Engadget, the long-running tech news website, has a new owner. Yahoo sold the publication to Static Media in a deal that was signed in early February and is scheduled to close later this March. (Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.) The deal hasn’t yet been publicly announced, but a source familiar with the publication says Engadget staff was told a few weeks ago and has already met with the new owners.
“This move reflects Yahoo’s focus on our core brands, while aligning Engadget with an owner whose primary focus is operating and growing editorial media brands,“ says Sona Iliffe-Moon, Yahoo’s chief communications officer, in a statement to The Verge. “This also includes a broader Yahoo partnership with Static Media that will support audience and revenue growth across its portfolio of brands, including Engadget.” Static Media didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The focus on core brands is an ongoing theme for Yahoo, which also sold TechCrunch to media investment firm Regent last year. It operates popular services like Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Finance, and appears to be otherwise happy managing publisher partnerships rather than running newsrooms. Yahoo laid off much of Engadget’s leadership in 2024, and this time I’m told that some of the Engadget team is staying at Yahoo to work on Yahoo’s homegrown vertical, Yahoo Tech. Yahoo Tech is primarily focused on commerce and buying advice, and the remaining employees — who I’m told were not given a choice which publication to work for — will likely do the same.
Meanwhile, it’s yet another corporate change for Engadget, which most recently became part of Yahoo in 2021 after Verizon sold the Verizon Media Group to Apollo Global Management (which renamed the whole thing Yahoo). Static Media, for its part, has been accumulating legacy internet publishing brands for years. It also owns SlashGear and BGR in tech, along with publications like Chowhound, Jalopnik, and SlashFilm. Internally, multiple sources tell me Static is talking about investing in Engadget’s future and that no one is losing their jobs. Engadget has had a series of huge tech companies as owners — including AOL, which owned the company in 2011 when a number of its employees left to start the publication that became The Verge — and the publication might actually stand to benefit from the attention and resources of a company that cares about media most of all.
There’s a broader trend at play here, too. In a world increasingly devoid of Google traffic and forced to reckon with the advent of AI, larger media investment companies are hoarding well-known brands in an effort to compete at scale for digital ads. Hugely influential Gawker brands like Gizmodo and Kotaku are now owned by Keleops; Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, sold Polygon to Valnet last May; Regent, which owns TechCrunch, also owns PCWorld, Macworld, and Tech Advisor; and Ziff Davis now owns CNET, PCMag, Mashable, and more.