After years of exploring a sale, The Skimm is acquired by Ziff Davis

The digital media company Ziff Davis — owner of CNET, Mashable, Lifehacker, and PC Mag as well as a number of shopping and B2B sites — has acquired The Skimm. The Skimm will join Ziff Davis’s health and wellness division Everyday Health Group as part of the deal.

The Skimm will operate as a standalone brand and retain its 75-person staff, according to the announcement.

Former NBC TV producers Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin co-founded The Skimm in 2012 as an easy-to-read email digest geared toward millennial women. The Skimm understood the appeal of email newsletters earlier than most news startups and uses an engaging, often irreverent¹ tone to convey the need-to-know headlines.

There’s been a number of twists and turns in the years since, from volunteer brand reps called Skimmbassadors to raising $29 million in venture capital to the (inevitable?) pivot to video to experimenting with a membership model to multiple rounds of layoffs. The Skimm has been exploring a sale for years.

Despite those twists — and the fact that the email newsletter space is a lot more saturated than it was in 2012 — The Skimm’s pitch to readers doesn’t seem to have strayed very far from the co-founders original vision more than a decade ago. The endorsements on The Skimm’s site today include “It’s so easy to read and I get caught up on all world events in 5 minutes” and “The Skimm is the reason I read any news at all.”

The acquisition announcement on Thursday came with some notable evasions:

• How much did Ziff Davis pay? Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
• Is The Skimm profitable? “Asked if the company is profitable, [The Skimm] founders said they have a track record as a company of profitability,” Sara Fischer wrote in Axios.
• Has The Skimm’s audience eroded over time? The Skimm previously reported 7 million subscribers. That has dropped to 5 million subscribers across six newsletters, including Daily Skimm, Skimm Money, Skimm Shopping, Skimm Well, SKM Report, and Skimm Parenting. When Fischer asked about the drop, one of the founders told her the company’s “numbers reflect consistent and engaged readers.”

Many of the women who began reading The Skimm as “early career professionals” are now “parents and mid-career executives,” as Adweek’s Mark Stenberg noted. Its initiatives include #ShowUsYourLeave, which advocates for better family leave policies in the United States.

The Skimm plans to “lean into” its health and wellness coverage under its new owners, Axios reported. One of The Skimm’s six newsletters — a monthly called Skimm Well — currently focuses on health. When the site republished information outlining women’s rights to abortion and contraception under U.S. law that had been taken down by the Trump administration, the company wrote it was “no stranger to amplifying women’s health stories.”

1. In 2017, The New York Times noted a recent Skimm newsletter had used “when you and your friend both thought the other was making dinner reservations” as a way to introduce the miscommunication around a U.S. aircraft carrier supposedly headed to North Korea.