The big publishers are one after the other moving into the realm of e-commerce. Old media houses need new revenue streams and as physical papers are slowly dying, and ad blockers are rising in popularity, e-commerce is a new option to bring in money.
Wall Street Journal now reports that Vox Media, a quite influential, but not that old, digital publisher is looking at e-commerce.
Vox Media runs popular online magazines like Vox (news), SB Nation (sports), The Verge (tech) and Polygon (games) among others. Combined the sites of Vox have around 170 million readers.
E-Commerce Posts on All Eight Sites
The publisher is now looking at e-commerce to boost revenue. They are hiring a commerce editor to oversee revenue-generating posts, according to WSJ.
Gawker Media and Business Insider are two media properties that already mix editorial content with e-commerce. The usual way of doing it is to recommend products and link to them on Amazon. According to Gawker you typically can get 4 percent in commission this way. But it can range anywhere between 1 and 10 percent.
The new e-commerce position at Vox will work in tandem with editorial teams on writing and optimizing commerce content for the company's eight sites.