Goldman Sachs, Ozy Media and a $40 Million Conference Call Gone Wrong

In 2014, Axel Springer, the Berlin publishing giant, invested an undisclosed amount. In 2019, Ozy also raised $35 million from a group led by Mr. Lasry, a boon that included money from the media-focused investment bank LionTree and the radio and podcast company iHeart Media. The Ford Foundation, seeking to support a minority-led company, also backed it with grants, its president, Darren Walker, said. The data service PitchBook reports that Ozy had raised more than $83 million by April 2020 and valued itself at $159 million.

Ozy spent some of that money to hire journalists and produce a raft of newsletters, feature stories and videos, as well as sponsored articles promoting a range of companies, from its offices in Mountain View, Calif. Its top editors included Jonathan Dahl, who had led Smart Money magazine and The Wall Street Journal’s weekend section, and Fay Schlesinger, a star journalist at The Times of London, both of whom left Ozy after relatively short tenures.

The site generated some buzz, and Mr. Watson said it had the traffic to match. In a 2019 news release, the company said it had 50 million monthly unique users.

Eugene Robinson, an early Ozy hire whose title was editor-at-large, said that, after he heard Mr. Watson boast of the company’s traffic numbers sometime around 2015, he thought they “seemed high” and started comparing the claims to public sources of audience data. Mr. Robinson, who said in an interview that he was fired earlier this year, concluded that the site was a “Potemkin village.”

In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Ozy had been among the publishers buying web traffic from “low-quality sources,” companies using systems that caused articles to pop open under a reader’s browser without the reader’s knowledge. Ozy said it had been buying the traffic to build its email lists and had not billed advertisers for those views. (I was editor in chief of BuzzFeed News at the time of that article. Later, I met Mr. Watson when I was peripherally involved in acquisition talks between the companies. Mr. Watson told The Times he believed that it was unethical for me to write this column. Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company, which I left last year.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/26/business/media/ozy-media-goldman-sachs.html