You may have come across Quartz occasion or you may have no idea it even existed, but think Bloomberg meets Gawker, a snide social justice site that claimed to be pitched to business, but in practice read like the Wall Street Journal had been taken over by the Huffington Post. Like so many other lefty digital media sites, it was bought up for a whole lot of money.
And now a whole lot of money has been lost.
Online business news site Quartz has been put up for sale just over two years after it was acquired by a Japanese financial intelligence and media company, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company, Uzabase Inc., agreed to purchase Quartz in mid-2018 in a cash-and-stock deal that could have been worth as much as $110 million based on whether the site hit certain financial goals. Uzabase ultimately only paid about $86 million…
For the first half of 2020, Uzabase reported that Quartz’s overall revenue had fallen to $5 million from $11.6 million in the same period the year before. In 2019, revenue fell 22% to $27 million. Earlier this year, Quartz eliminated about 80 positions.
Quartz reported a loss based on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $18.6 million for 2019 and a loss of $11.2 million in the first half of this year. In 2018, the company took in $35 million in revenue and recorded an Ebitda loss of $10.7 million.
Sadly this means the Japanese company may no longer be funding such business-related Quartz coverage as, “Quartz’s latest special project looks at how reparations would actually work. This series examines the economic, logistical, and ethical questions underpinning reparations policies to understand how they might be eventually put into practice, from the responsibility corporations have to make up for a history of racism, to what the UK owes its former colonies.”
Now Quartz is in need of reparations.
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