Dan Gilbert, owner of the NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers, has found it is easier to win a title than to turn the Robb Report — the 40-year- old high-end luxury magazine — into a digital powerhouse.
As 2016 wound down, Gilbert’s Rockbridge Growth Equity quietly announced it was flipping the Robb Report, purchased from Bill Curtis in 2014, into a new joint venture with Jay Penske’s Penske Media Corp.
PMC is the owner of Women’s Wear Daily, Variety, HollywoodLife and Deadline.
“Penske’s shown some ability in b2b publishing, but we don’t know what he can do in b2c [business-to-consumer] publishing,” said one industry observer of the surprising on New Year’s Eve deal.
When Rockbridge — which counts Gilbert as its managing partner — bought the Robb Report it laid out aggressive plans to greatly expand its digital footprint.
But Web traffic was erratic.
Curtis, who originally stayed on as a minority partner and vice chairman, quietly exited last spring.
By last November, comScore reported the Robb Report had 715,000 unique visitors.
Unfortunately, traffic was so low last January, February and April that it fell below the minimum threshold of 200,000 uniques that comScore requires to track a site.
In the release announcing the deal, Rockbridge and Penske pointed to a “deep focus on digital and live media and emerging social platforms.”
It could not be learned how much of a stake Rockbridge will retain going forward. WWD reported on Tuesday that Robb Report’s offices in New York and LA would move into office space with PMC.