We Bought Curbed to Invest in Video: Vox Media CEO

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Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Vox Media Chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff discusses the company's acquisition of the blog company Curbed.com with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television's "In The Loop." (Source: Bloomberg)

You are watching "in the loop yuriko streaming on your tablet, phone, and bloomberg.com.

Vox media just went shopping itself.

They have acquired a trio of sites that includes curbed, eater, and racked.

Here is vox media ceo.

Thank you for joining us.

You are on an acquisition spree.

Why did these sites make sense?

We believe in big consumer categories.

Young, affluent audiences.

These sites have a bit of an attitude.

They operate in huge mainstream categories.

Think about the biggest shows on cable today.

All about home, about food.

Consumers are moving digital and we want to be able to provide them the things that they love and be able to do it with a great editorial team and digital content.

What is different about curbed or other online sites?

They dive into the stories around home and real estate.

The use data.

They humanize it.

The use multimedia to do that.

The tools of the web, the tools of digital, mobile -- everything that this generation of consumers has grown up with.

How big of a part is a video to this?

It is big and it will be bigger.

We are excited about the opportunity to invest more.

The curbed team bootstraps it.

What do you mean?

They didn't take big venture capital financing.

They're good entrepreneurs.

You will be adding money to it?

We will be investing.

In video as well as other things.

This is original video.

Give me an example on eater or curvbbed.

Home, food it is so visual.

There are so many great scenes to shoot.

People love traveling through homes.

People of understanding the stories behind them.

You can envision stories about homes, about chefs, about architecture, about food trends.

It has been proven.

It will work in digital.

Is that all because you were trying to get the advertising dollars?

You are trying to get the bigger advertising dollars that is right now in traditional television and you are trying to bring that onto the web.

That is a great point.

There was 150 billion dollars of brand building advertising.

They need to move to digital because their audiences are on digital.

The need to be associated with quality content editorial.

We produce it efficiently for younger generation and we already know that advertisers are looking for it.

You sound like tim armstrong from aol.

I worked there for many years.

Is that the philosophy you learned as well with armstrong at the helm?

He believed that digital video.

He believed that video is where it's at.

We both believe in online video and its growth.

I believe also in digital as a branding medium.

We tend to think of tiny little ads that may not be that effective.

We tend to think of online content is cheap and ubiquitous.

We think of we use talent to grow big, valuable audiences that brand advertisers will come.

We are working on making the ads good and premium.

Original content to get premium ads.

Are you as big on the program attic -- programmatic ad vine?

It is not just about a marketplace.

Brand advertisers want something new, something that they can only get with us.

They look to us for custom solutions.

We used technology to automate that, to make it more robust.

Online advertising is not that good right now, creatively.

By using data, by using technology, and human creativity we can make it better.

You have properties that range from technology to sports to shopping to real estate, how will you meld all of them together?

We get a lot of efficiency.

We have a technology platform.

It is called chorus that enables us to launch these verticals and run them efficiently and in a high-quality way.

Other than that, we believe in being not a portal.

Just like bloomberg, in order to do what you do, you have to focus.

We are not a niche player.

We want to go after big consumer categories.

You were backed by big venture capital firms.

The word on the street is that pure content companies are not that popular to invest in.

That is what you could make a move like what you did.

You were able to buy these websites.

People have shied away from content because they do not extent -- understand it.

Does it scale?

Sometimes it doesn't. we use technology to unleash creativity on the editorial front.

Using technology helps us scale.

Thank you so much for joining us.

The ceo of vox media.

Today's big number is 13,476 -- how money miles the average american drives every year according to the department of vet -- transportation.

One quarter of you say that you go online when you are driving.

That is from a news national survey by state farm insurance.

Don't be too quick to blame your



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