Available in English Website mic.com Registration Optional Founded 2011 | Slogan(s) "Rethink the World." Alexa rank 3,766 (February 2017) Current status Active CEO Chris Altchek (Mar 2011–) | |
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Headquarters New York City, New York, United States Founders Chris Altchek, Jake Horowitz Profiles | ||
Mic is a media company that targets millennials. The company reaches 19 million unique monthly visitors and has a higher composition of 18- to 34-year-old readers than any other millennial-focused news site, including BuzzFeed and Vice. Mic received early attention for its on-the-ground coverage during the revolution in Tunisia, and The Hollywood Reporter remarked that Mic features "stories that intelligently cover serious issues important to young people".
Contents
History
Mic was founded in 2011 as PolicyMic by Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, two high school friends from New York. Since then, they have raised $15 million from investors, including Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape, who said that Altchek and Horowitz "remind me of my younger self". Other investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lerer Ventures, Advancit Capital, Red Swan Ventures, and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2014, PolicyMic announced they would re-brand their organization to target millennials, and renamed themselves as "Mic". The company will not disclose its valuation. According to The New York Observer, Mic currently does not make a profit and "is in the increasingly rare habit of actually paying each one of its contributors". On March 2016, Mic acquired Hyper, as well as the developer, AntiHero.
Content
Mic features eight different sections: News, Policy, World, Arts, Music, Science, Connections, and Identities. Forbes wrote that Mic is "closer than any of its competitors to finding the promised land for new media companies, a middle ground between deeply reported stories and listicles".
In 2015, Mic launched "MicCheck", an iPhone app with a "curated stream of stories, from both Mic and other news sites". Mic's news director, Jared Keller, was fired in February 2015 after Gawker found various levels of plagiarism in 20 different passages of his work.
People
Contributors to the site have included Senator Rand Paul, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and radio host Daisy Rosario. In December 2013, the White House worked with Mic on what was called an "Open Mic" competition to "make health care work for our generation". Advisors to the company include David Shipley, executive editor of Bloomberg View and former op-ed editor at The New York Times, and Jacob Lewis, the former managing editor of The New Yorker.
Revenue
Mic generates revenue through advertising known as "branded content". Digiday.com reported in November 2014 that "brands like Microsoft, Cole Haan, Cadillac and most recently GE have all tapped Mic in the last few months in the hopes of using its millennial expertise to reach the site's audience of educated 20-somethings".