Red Ventures has turned very specific advice into a very large business.

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India, South Carolina — Lindsey Turrentine first heard of Red Ventures last fall when it acquired the famous technology news website CNET, where she was the senior vice president of content. She sat down at the kitchen table in Berkeley, California, and frantically started Googling to find out what it was.

Her experience is not uncommon. In recent years, people working on travel guide Lonely Planet, travel website The Points Guy, and health and medical information website Healthline have also been blinded when Red Ventures spent billions of dollars to purchase special interest publications.

They came to the company’s South Carolina headquarters through a Google search and mandatory company retreats. This is a 180-acre park with a bunch of modern buildings, a fire pit, a six-lane bowling alley, a spinning room, a kimchi field and 264 residences for employees choose to live where they work.

Red Ventures started as a digital marketing company and has attracted a lot of investment from private equity firms. Its location obscures what may be the largest digital publisher in the United States. The 4,500-employed giant stated that its annual revenue is about 2 billion U.S. dollars, and its conservative valuation earlier this year exceeded 11 billion U.S. dollars. And more readers (by measurement) Comscore, more than any media brand you've heard of-average monthly visits of 751 million.

On Indian soil, I feel as if I have returned to the ping-pong era of Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. Red Ventures has built a culture that blends passionate enthusiasm, progressive social values, and ruthless performance indicators of the direct selling business.

The company almost accidentally found itself involved in the publishing industry and is now leading the industry’s transition to what is sometimes called "intention-based media"-the terminology of professional websites, attracting those who already want to spend money in specific areas (travel, technology) , Health) and guide them to make purchases while reducing expenses.

This is a step from the traditional advertising business to selling products directly to you. For example, Red Ventures plans to direct Healthline readers to doctors or drugs found on HealthGrades, another website it recently acquired, which ranks and recommends doctors. Red Ventures will charge a reasonable commission for each referral.

At the core of the company is CEO and co-founder Ric Elias. As a Puerto Rican, 6 feet 5 inches tall, he has quietly become one of the country's most powerful media tycoons, Barry Diller of the South (Barry Diller), leading a company of the size of Mr. Diller's IAC. (Mr. Diller, a more typical unmodest media figure, said in an email that he thought Mr. Elias was "impressive", but there was only one Barry Diller: "I consider myself a compass All the points on it.")

Mr. Elias talked to me in the company's bright and spacious cafeteria, and that morning he played basketball with a former NBA player who lived nearby. He is the largest shareholder of Red Ventures and owns more than 20% of the company's shares, so he is a nominal billionaire-although he has not yet completed the self-promotion required to enter the Forbes list.

"I think we are a 20-year-old company, and it is still thinking about who we will become," he said. "And I don't think we have anything to celebrate or tell."

If you have heard of Mr. Elias, it may be because you are one of 8 million people who have watched his TED talk video "Three Things I Learned When a Plane Crash". On the top floor of the main building of the Red Ventures campus, he pointed to his vague shape. The passengers in the painting stepped onto the wing of American Airlines Flight 1549 bound for Charlotte. The jetliner made an emergency landing on the Hudson River. The river in 2009 is known as the "Miracle on the Hudson". Mr. Elias's seat is 1D.

He returned from that near-death experience, determined to reshape his life-and his company. He is committed to various undertakings, including a university scholarship program for undocumented immigrants who are not eligible for state aid, some of whom he employs. He started to transform Red Ventures (a mid-sized marketing company at the time) into a company he hoped to spend his career.

"This is the habitat where I will spend the rest of my life," he said, describing his thoughts at the time. "We will not go public, we will not sell. As long as I am still operating, Red Ventures will never become a public company."

He persuaded major investors — private equity firms General Atlantic and Silver Lake each hold approximately 20% of the shares — to support the ambitious expansion. Now, Red Ventures is the largest of the private equity-backed giants, and these giants have been snapping up trusted media brands that were once eliminated. North Equity acquired Popular Science, Domino and Field & Stream, and the men's website Mel. Listed company J2 Media acquired old publisher Ziff Davis with its online brands Mashable and IGN. In addition to Lonely Planet, CNET, Healthline and The Points Guy, Red Ventures also acquired BestColleges, an education consulting website.

These low-key media companies are pushing for technological transformation because both Apple and regulators have weakened the dominance of the creepy advertising technology that allows companies to track you across websites. This helps push the pendulum back to the old-fashioned idea of ​​connecting with readers seeking information about their lives, whether it's a Field & Stream article on the latest fly rods or a Healthline guide for Crohn's disease treatment.

In this context, Red Ventures-a company that supports access to the media after specializing in online marketing-makes sense.

Mr. Elias grew up in San Juan and listened to the story of his late grandfather. He was a Lebanese immigrant. According to family legend, he established a huge agricultural product import business, but lost it because he did not pay taxes. . He said that recently it occurred to him that he has been working hard to restore this surname throughout his career.

