Latest news with #Valnet
Fast Company
24-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
CareerBuilder + Monster job search board files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after revenue sinks nearly 40% post-pandemic
The company initiated the Chapter 11 process to facilitate a sale of its operations, with assets totaling between $50 to $100 million and estimated liabilities of some $100 to $500 million, according to its bankruptcy filing. Fast Company has reached out to the company for comment. The bankruptcy plan calls for the assets to be divided up, selling its jobs board business to JobGet Inc.; selling Monster Media Properties to Valnet Inc. (which includes and and transferring Monster Government Services to Valsoft Corp. However, the asset sale is subject to other, higher offers, according to the press release.
Wall Street Journal
24-06-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
CareerBuilder + Monster to Sell Businesses in Bankruptcy
CareerBuilder + Monster filed for bankruptcy Tuesday with plans to sell various business lines to different buyers. The company, once one of the leading job search platforms, said it has reached a deal to sell its job board business to JobGet, according to a press release. Monster media properties, which include and would be sold to Valnet. And Monster Government Services, which provides software to state and local governments, would be sold to Valsoft.
Entrepreneur
24-06-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
CareerBuilder, Monster Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
After decades in business as separate entities, the recently merged company CareerBuilder + Monster has filed for bankruptcy. The company announced on Tuesday that it had initiated a voluntary Chapter 11 process in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware as business continues to decline. Chapter 11 allows a company to continue operating while it reorganizes its finances and develops a plan to repay its creditors. "Our business has been affected by a challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment," Jeff Furman, CEO of CareerBuilder + Monster, said in a press release. "We determined that initiating this court-supervised sale process is the best path toward maximizing the value of our businesses and preserving jobs." The bankruptcy plan suggested on Tuesday proposes selling CareerBuilder + Monster's assets to various companies. The firm's job board business would be sold to job app JobGet, Monster Media Properties would be transferred to media company Valnet, and Monster Government Services would be bought by investment firm Valsoft. The transactions, which are of undisclosed value, are subject to court approval and are expected to close in the coming weeks. Related: CEO of Tesla Rival Drops Salary to $1 to Cover Bankruptcy Costs CareerBuilder + Monster is also undertaking restructuring efforts across its U.S. businesses. Furman stated that the company was "making difficult but necessary" changes to reduce its workforce. It's unclear how many employees will be affected by the job cuts, which are intended to bring down costs. CareerBuilder and Monster were both pioneers in the online job hunting space, launching in the 1990s and popularizing the search for a job online. The two merged in September 2024 to create a unified job board with more options and greater reach. However, the joint company still faced declining sales. CareerBuilder's revenue fell to $49.2 million in 2024, a 40% drop compared to 2023, according to Moody's Ratings. The company has recently faced stiff competition from LinkedIn and Indeed, which have both experienced notable growth in the past decade. Indeed claims to be the top job site in the world based on total visits, with more than 580 million users across 60 countries and over 3.5 million employers who use the site to find new hires. Meanwhile, LinkedIn says it is "the world's largest professional network" with more than one billion users in 200 countries. The company, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, generated an estimated $16.37 billion in revenue in 2024, up from around $7 billion in 2019. Related: LinkedIn's AI Writing Tool Isn't as 'Popular' as the CEO Thought It Would Be. Here's Why He Thinks Users Are Shunning It.
The Verge
30-05-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Two former Polygon writers are starting a new site
A lot of Polygon 's staff was laid off following Vox Media's sale of the publication to Valnet, but two of its former guides writers are launching their own guides-focused website: Big Friendly Guide, which you can find at Ryan Gilliam and Jeffrey Parkin founded and are co-owners of the site. Guides make Gilliam 'feel like I'm helping someone enjoy something that's very important to me and I know is important to them,' he tells The Verge. 'And so when I lost the opportunity to do that at my usual 9-to-5, I wanted to continue it.' 'I hate sounding immodest or bragging, but what Ryan and I got really good at was helping people play video games,' Parkin says. Their work on guides helps people have fun with games, he adds — and assists with things like getting a giant horse in Zelda. Big Friendly Guide will make most of its content available for free, and the guides themselves won't be paywalled. But Gilliam and Parkin will also be opening a Patreon for the site as a way for people to support the work, which will also give people access to a Discord. There will be a weekly podcast that's free for everyone and a monthly subscriber-only podcast where Gilliam and Parkin will discuss their coverage plans. There will be ads on the site to start. 'For now, at least, we'll run ads to keep the lights on,' according to the site's About Us page.) But the focus is more on building a community that trusts Gilliam and Parkin's work and pays to support it. In addition to working on guides for games that interest them, Gilliam and Parkin want the community to make suggestions for guides that they can consider and respond to. With Big Friendly Guide, Gilliam and Parkin have modest expectations. 'We're not looking to build a brand and sell it or anything,' Parkin says. 'I don't think either of us want to get particularly rich. We want to keep doing this. That's really what it comes down to.'
