Since moving its headquarters from Atlanta to Las Vegas in 2013, global digital-media technology conglomerate Remark Media Inc. has grown its technology portfolio while setting its sights on millennials and reinforcing its reach into the lucrative Chinese market.
Many diverse properties reside under its umbrella — including websites and applications that target the personal finance, travel, entertainment, sports, young-adult lifestyle, social media and health care industries. The publicly traded company owns and operates brands such as bikini.com, banks.com, Roomlia, FansTang, Tax Extension, U.S. Tax Center and vegas.com. (Remark Media purchased vegas.com from the site’s founding company, the Greenspun Corporation, in September 2015.)
This portfolio allows Remark to provide digital-media experiences in multiple verticals with a consistent focus on the millennial market, according to Remark chairman and CEO Kai-Shing Tao.
“Millennials are the most sought-after demographic because of their purchasing power, so we’ve created a global ecosystem to target this demographic,” said Tao, who assumed his current post in 2012. “The company has evolved from being a media-content business to being a technology company where our data platform allows us to expand into any industry.”
Remark Media’s future lies in its KanKan Data Intelligence Platform, Tao said. The platform aggregates users’ digital footprints and analyzes behavior based on their social media use, travel and shopping habits.
KanKan has been gathering, analyzing and organizing global content for less than three years, resulting in 1.3 billion active user profiles; 22 billion posts; 14 billion images; 130 billion comments and reviews; 50 million business profiles; and 40 million point-of-interest profiles.
Jason Wei, Remark’s chief technology officer, said KanKan targeted millennials, which aligned with target demographics for other business units within the company.
“KanKan is the data hub of all Remark Media’s businesses, current and future, that will connect all Remark customers and provide valuable customer analysis and insights, and data solutions to internal businesses,” Wei said. “For KanKan itself, with partners, it will also build various data solutions for global business customers based on its advanced data and artificial intelligence technologies.”
In January, Remark announced its collaboration with Chinese investment holding company Tencent to develop marketing solutions powered by KanKan and Tencent Cloud, a high-performance cloud computing service. Tencent Cloud is developing a data platform that can serve businesses in several verticals solve marketing challenges, Remark officials said.
Also in January, Remark announced a partnership with China-based Alibaba Cloud, one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, to provide customers with the new Enterprise Data Services Solution, which includes data on tens of millions of businesses in China. Tao said the partnership underscored KanKan’s value and monetization opportunities.
“We believe this is just the beginning for our KanKan platform,” he said. “Our data resources and technology expertise represent a tremendous opportunity for additional partnerships with some of the world’s largest companies.”
In 2016, Remark acquired FansTang, which provides Western sports and entertainment digital video content, international live event broadcasts and social media content into China. The integration of China Branding Group’s U.S. content and production assets and the FansTang subsidiary will enhance Remark’s millennial appeal in both the U.S. and China, Tao said.
“The Chinese digital market is experiencing explosive growth and will continue to do so over the next five years, and we intend to be a part of that growth,” Tao said. “We’ll be able to use the sales team that China Branding Group has in place to sell across all the different assets for Remark Media.”
He noted FansTang’s portfolio of celebrity, sports and entertainment content; its social media community of more than 130 million followers in China; and proven distribution and monetization strategies — all of which will help Remark generate traffic and grow revenue, Tao said.
Back on the home front, KanKan is helping Remark’s internal businesses, such as vegas.com and
bikini.com, provide useful information to help target the 18- to 34-year-old age bracket, while also generating revenue and keeping ahead of technology trends.
The acquisition of vegas.com, Remark’s biggest moneymaker, was a milestone, Tao said.
“Vegas.com is our crown jewel,” Tao said. “When we acquired it, we saw a much bigger opportunity to expand it from just ticketing into a media platform, and capitalize on the traffic we generate from producing original content.”
Vegas.com President Michael Reichartz said the company had been working on mobile migration as well as striving to improve the user experience.
“We’ve been doing a lot of A/B testing, where we build a product and test it on a limited audience to gauge the response before releasing it site-wide,” said Reichartz, who co-founded hotel-booking site Roomlia, which Remark acquired.
“Last year, we ran almost 200 tests, and we are on pace for even more in 2017, which allows us to be incredibly nimble,” Reichartz said. “We’re also seeing the colonization from desktop to mobile devices in the new phone-first kind of environment. The focus on millennials is certainly there for us, too, so we’re trying to present more image-driven content, because the younger the demographic, the more visual the consumer is said to be.”
Bikini.com, a luxury lifestyle destination encompassing exotic travel, health and fitness, social consciousness, and designer swimwear and accessories, is also a significant component of Remark’s portfolio, and focuses on an even narrower niche: female millennials.
“Bikini.com is about tapping into the daydreamer that’s inside every girl and celebrating that sense of wanderlust,” said Shannon Follansbee, company president. “We celebrate natural beauty and acceptance of all body shapes, and want women to feel confident that bikinis are for everyone.”
With more than 3 million social media impressions, bikini.com recently launched its Brand Brand Ambassador program with more than 100 social influencers. In September, it introduced The Wanderlust, a $75-a-quarter subscription series which features a themed discovery box inspired by beach destinations around the world. The box contains beauty, style, travel and fitness essentials such as jewelry, body scrubs, water bottles and beach accessories. Bikini.com also recently rolled out video content on its site.
Remark’s 2016 third-quarter results reflect the recent enhancements to its portfolio, as well as the success of KanKan. Its net revenue in the third quarter was $15.1 million, compared with $800,000 for the same period in 2015. For the nine-month period ending Sept. 30, its net revenue was $44.4 million, compared with $2.4 million for the same nine months in 2015.
“As we look ahead, we are more excited than ever about our ability to expand our leadership position in global consumer data intelligence and monetize our offerings in that arena,” Tao said.