Vox Media reportedly gearing up to sell SB Nation

Vox Media is selling itself for parts, per Puck’s Dylan Byers.

In the coming weeks, Byers reports, CEO Jim Bankoff is likely to agree to multiple deals covering the Vox Media Podcast Network, New York Magazine, and the portfolio of digital brands that includes The Verge, Eater, and SB Nation.

“There’s not one deal, there are deals,” a source familiar with the negotiations told Byers.

Vox spent much of last year shopping the podcast network and other assets to potential buyers — including a full company sale — before informing investors in February that the podcast network was no longer available. That didn’t last, as Versant, the newly formed parent of CNBC, emerged within weeks as one of multiple suitors in talks to acquire the podcast network, which produces around 40 shows, including Sue Bird’s A Touch More with Megan Rapinoe, Bird’s Eye View, Cam Heyward’s Not Just Football, and now Maria Sharapova’s Pretty Tough. NBCUniversal — Versant’s predecessor before the Comcast spinoff — invested $200 million in Vox Media back in 2015 and inherited that stake when Versant separated from Comcast.

Vox Media was built on the back of SB Nation, the network of sports blogs that launched in 2005 and became one of the most significant sports media operations on the internet. On the strength of that foundation, Vox expanded aggressively, launching The Verge in 2011, acquiring New York Magazine in 2019, and building a podcast network that became among the industry’s most prominent.

SB Nation’s story inside Vox is its own separate tragedy. The sports blog network that built the entire company was systematically dismantled over the better part of a decade. A 7% company-wide layoff in January 2023 took out dozens of prominent SB Nation employees and shuttered hockey and soccer sites across the network. The SB Nation podcast network was shut down in April 2024, blindsiding contributors who had received no warning.  Secret Base — the sports video vertical that had become one of SB Nation’s last remaining bright spots — lost more than 20 percent of its staff in February 2025, including veteran staffers Steven Godfrey and Kofie Yeboah.

Along the way, Vox sold off Outsports, settled a $4 million class action lawsuit from site managers who had been misclassified as contractors rather than employees, and watched some of its most talented people — Spencer Hall, Ryan Nanni, Holly Anderson — take buyouts and build successful independent operations with the audiences they had built despite Vox, not because of it.

What’s left of SB Nation will presumably be part of whatever deal gets made for the digital brands portfolio. What that looks like on the other side — whether a new owner invests in rebuilding what was there or simply holds the domain names and monetizes the remaining traffic — remains to be seen.