In 1986, he arrived at Boston College a semester late because he had been working hard to form a local professional basketball team, Leones de Ponce, and spoke the broken English he spoke. From there, he received an MBA degree from Harvard Business School. In 2000, he and his friend Dan Feldstein (now the chief marketing officer of Red Ventures) founded a business with the idea of ​​bringing online shoppers to physical stores. Mr. Elias said it was a "bad idea" and they quickly ran out of money. In the next few years, they tapped and rewarded their investors, including their more successful Harvard Business School classmates.

Mr. Elias and Mr. Feldstein sold their business to management in 2005 and restarted under the name of Red Ventures, becoming the pioneers of that era linking digital data with real-world business. They entered the business of selling DirecTV subscriptions and ADT Security anti-theft alarms. Along the way, they figured out how to integrate online marketing and old-fashioned telemarketing methods-and they are very good at search engine optimization.

Other techniques are more ingenious. For example, they bought more than 1 million free phone numbers and showed a different phone number to each visitor to their marketing website. Therefore, when potential customers call, Red Ventures knows exactly what they are viewing on the website, which provides agents with the information they need to make a personalized sales promotion. In those more innocent times, this is a very high-tech form of digital surveillance. With the development of the company and the transformation of the market, its founders realized that the technical knowledge they developed has become a commodity in itself, and they need to develop their own brands, not just sell others' brands.

In 2015, Red Ventures raised $250 million to acquire Bankrate for $1.4 billion, a personal finance company that helps people compare financial products (and earns commissions from each sale). The acquisition includes The Points Guy, a website dedicated to clarifying airline mileage programs and credit card transactions. The Points Guy has built a profitable business, where people earn commissions every time they sign up for a credit card they read on the website-usually with rave reviews for high-end credit cards.

The profit margins promised by the marketing of financial products are much higher than the online "affiliated" businesses of sites such as the New York Times' Wirecutter. Although publishers that recommend gadgets on Amazon may get a single-digit percentage of shoppers’ purchases, the "bounty" paid to Red Ventures is used to direct consumers to Chase Visa Sapphire Reserve credit cards or American Express Rose Gold Cards US$300 to US$900 per card.

Among the reporters working under Elias, the arrival of Red Ventures executives is not always very popular. Journalists, like members of the medieval guild (the hall of the guild is Twitter), have a closer relationship with their professional folklore than with any corporate culture. Some people roll their eyes at the rah-rah retreat of Red Ventures, where there are fireworks and song. More disturbingly, some reporters from The Points Guy also reported on the entire tourism industry (it has always been a comprehensive source of information about where vaccinated Americans can travel), and they complained that the new owner eroded the industry. The wall between the website and the website has been shaky. Service journalism and credit card sales that finance it.

JT Genter, who left the site more than a year ago, stated that Red Ventures was "all about maximizing profits." He and other Points Guy authors said that they were not forced to publish stories that they considered suspicious—in fact, the site occasionally cautiously provided critical reports on its main business partners Chase and American Express. But Points Guy reporters must attend regular business meetings to detail how much money the site makes from credit card sales. Some people think this is the default recommendation, and they put their thumbs on scale.

Mr. Elias stated that Red Ventures has a “non-negotiable stance” on the editorial independence of its website, adding that he has provided his mobile phone number to CNET employees and instructed them to deal with business pressure call him.

"I told them,'There is a red line,' and they said,'Well, let's wait and see,'" he said.

Red Ventures is rooted in marketing, its investment in technology designed to sell you something, and attempts to provide readers with reliable and even news recommendations are almost accidental moves. These recommendations have formed a strange Hybrid. And the company's Silicon Valley style has only continued to this day. Most employees do not get equity in the company, and lunch is not free, but subsidized.

However, the company does provide a happy workplace, with inspiring slogans printed in delightful fonts on the walls of the inner courtyard. The most I hear from executives is "Everything is written in pencil." For a company that has almost completely transformed from a marketing origin to a major supplier of news services, this adage makes sense. Its executives seem to have accepted the idea that they are selling trust, even if they did not express it in the language of a journalism professor.

"Brand and trust are at the core of everything we do," said Courtney Jeffers, president of the company's financial services division, which includes Bankrate. "If you lose brand trust, then you have no business."

There is a lot of good news about Red Ventures and similar companies rescuing old media brands—for example, CNET plans to hire 150 new employees this year. A deeper concern may be what it means to turn an independent arbiter of the Internet into an open mouth in the sales funnel.

I think that less pessimistic is another thing that Red Ventures represents: the challenge to Amazon’s oligopoly on the Internet and the model of independent media companies that have spent a generation of time or lost their core business. Give the ruthless tech giants, or, at best, live on their leftovers. For sites like Wirecutter, Internet commerce in practice usually means acting as an Amazon storefront, with revenue from moderate commissions. But Red Ventures successfully established a technology and media company that is independent of that particular Goliath, if not another Goliath-Google.

"We will have the opportunity to be an alternative to the large walled garden," Mr. Elias said of his company. "This is an airplane that has just reached a certain altitude."

The topic of airplanes prompted me to ask Mr. Elias how he returned to Carolina after landing on the Hudson River. He said he had told a surprised agent that he wanted the next flight.

"The lady looked at me as if I was crazy," he recalled, but he thought, "If I don't get on the plane right away, I might never fly again-if the next flight crashes, it's God wants Come to see me."