The chief executive of Industry Dive, the American B2B publisher recently acquired by Informa, wants his business to double the number of sectors it covers in the coming years.
In an interview on the Future of Media Explained, Press Gazette’s podcast, Sean Griffey spoke about building Industry Dive from scratch into a £323m-valued business.
Griffey and two co-founders launched Industry Dive with five publications and a shoestring freelance budget in January 2012. Today, Griffey said, the business has more than 400 employees, including around 100 journalists, and expects to generate more than $100m of revenue this year.
Unlike many other B2B firms, Industry Dive has opted against putting websites behind paywalls and instead is reliant on advertising revenue. In addition to its publications, the business owns StudioID, a content marketing operation.
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As of this week, following the launch of Manufacturing Dive, the company operates 29 publications. Other titles include Banking Dive, Pharma Voice, Transport Dive and Social Media Today.
Griffey told Press Gazette that Industry Dive has been launching roughly three or four publications per year, but he said he wants to double this rate.
“There’s still 25, 30 more markets on our whiteboard that we really want to tackle over time,” he said, adding that Industry Dive could also expand the number of titles covering sectors the business is already in, such as healthcare and IT.
“If you look ten years down the line, we want to launch into 20 or 30 new markets, but we also want to go deeper into each one and sub-divide a lot of the markets we’re in now.”
In July, UK-based Informa, a B2B and business events giant, announced that it had agreed to buy Industry Dive for £323m. Falfurrias Capital Partners, a private equity backer of Industry Dive since 2019, sold out as part of the deal.
Griffey told Press Gazette’s podcast that he believes Industry Dive’s B2B offering can complement Informa, which is better known for its events business.
“Informa is the world’s premier event company serving specialist business markets,” he said. “Without a doubt, they are the leaders. We have zero events. We view ourselves as the world’s premier B2B media company scaled across industries.”
He said the businesses were drawn together by a “shared vision” of how “first-party data can play in the market going forward”.
“We’ve got a tremendous amount of first-party online behavioural and intent data,” he said. “I can tell you what 200,000 CFOs across 28 industries are reading and doing every day.
“Informa can tell you what they do offline. They can tell you what events they go to. They can tell you what sessions in those events they listen to, which vendors they visit on the show floor, right?
“And if you combine those two things, the offline behaviour with the online behaviour, it’s really compelling for how you can better serve those audiences, and how you can better connect them to marketers at the right time with the right products.”
Griffey also spoke to the podcast about media valuations. Industry Dive’s £323m ($383m) takeover means that it currently has a higher valuation than Buzzfeed, which currently has a market capitalisation of less than $250m. During the mid-2010s, when both media startups were growing fast, Buzzfeed generated large amounts of publicity and was valued at $1.7bn at peak.
“We had north of 30% margins almost from the beginning,” Griffey said, reflecting on Industry Dive’s early years. “I think the team was building something truly incredible and I wanted the team to get recognition. And yet you couldn’t get the mainstream media to cover us because they were covering the Buzzfeeds in the rest of the world. And so that frustrated me at different times.”
He added: “I actually have a lot of respect for what Buzzfeed’s trying to do and what they’re doing. I kind of think that they may be undervalued right now, which is the interesting piece of this.”
Picture: Industry Dive
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