Katie Benner, Columnist

Re/code's Sale and Life After Advertising

Is the subscription model for digital media better than the advertising model?

May 27, 2015 at 9:36 PM UTC

Katie Benner is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about technology, innovation, and the cult and culture of Silicon Valley. She lives in San Francisco. Benner previously wrote a tech and finance column for the Information. She has worked at Fortune, TheStreet.com and CNN Money, and was a freelance writer based in China covering culture, business and politics. She has a bachelor's degree in English from Bowdoin College.

Re/code's Kara Swisher: I give up.
Photographer: Marla Aufmuth/Getty Images

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After the tech news site Re/code sold itself to Vox Media, reports in Fortune and the New York Post noted that the deal was necessary because it’s just too darned hard to build a media company these days. Months before the Re/code sale, the long-running tech site Gigaom had shuttered, too.

Re/code was founded by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, former Wall Street Journal writers who are revered in tech circles. The website launched amid the current tech boom, which has created a huge appetite for the breaking stories, scoops and product reviews that Re/code provides. But after about a year and a half, it only averaged 1.5 million unique visitors a month, according to Comscore. That’s not a big enough audience to satisfy advertisers.