Red Ventures paid $500M for CNET/ZDNet in 2020 and this week sold them for $100M. Kaput went its plan to use AI to monetize content. Had to sell. The Axios layoffs are worrisome. Axios bet big on local edit, on verticals and on turning Axios “smart brevity” into a SaaS product. All bold ideas. None worked well enough to counterbalance the decay in the core business.

This is what Om Malik wrote when he folded Gigaom in 2015: “Every founder starts on a path — hopeful and optimistic, full of desire to build something that helps change the world for the better, reshape an industry and hopefully become independent, both metaphorically and financially, Business, much like life, is not a movie and not everyone gets to have a storybook ending.”