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
When video games journalism eats itself, we all lose out
Last week was a bad one for video games journalism. Two key contributors to the veteran site Giant Bomb, Jeff Grubb and Mike Minotti, have announced their departure after a recent podcast was taken down. The 888th episode of the Giant Bombcast reportedly featured a section lampooning new brand guidelines issued to staff and is no longer available online. Later this week, it was announced that major US site Polygon was being sold to Valnet, owner of the ScreenRant and GameRant brands, resulting in a swathe of job losses. This follows ReedPop's sale, in 2024, of four high-profile UK-based sites – Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247 – to IGN Entertainment, owned by Ziff Davis, which also resulted in redundancies. It's sad how these long-standing sites, each with vast audiences and sturdy reputations, have been traded and chopped up like commodities. On selling Polygon, Vox CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement: 'This transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio.' It felt gross, to be honest, to see this decade-old bastion of progressive video games writing being reduced to an asset ripe for off-loading. Of its purchase Valnet said: 'Polygon is poised to reach new editorial heights through focused investment and innovation.' Quite how it will do that with a significantly reduced staff is anyone's guess. This is, of course, the familiar robotic doublespeak of the corporate press release and industry observers have not held back in their anger and incredulity. Writing on Aftermath, journalist Nathan Grayson said: 'None of this was, strictly speaking, necessary, with Polygon an unqualified success in terms of traffic while Giant Bomb boasted a dedicated audience drawn to its unique mix of personalities. But of course, parasitic execs decided to suck the marrow from the bones of both, and now we're left wondering what comes next.' You do have to wonder if any of the CEOs involved in these sales have ever read a story or listened to a podcast in their lives that wasn't about maximising shareholder value. Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff at Code Conference in 2022. Photograph:for Vox Media Video game journalism has always walked a windswept tightrope between competing commercial interests. In the olden days of games magazines, much of the money came from adverts bought by the same companies whose products were being reviewed and often mauled by journalists. Several times during my career as a magazine editor I witnessed adverts pulled from publications I worked on following unfavourable reviews of the advertisers' products. To bow to those pressures would mean losing the faith of our readers, which was the most important asset we had. Publishers always came round in the end, but once you've lost the trust of your audience, you might has well call it quits. Later, those magazines transitioned into websites, where ad space remained a vital income. Nowadays it's much more complex, and the industry doesn't need dedicated gaming sites so much, thanks to the rise of influencers on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube. It seems the companies most interested in acquiring gaming sites see only brands, not the creative and experienced staff behind them; in March digital news site the Wrap ran an investigative feature in which Valnet was accused of turning acquired sites into content mills for 'mind-numbing SEO bait'. Valnet has since sued the publication. But the pay rates for journalism are stagnating, even falling, as the games themselves transform into live-service megaplexes inhabited by billions of paying customers. There is, it seems, a festering suspicion of human creativity in the modern tech corp landscape. Unquantifiable, expensive and resistant to spreadsheet analysis, it is an annoying barrier in the way of streamlined market penetration and exponential growth. Wouldn't it be so much easier if AI could write those long, in depth video game walkthroughs that get so many hits, but take so many weeks of work to produce? Wouldn't it make sense if news and analysis was generated and filed within seconds through some sort of automated content pipeline? There's just one problem. Writing a game walkthrough is a complex task, relying on skilled play, the ability to interpret and explain a moment of action and the foresight to know what players will be looking for. A review is a subjective human response to an experience; a podcast is a parasocial chat with pals. Vitally, good games journalism also holds the industry to account, investigating and highlighting issues that would otherwise be buried. The people who do this stuff and do it well have been playing, writing and questioning for years. They know what we think about when we think about games. I suppose this is the same argument playing out right now everywhere in the arts, from movies to music. The tech bros want portfolios of brands to swap between each other, expecting the wordless masses to follow behind, consuming whatever slop they're fed. But it's not