Technology

My guess: turn failing big companies into failing little ones.

From wiki

Red Ventures is an American media company that owns and operates brands such as Lonely Planet, CNET, ZDNet, The Points Guy, Healthline, and Bankrate.[1] Red Ventures focuses on news, advice, and review websites.[2]

Seems pretty straightforward.

I realize the article was written to make it sound like they lost money on this, but I would be shocked if they had.

To vastly oversimplify it, private equity does a few things to make money on the companies they acquire:

• Significantly reduce staff, and increasing workload
• Strip and sell off individual assets
• Load the company with debt

The last parts are where it goes from amoral to "HOW THE FUCK IS THAT LEGAL?"

The private equity firm will have its own separate entities that provide a variety of services, for example janitorial or administrative.

The new private equity owners will then replace all the current vendors, with their own entities at a expentionally hirer costs. All the while, paying themselves gigantic consulting fees.

Basically those are all just ways to legally embezzle money by extracting all the resources from the company. Once that's done, they'll sell the last thing of value: the brand name itself e.g. CNET, VICE, etc.

If there is no money in the brand and self, then they'll just dissolve the company.