Show an ad over header. AMP

Scoop: Industry Dive taps a global tech company in first big acquisition

28 July 2020
Dan Ackermann

Industry Dive, a business journalism company, is acquiring the marketing arm of NewsCred, a global technology company, executives tell Axios.

Why it matters: Industry Dive is a niche B2B media company, but it's long been profitable, and it's pretty sizable.

Catch up quick: The deal includesall of the studio's assets, including its technology, its 100+ client roster and 40 employees from NewsCred's Content Marketing studio.

  • The acquisition adds 40 new people to the company's 175 current employees and it expands its presence from D.C. to New York, London and Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Details: The acquisition will help Industry Dive sell custom ads to its audience of more than 11 million business decision-makers across 20 niche industries, which includes topics like banking, bio, pharmaceuticals, construction, education, grocery, marketing, retail, smart cities, transport, waste and others.

  • Industry Dive's growth strategy has always been to take business topics that already have sizable audiences and advertising potential and launch a digital, ad-supported newsletter and other products around each.
  • It determines which verticals to invest in through several criteria, like whether a particular field has high turnover, heavy government regulation or if there's high capital spend within the industry, particularly on technology.
  • "We think each vertical can be worth $10 million–$20 million just in digital newsletter ad spend," says Industry Dive co-founder and CEO Sean Griffey.
  • Retail is the company's largest vertical, and waste is growing fast.

The big picture: Last year, Industry Dive sold a majority stake to Charlotte, North Carolina-based private equity firm Falfurrias Capital Partners, seven years after its founding in Washington, D.C.

  • At the time, its revenue was roughly $30 million, according to sources.
  • Today, Griffey says revenue is up significantly and that the business is highly profitable.
  • "Q2 was our best quarter in company history from both a revenue and profit standpoint," says Griffey.

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

Section2

Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.