Mel Magazine Is Coming Back After Being Acquired By Literally Media
Mel magazine is coming back.
Men are so back: Mel magazine, an audacious digital media site for the guys, will get a new lease on life next year after its unceremonious dissolution in 2022.
Literally Media, which owns Know Your Meme, Cracked and other brands, announced Friday that it acquired Mel magazine for an undisclosed amount. Originally a content site for the Dollar Shave Club, Mel was oncedescribed by The New York Times as “the rare men’s magazine that has taken upon itself to investigate masculinity, not enforce it.”
Oren Katzeff, CEO of Literally Media, told HuffPost that he wanted to acquire Mel for its unique voice and a loyal audience.
“I’m a sucker for a good brand,” Katzeff said. “And we hold a deep amount of respect for the voice that Mel had and the audience that it had, and that’s what led to success from a brand standpoint. When you make an acquisition like this, you have to be very respectful of that while also thinking about how to expand and grow the voice into the next chapter of the brand.”
Mel doesn’t have an editor-in-chief or any writers yet, but the magazine will start publishing next year. Katzeff said he would like to have three to five people on staff with a mix of full-time and freelance employees and then “grow from there.”
Katzeff said he plans to package Mel “with opportunities beyond the articles on site,” which will include a newsletter strategy as well as introducing video, which will open “more doors” to brand deals.
“There’s really a ripe opportunity for Mel to expand beyond just the website into at the very least video and possibly audio as well,” Katzeff said. “Literally Media as a company years ago was probably doing anywhere from 10 to 15 million video views a month, and now we’re doing in the hundreds of millions. So I’m pretty bullish in terms of Mel’s opportunity in both the video and audio space moving forward.”
Mel magazine’s stories included headlines like “Our Eternal Horniness for the Camp Counselor” and “I Tried Mark Wahlberg’s Catholic App to See If It Could Reconnect Me With God.” Mel magazine reached 4 million unique monthly visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, according to a news release, but in March 2021, it ceased publication. A few months later, Recurrent Ventures acquired it only to pull the plug in 2022 and lay off all staff members.
Mel magazine is the most recent digital media outletto get a second (or third) life. Last month, Paste magazine acquired Jezebel, the women’s publication, after it shuttered in November. Katzeff said it’s “more challenging that ever” to run a successful media company.
“I think we’ll be seeing more opportunities like these, I think we’ll be seeing more collaborations moving forward,” he said. “And, you know, what I hope with an acquisition like this is that we can also leverage some of the success we’ve had with our other brands to help revive some of the audience on Mel.
“I think the power of a network is something that you get to enjoy that you don’t necessarily get as an independent entity. And so, my guess would be as we go into 2024, if the market conditions continue as they are, which is, again, greater challenges in terms of audience, greater challenges in terms of monetization, I think we may see more and more opportunities like these.”
