Why Vox may be able to revive The Ringer, even though its traffic has plummeted
According to comScore, the sports and pop culture-oriented site reached just 357,000 unique visitors in April. That's down from roughly 1.2 million unique visitors in July of 2016 just after the site went live. In February, traffic had dipped to just 316,000 visitors.
The Ringer will soon begun publishing using Vox's technology platform. And Vox will sell ads for The Ringer, with the two companies sharing the revenue, the Wall Street Journal reported.
As part of that partnership, it's a good bet that Vox will use its network of sites to send more people to The Ringer.com. An obvious place to promote the Ringer would be SB Nation, Vox's network of sports properties. Vox's technology and team should help The Ringer improve how its content gets discovered by search engines and shared via social media.
The Ringer currently has 90,000-plus Facebook fans and 304,000 Twitter followers.
On the ad sales front, besides benefiting from Vox's ad sales clout, it's possible that The Ringer could end up as part of ad packages sold by Vox partner NBCUniversal as part of the two companies ad partnership, known as "Concert" (NBCU was not part of today's announcement).
The Ringer was launched as something of a successor to ESPN's former highbrow sports content venture Grantland, which was also founded by longtime ESPN columnist Simmons. It was one of the first high profile publications lauched on Medium. But early this year Medium shifted its model away from advertising, and founder Ev Williams has spoken out about the web being "broken."