Daily Mail Acquires Millennial-Focused Website Elite Daily

DMG Media, publisher of UK newspaper The Daily Mail, announced this morning that it has acquired Elite Daily.

Describing itself as “The Voice Of Generation Y,” Elite Daily mixes general news and culture coverage with stories like, um, “You Can Literally Make Over $13,000 A Year Just By Pooping.” (Which, to be fair, is good to know.) In a blog post about the acquisition, CEO David Arabov said the site now has a 65-person team and reaches 74 million readers.

“This marriage will permit Elite Daily to continue to flourish as a platform for and by Millennials, allowing us to expand internationally, grow our staff and continue to deliver the most relevant and engaging content for Millennials,” Arabov wrote.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reported that the price was $47 million. Jon Steinberg, Daily Mail’s CEO for North America (and previously president of BuzzFeed), told The Journal, “We want to compete with AOL and Yahoo, and this will help us get to that goal.” (AOL owns TechCrunch.)

TechCrunch’s coverage of Elite Daily also got us into a spat with The Awl back in 2013 about whether the site was an “astounding troll-hole” (The Awl’s characterization), and whether, by kinda sorta defending it, we were “startup shills.” So that was fun.