Last week, Sundial Media Group closed on a deal to purchase Refinery 29 from Vice Media. Refinery29 is a women's lifestyle company with editions that cover the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Australia.
According to Business Wire, Sundial Media Group owns Essence Ventures (ESSENCE including Girls United; AFROPUNK; BeautyCon including Naturally Curly; Essence Studios; ESSENCE Festival of Culture; and SOKO MRKT), Global Black Economic Forum (GBEF), including Academy For Advancing Excellence, and New Voices Fund.
Based on the current holdings of Sundial Media Group, they have a nice stable of companies that are directly or adjacently in the Black media space. With this purchase, there may be a move to consolidate media entities that are directly targeting underrepresented groups such as the global Black audience.
The current state of Black media is interesting. Black Entertainment Television (BET) is still owned by Viacom, which is a subsidiary of National Amusements. National Amusements has a majority of the voting shares in Paramount Global. BET was rumored to be for sale and Tyler Perry made an attempt to purchase it which ultimately didn't fall through and he cited the experience as disrespectful. A purchase by Tyler Perry would have made BET Black-owned again for the first time since its sale in 2001.
Blavity, Ebony, and Black Enterprise are currently still Black-owned. The Root is owned by G/O Media which is the parent company for Gizmodo, The Onion, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Quartz, and The Inventory. We'll explore the rest of the Black media landscape in articles to come, but this is just a primer. As it stands, there are several media companies whose target audience is Black but they aren't Black-owned. Of course, in the business world, things change hands often. So just because things are as they are now, doesn't mean they will remain this way. We'll circle back.