Breaking media news reporter for The Washington Post Jeremy Barr said Thursday that the now-floundering Ozy Media was likely able to attract investors due to its rise amid the success of other online media companies.
“Ozy was founded in 2013 and at that time, you know, people were talking about BuzzFeed and Vox Media and Vice Media as companies that could be worth $5 billion. Vice’s valuation was several billion dollars and so, you know, $70 million investment in Ozy is a good amount of money, but it’s not actually that much when you compare to some of the bigger companies,” Barr said on Hill.TV’s “Rising,”
“Basically a lot of these bigger legacy companies, in addition to the investment funds, were looking for the next big thing in millennial media,” he added.
Ozy has faced a barrage of bad headlines, beginning last month, when a New York Times report revealed that co-founder Samir Rao had impersonated a YouTube executive while trying to secure a multi-million dollar investment from Goldman Sachs.
A Beverly Hills investment fund that poured more than $2 million into Ozy sued the media company this week, arguing that it never would have agreed to the investment had it known of the incident with Goldman Sachs.
See part of Barr’s interview above.
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