Atlantic Media’s business news site built for the digital age has turned into a good bit of business itself.
The site, Quartz, which was created by Atlantic in 2012, will be sold to the Japanese financial intelligence company Uzabase for between $75 million and $110 million, depending on its performance, according to a statement released Monday.
The purchase is the second major international media takeover in recent years by a Japanese company. In 2015, the Japanese media group Nikkei bought The Financial Times, the British business newspaper of salmon-colored pages, for $1.3 billion.
The sale also signals a rare success in a media industry that is still struggling to adapt to the internet and the tech titans that dominate it. Just a year after Quartz was founded, The Washington Post was sold to Jeff Bezos for $250 million, seen as a remarkably low price for a news organization with a historic brand name and a vast publishing apparatus. Around the same time, the company that published The Boston Globe was sold by The New York Times Company for $70 million.
Five years later, Quartz itself — lacking the historic brand names of The Post or The Globe — could sell for a comparable sum.
“Uzabase’s ambition echoes our own — to build the leading business news brand of our century — and now we are in this mission together,” Kevin Delaney, the Quartz editor in chief and co-founder, wrote in an emailed memo to Quartz employees on Monday.
Created in 2012 with just 20 journalists, Quartz quickly found an audience by turning out a torrent of articles — some analytical, some quirky, most short — and charts targeting tech-savvy business readers. Armed with an editorial staff steeped in technology, the site has experimented with new ideas, including making bots that give readers the news and integrating ads into its newsfeed.
Today, the company — which has its own bot studio, a number of popular newsletters, and a project to introduce a video show on Facebook — has 215 employees, including more than 100 journalists. Quartz will retain its name, brand, staff and offices, according to the announcement. Mr. Delaney and the publisher Jay Lauf will share the title of chief executive, and report to the Uzabase co-founder Yusuke Umeda.
Uzabase, which runs a business news aggregation app called NewsPicks, said that it was buying Quartz to help it grow its overseas business. Quartz will take over the English language version of NewsPicks and also develop new paid products, according to the emailed memo.
Uzabase and Mr. Umeda have worked to challenge a staid media environment in Japan by focusing coverage on emerging technology trends, according to Japanese media interviews with Mr. Umeda.
The company’s NewsPicks product, which aggregates business news and allows commenting and sharing, has 64,000 subscribers paying roughly $15 per month, according to the statement. In 2017, the company formed a joint venture with Dow Jones & Company to run an American edition of NewsPicks. Uzabase also runs a financial intelligence service called Speeda.
Discussions between Uzabase and Quartz began last fall and were in part rooted in Mr. Umeda’s early admiration of Quartz, according to the statement.
“Five years ago, when I was originally thinking about launching a digital media business, I discovered Quartz for the first time,” Mr. Umeda said in the statement. “I thought that they were truly the first new media company to successfully combine quality journalism with mobile technology, and they played a big role in inspiring me to launch NewsPicks.”.
Still, it seems that Quartz will now be following the direction set by Mr. Umeda and his NewsPicks product. Under the new leadership, Quartz is to focus on developing subscription products aimed at its current readership.
“While high-quality advertising will continue to represent the lion’s share of Quartz’s revenue in the coming years, we expect that the biggest source of growth in Quartz’s next chapter will come from reader revenue,” Mr. Delaney wrote in his email to employees.
Follow Paul Mozur on Twitter: @paulmozur.
Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno contributed research.
