https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/business/media/red-ventures-digital-media.html

Back from a few weeks off with this column, and also spent some of today talking to Afghan journalists who are "being left behind," as the RFE/RL bureau chief in Kabul told me.

Here's the column:

You’ve Never Heard of the Biggest Digital Media Company in America

Red Ventures has turned very specific advice into very big business.

By Ben SmithAug. 15, 2021, 7:15 p.m. ET

INDIAN LAND, S.C. — Lindsey Turrentine first heard of Red Ventures last fall, when it bought the venerable tech news site CNET, where she is the senior vice president in charge of content. She sat down at her kitchen table in Berkeley, Calif., and frantically started Googling to find out what it was.

Her experience wasn’t uncommon. People working at the tourism guide Lonely Planet, the travel site The Points Guy and the health and medical information site Healthline were similarly blindsided in recent years, when Red Ventures bought up special interest publications in a multibillion-dollar shopping spree.

Their Googling and mandatory corporate retreats led them to the company’s South Carolina headquarters, a 180-acre campus with a cluster of modern buildings, a fire pit, a six-lane bowling alley, spin room, pickle ball courts and 264 residences for employees who choose to live where they work.

Red Ventures, which started as a digital marketing company, has attracted serious investments from private equity firms. Its location has helped obscure what is perhaps the biggest digital publisher in America, a 4,500-employee juggernaut that says it has roughly $2 billion in annual revenues, a conservative valuation earlier this year of more than $11 billion, and more readers, as measured by Comscore, than any media brand you’ve ever heard of — an average of 751 million visits a month.

Here in Indian Land, I felt as if I were back in the Ping-Pong days of Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. Red Ventures has built a culture that blends warm enthusiasm, progressive social values and the ruthless performance metrics of the direct marketing business.

The company found itself in the publishing business almost by accident, and is now leading a shift in that industry toward what is sometimes called “intent-based media” — a term for specialist sites that attract people who are already looking to spend money in a particular area (travel, tech, health) and guide them to their purchases, while taking a cut.

It’s a step away from the traditional advertising business toward directly selling you stuff. Red Ventures, for instance, plans to steer readers of Healthline to doctors or drugs found on another site it recently acquired, HealthGrades, which rates and refers doctors. Red Ventures will take a healthy commission on each referral.

At the center of the company is Ric Elias, the chief executive and co-founder. A 6-foot-5 native of Puerto Rico, he has quietly become one of the most powerful media moguls in the country, a Barry Diller of the South, heading a company roughly the size of Mr. Diller’s IAC. (Mr. Diller, a more typically immodest media figure, said in an email that he finds Mr. Elias “impressive” but that there is only one Barry Diller: “I think of myself as all points on the compass.”)

Mr. Elias, who spoke with me in the company’s bright and sprawling cafeteria, had played basketball that morning with a former N.B.A. player who lives nearby. He is the largest shareholder in Red Ventures, with more than 20 percent of the company, and so a billionaire on paper — though he hasn’t done the self-promotion required to get on the Forbes list.

“I think we’re a 20-year-old company that still is figuring out what we’re going to be,” he said. “And I don’t think we have anything to celebrate or tell.”

If you’ve heard of Mr. Elias, it’s probably because you’re one of the 8 million people who has watched the video of his TED Talk, “3 Things I learned When My Plane Crashed.” On the top floor of the main building on the Red Ventures campus, he pointed to his own blurred shape in a painting of passengers walking onto the wings of the Charlotte-bound US Airways Flight 1549, the jetliner that made an emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009, the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson.” Mr. Elias’s seat was 1D....