Why Accel Is Leading A $40M Round In Vox Media, A Digital Content Company (!)

“At some level, it is still contrarian,” Accel Partners’ Andrew Braccia admits about leading a $40 million fourth round of funding in Vox Media, the publisher of hundreds of major league sports fan blogs as well as tech/culture site The Verge and gaming site Polygon. Coming on top of $30 million in previous rounds, the Washington, DC-based company will have the most venture backing of any high-end content creator when the round is finalized in the coming weeks. There are precious few other examples on this scale. Viral-oriented Buzzfeed has raised nearly $50 million in total. Politically-focused Huffington Post had reached $37 million before Aol (TechCrunch’s parent company) bought it. Silicon Valley investors, at least, are still not very optimistic about startups that put content first. But Braccia has been leading venture rounds in Vox since its first in 2008. What does he like? Vox’s long-term strategy, which it has been building out for a decade. It was founded in 2003 by Markos Moulitsas and others from The Daily Kos, his namesake political commentary blog. That site had grown into a pillar of the progressive blogosphere in that turbulent political era because it focused on big issues and let readers publish their own posts. But instead of expanding into other parts of the political world, the founders stepped back and wondered how the model might apply more broadly. The answer they found was sports. Co-founder and sports writer Tyler Bleszinski decided to focus on a personal passion, Oakland baseball, and launched Athletics Nation. Readers loved it, and from there the company slowly built out a content management system, more sports sites, the start of an ads business, and eventually attracted a former Aol executive, Jim Bankoff, as an advisor. Braccia, who is known in these parts for finding unusual, big-time deals (Braintree, Lynda.com and 99Designs are some fresh examples), first met the company through Bankoff when Vox had around 75 sites. He quickly got the big idea, he tells me today, as he’d already been a long-time reader of two of the sports sites, McCovey Chronicles for the S.F. Giants baseball team and Golden State of Mind for the Golden State Warriors basketball team. “Building a media company is not as well understood in Silicon Valley as building a software company, or building other types of companies that scale differently based on network effects, virality, or whatever it might look like,” he explains. “You haveSource: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/J2JDCrUGARA/
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