endless dead-eyed content we're coming for, it's ideas and craft. What a relief it is that independent sites are springing up at a growing rate. We have the UK games news site VGC and, in the US, there's Aftermath – both have blossoming audiences. Fandoms can only be fooled for so long. I harbour high hopes that when it becomes clear understaffed machines of digital content can only spew out secondhand ideas, the pathetic ghost burps of dead fandom, authenticity will become the only game in town. What to play Scarily good … The Horror at Highrook. Photograph: Nullpointer Games Every month sees a dozen new indie video games using the mechanics of collectible card battlers such as Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh to interesting but increasingly familiar effect. But don't let that stop you trying The Horror at Highrook a heady occult mystery in which a group of explorers raid a haunted mansion in order to discover the truth about a missing aristocratic family. The game world is like a highly complex Cluedo board and mysteries are uncovered and solved by combining relevant item and skill cards, while upgrading the abilities of your party. Clearly inspired by the twin forces of Poe and Lovecraft it's a beautifully constructed challenge, filled with ideas and little arcane treats for fans of both cosmic and gothic horror. Available on: PC Estimated playtime: 10-plus hours What to read Lucia Caminos, co-protagonist of Grand Theft Auto VI. Photograph: Rockstar Games Cheating is as old as video games, but it is ruining the experience of many who like online multiplayer shooters. This feature looks at how Riot is taking on cheaters in A League of Legends and Valorant and it's a great primer on the Red Queen-esque battle between developers and hackers. Most great video games were, at some stage in their development, a fraction of a millimetre away from some disastrous design choice. The highlight of this long interview is how the former Sony president Shuhei Yoshida saved Gran Turismo by suggesting that the team make it actually playable by non-racing drivers. I love that video games, though products of modern technology, still inspire their own legends and folklore. A feature on the BBC site analyses a wonderful example, Ben Drowned – the tale of a haunted N64 cart, a creepypasta that infected games forums in 2010. If you're done with reading, Rockstar just released a new Grand Theft Auto VI trailer and speedboatload of screenshots and info about protagonists Jason and Lucia (above), days after announcing the game's delay until May 2026. Go have a look, it's wild. What to click skip past newsletter promotion Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion Question Block Virtually non-existent … games have struggled to break through on VR devices like the Meta Quest. Photograph: Meta Connect/AFP/Getty Images This week's question comes from Guy Bailey who messaged me on blue BlueSky with the following: 'I love sim racing in VR and my son is addicted to VRChat and the camaraderie of the various worlds. Half Life Alyx is incredible, and most people who try VR love it – so why hasn't it had its gaming mainstream breakthrough yet? Will it ever?' This question has haunted the VR industry since the arrival of the Oculus Quest in 2019, which was supposed to rejuvenate the whole concept of VR for the modern era. And while more than 20m Quest headsets have now been sold, alongside 5m PlayStation VR sets and many other contenders, we're not all spending vast swathes of time in virtual worlds. There are many, many reasons. Motion sickness is one: a percentage of people (and it is more common in women for reasons that no one can agree on) will feel nauseous after a few minutes of use. No one wants to feel sick, no matter how fun the software is. There's also the neurological and physiological disparity of being enclosed in a visual environment which does not align with what our bodies and our senses are expecting. We've all seen the funny videos of people getting carried away in a VR game and running straight into walls. VR also makes us feel vulnerable and silly. It is weird to be so cut off from external 'reality' and it is weird to wear a massive helmet in your living room. These elements are perhaps part of why Apple has been betting big on augmented rather than virtual reality, via is Vision pro headset, which is comparatively inconspicuous and keeps us in touch with our surroundings – but even that has failed so far – at least as a consumer platform. Mostly though, I don't think the content is compelling enough for a non-tech audience. It's a cliche, but there's no killer app. I have an unused PlayStation VR headset and my sons only occasionally play with their Meta Quest 3. The games they like can only be experienced in 20-minute bursts, and I don't think they grip the heart, soul and intellect the way a traditional screen-based immersive game can. For most of us, VR will need to find a way to give us touch, taste, smell and presence, or at least give us a compelling enough reason to leave the sensual world behind for hours on end. If you've got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@
