Three years ago, the digital media holding company Recurrent Ventures was struggling.
A $300 million investment from the private equity firm Blackstone in 2022 had turned into an albatross, and the company spent the period that followed shedding titles, laying off staff, and cycling through three chief executives in three years.
But since then, the company has retooled both its commercial and editorial strategy, a rebuild that has yielded a more disciplined, sustainable operation, according to CEO Andrew Perlman.
The clearest signal of that shift came earlier this month, when Recurrent sold Dwell, Domino, Business of Home, and PopSci to Ziff Davis. The divestiture was an intentional narrowing, similar to the portfolio pruning happening at other house-of-brands media companies, like Condé Nast and Vox Media.
The home titles and PopSci served different demographics and advertisers compared to the company’s military and auto publications, according to Perlman. They were also more difficult to align with the company’s increasing focus on video and events.
What remains is a tighter, more thematically coherent portfolio, categorized largely into two verticals: auto and military.
The military brands include Task & Purpose, We Are the Mighty, The War Zone, and Military Spouse, plus the Military Influencer Conference. Its auto titles include Donut, Real Mechanic, and The Drive. Three others—Outdoor Life, Bob Vila, and Futurism—do not fit neatly into either group, but they attract a similarly male-skewing audience, per Perlman.
The refocused portfolio reflects an organizing principle at Recurrent, which prizes expertise over scale. In a media landscape upended by collapsing search traffic, focus is now the goal.
The company, which has roughly 100 staff, is profitable and generates an eight-figure revenue, according to Perlman. He declined to offer further specifics. Measured against the roughly $50 million in revenue and $15 million in EBITDA it took in at its 2021 peak, it is likely smaller but more durable.
The commercial strategy now rests on four pillars: video, experiential, licensing, and AI, a deliberate position against the broad programmatic scale that Perlman argues no longer works.
“If you are in media now, you can’t run the type of website business that you used to,” he said.
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For Recurrent, this pivot is apparent in its retreat from commerce. Affiliate revenue, once a core component for the company, has been squeezed from every direction.
Answer engines have reshaped search traffic, pushing organic search results farther down the page—if they appear at all. Compounding the challenge, Amazon roughly halved affiliate rates across the publisher ecosystem several weeks ago.
Recurrent began moving away from the model in late 2023, betting instead on direct audience, email capture, and loyalty.
The company points to traffic gains as evidence the bet is paying off. From January to April year over year, traffic to Task & Purpose is up 195%, the military portfolio is up 85%, Outdoor Life 19%, and even The Drive is up 10%, according to Perlman.
Video is the most visible shift. Recurrent’s YouTube brands sit at different stages of maturity—Donut and The Drive are well established, for instance, while the handyman site Bob Vila is newer to the platform—but the direction is consistent.
Donut, the star of its video offering, now runs a FAST channel on Samsung TV Plus, stocked with roughly 100 hours of back catalog refreshed monthly. The company also plans to co-produce at least three exclusive series for streaming platforms this year, the first of which will be announced in the coming weeks.
The emphasis on video also serves the complementary purpose of fueling the events business.
Its two military-centric events, the Military Influencer Conference and Military Spouse Fest, together generated about $750,000 in revenue when Recurrent acquired We Are the Mighty in 2022. This year, they should clear $4.5 million.
Attendance to MIC has climbed from 1,200 in 2023 to a projected 4,000-plus in 2026, and it now also draws non-endemic sponsors like BMW and Starbucks alongside USAA. Similarly, Donut hosted five events last year and expects up to nine this year.
“Video creates a completely different kind of connection with the audience than text-based content,” he said. “With that connection, you’re able to move audiences to engage in live events.”
Despite these shifts, one constant at Recurrent is its relationship with Blackstone, which still holds a board seat. The relationship between the companies is healthy, according to Perlman.
The firm, like investors in so many media companies, is likely still hoping for a liquidity event. But for now, Recurrent has done the harder thing first: it built a business that can last.