The 11th Hour Dispatch — Wednesday, June 27, 2018
YOUNG MONEY
Lyft’s post-money valuation has jumped to a whopping $15.1 billion after it locked down $600 million in its Series I round. The round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company. Fidelity, a prior investor, has poured more than $800 million into Lyft and is the company’s largest investor. Lyft’s value has more than doubled in just the last 14 months. Don’t get too excited about that stat though. Lyft’s biggest competitor, Uber, has a valuation of $68 billion, and Lyft only holds 35% of the ride share market.
BINGE WATCH
Roku plans to launch Audience Marketplace, an ad platform that will connect buyers to sellers for ad space on the Roku platform. By combining Roku’s audience data and tech with third-party data, the platform will allow advertisers to sell to specific targeted audiences via both programmatic and direct-selling methods. Roku claims to be present in 21 million households, which, if true, gives it a pretty substantial reach that could lure in the publishers with the big bucks. It also doesn’t hurt that it has already lined up Turner, Viacom, and 21st Century Fox to use the Marketplace initially.
BIG BUSINESS
The Daily Beast is the latest publication to try to rewrite the rules of digital news monetization. Today, it rolled out a new $100 per year membership program called Beast Inside. The program gives members exclusive content and early access privileges. When launched, members will receive the Rabbit Hole newsletter that deep dives a story from the day, a custom version of the Cheat Sheet newsletter (depending on how much Trump news they want to consume), access to both the new Onmishambles podcast and the crime series The Beast Files, and access to the biggest story of the weekend on Fridays. On top of this, members also earn a privilege that the internet definitely didn’t have enough of: comment access.
Over the past few years, The Beast has focused on driving visitors directly to its site rather than through a third-party platform like Facebook. Thanks to those efforts, it reports that 40% of its traffic goes directly to its homepage, and that one million people visit the site 50 times per month on average. This is the die-hard group — most of which live in urban areas, have a few pennies to spare, and can’t shut up about the latest headlines — the publication will be heavily targeting with this announcement. ComScore estimates that The Beast has a total audience of 13.3 million.
NOTHIN’ BUT ‘NET
This cat has bad taste in chips.
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