The digital media landscape is bleak the world over, and things seem to be no different in India.
The Good Glamm Group has sold ScoopWhoop for Rs. 18-20 crore to Bengaluru-based marketing agency WLDD, ET reports. The Good Glamm Group had acquired ScoopWhoop for approximately Rs. 100 crore in 2021 in an all-cash deal. The new deal represents an 80 percent erosion in the value of ScoopWhoop in the last four years.
The sale of ScoopWhoop comes at a difficult time for the Good Glamm Group. Last month, the representatives on its board of VC firms Accel, Prosus Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners had quit in unison. It had also been reported that the company had been unable to pay salaries to employees on time.
There had been hints of trouble at Good Glamm group after senior executives had begun leaving early last year. In March, chief financial officer Piyush Kalra left the company to join appliances firm Versuni as its finance chief. In February, PopXO founder Priyanka Gill, who’d been accorded the cofounder label when her company was acquired by the Good Glamm Group, had joined investment firm Kalaari Capital as a venture partner. In April, the company went ahead and laid off 150 employees, which at the time represented 15 percent of its workforce. In January this year, the group had failed to pay salaries to many of its employees, while simultaneously laying off another 150 workers.
Good Glamm chiefly sold cosmetics, but had embarked on the ambitious strategy of acquiring content companies to help with its distribution efforts. MyGlamm had acquired premium mom-and-baby brand MomsCo. It had also acquired baby products brand Baby Chakra and women-focused content platform POPxo, whose founders were listed as the cofounders of the Good Glamm Group. The company had also acquired ScoopWhoop and Miss Malini, and ran influencer management platform Plixxo, which had close to 220,000 influencers onboarded.
But it appears that these acquisitions weren’t able to deliver the results that My Glamm had envisaged. As the company ran into trouble, it’s been looking to jettison the brands it had brought on. It had acquired women’s hygiene brand Sirona for Rs. 450 crore in October 2024, but has sold it back to its founders for just Rs. 150 crore. It’s now sold ScoopWhoop as well at an 80 percent discount to its acquisition price.
And ScoopWhoop’s sale for just Rs. 20 crore highlights the difficulties the digital media space is facing the world over. Globally, Buzzfeed — on which ScoopWhoop was loosely based — has lost 95 percent of its value, and Vice has gone bankrupt. Newsrooms around the world over have seen massive job cuts. And with a brand that once symbolized new media in India being sold for a mere Rs. 20 crore, the digital media space continues look bleakly on as platforms like Google, Facebook and increasingly, X, are eating its lunch.