Digital media companies Group Nine and Refinery29 are planning to merge, three close people aware of this news revealed. As most of the digital ad share is going to Google and Facebook, so a lot of venture-funded digital media companies are planning to merge. Such speculations are in new since the last few months. However, there is no clear message from the heads of both the companies namely, Group Nine and Refinery. Even the heads of both the companies said earlier this year that they only believe in the acquisition.

Although a lot of companies are planning to merge, which is not an easy task. Any type of merger involves a lot of challenges which both the merger companies need to tackle. Similar to this, the merger between Group Nine and Refinery doesn’t seem to come in the near future. Both companies need to understand the values of each other before coming together to make their merger successful. However, in the case of these two companies, investors namely, Discovery and Turner have to agree on terms as both of these backed Group Nine and Refinery.

As the two companies belong to different cultures so it is hard to combine and if it happens, then it would be a challenging task. One of the possibilities that experienced media mergers and acquisitions suggests is that both the companies could combine in a stock deal without changing money from one hand to another. However, if this merger happens, the chances for the growth of both companies would increase manifold. There is a huge demand for digital media and hence the  responsibility for digital footprint also resides on the shoulders of both the companies. Reacting to this merger news, both Group Nine and Refinery representative said they have not decided anything about the merger. They said they are discussing the opportunities to merge with their peers.

The nature of the two companies, Group Nine and Refinery29 are the same, as the two make videos for the audience. Out of the two, Group Nine makes more profit, although the industry watchers don’t consider this fact. The relation between the two companies is on the grounds of links between investors. Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer joins the team of Lerer Hippaeu, which has made an investment in Refinery.

Group Nine, which is a product of Nowthis, The Dodo, Thrillist, and Seeker. It got started due to the $100 mn investment of Discovery Communications and post this, discovery continued to invest more money into it. In order to diversify, it is planning to sell its video studio output and branching out to e-commerce. On the other hand, 2005 founded company, Refinery is a women’s lifestyle publisher. Refinery gets its revenue from advertising and organizing other events. The company is planning to increase its profitability by expanding its live events and selling high-quality video for streaming services globally.

The companies are talking about a merger because these venture-backed digital media are not getting enough money out of their business and hence their profitability is not very high. One way to get profit is to get cheap distribution on Facebook. But Facebook has refused to allow free distribution and the major part of advertising is going into the hands of Facebook and Google. Hence, companies are only left with the option of mergers so that they could remove redundant staff to increase their profitability.