Media group targeting millennials raises money from esports platform

The Grvty Media team. Photo credit: Grvty.

Facebook is gobbling up the media industry, but at least one investor thinks it’s still worthwhile to invest in content creators.

Singapore-based Grvty Media, which is a collection of media products targeting millennials, announced that it has raised S$1 million (US$727,000) from Spout Entertainment Group, a company that’s using a unique blend of technology, media, and talent management to nurture esports in Southeast Asia. Spout owns 27.7 percent of Grvty after this deal.

The three-month-old startup is profitable from day one, says co-founder and managing director, Jacky Yap. The entity makes money via branded content and agency work, in other words, making content for other channels.

Grvty’s portfolio includes Vulcan Post, which covers tech and digital lifestyle news for consumers, as well as sites that cover travel, fashion, entertainment, and profiles of interesting millennials (their website has more information).

Yap is shaping Grvty in the style of Vox, a US media company that operates many different media brands in various verticals ranging from sports to politics to technology. It’s also influenced by Buzzfeed, which employs a strategy of reaching out to its audience via a multitude of channels, without necessarily driving readers back to its main website.

Combined, Grvty claims to reach 20 million individuals organically, though that number adds up Facebook reach and pageviews from its websites. So the unique viewers would be fewer than that. That figure grew 50 percent month-on-month growth in the past three months, driven mostly by social videos.

Combined, Spout and Grvty claims to have 30 million unique visitors a month.

Yap founded Vulcan Post in 2014. The company then created Parrot, a tool to discover viral content on the internet. He says this tool is Grvty’s competitive advantage, allowing it to sniff for content ideas that’ll resonate with its audience.

There’s been a spate of investments in online media properties lately. Reapra, an investment group founded with US$100 million in personal money from Japanese entrepreneur Shuhei Morofuji, has backed ventures like Spout and Inc Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Malaysian giant Media Prima bought digital media company REV Asia for US$24.2 million.

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from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/media-group-targeting-millennials-raises-money-egames-platform
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