publishers struggle to stay afloat amid a saturated media landscape, some are looking to unlikely partners. Case in point, last week, Warner Music announced it would acquire pop-culture media website Uproxx in a deal estimated to be in the tens of millions.  

According to The Wall Street Journal, Warner Music’s rational for the acquisition: It doesn’t have a customer-facing outlet to reach new and savvy music fans. The corporation, said to be the third-largest recorded music company, can achieve this by leveraging Uproxx’s 40 million users. 

Uproxx was cofounded in 2008 before being acquired in 2014 by digital media firm Woven Digital, when it was renamed Uproxx Media Group. The site publishes stories about music, sports and fashion; it relies heavily on video and “search engine-friendly write-ups” about the newest album and movie releases.  

The company also has a creative services and sales team, which will now exist under Warner Music’s purview. Warner Music’s hope is that it will glean a “deeper understanding of the interests of a young, digital audience” through the deal. 

During the past few years, the survival of independent media websites has become precarious. With last week’s layoffs at Upworthy and Mashable’s catastrophic fall from a $250 million company to being sold off to Ziff Davis for $50 million — noted by the WSJ — the odds of survival become slimmer by the year. 

Even digital superstar BuzzFeed Media failed to meet its earning targets last year by $70 million, resulting in rounds of layoffs and scaling back in some areas. 

Traditional media companies are now morphing into publishers and data-gathering machines. They are developing tools to better analyze a user’s behavior to dictate content and dollars. 

It makes sense that an entertainment company like Warner Music would want to acquire Uproxx. Having access to the site’s readers' data will likely be fine-tuned into an algorithm to dictate future album sales and marketing campaigns. 

One fear: the digital publishing landscape will become so unstable that data mined by corporate backers to be turned into product will be the only way to sustain its existence.

Is there a real difference between publishers launching ecommerce sites tied to their editorial product, and a company purchasing a publication that appeals to its specialized audience Probably not. But suddenly, everything feels a little bit “sponsored.”