Minute Media Acquires 'Mental Floss,' Focuses on Growing Millennial Base

After raising $77 million in capital earlier this year, Minute Media is making its first major acquisition with Mental Floss from the Felix Dennis estate. Proceeds from the sale will go to the Heart of England Forest, a charity that Dennis established during his lifetime.

A global publishing and technology platform, Minute Media has until now been operating three sports-media platforms, including 90Min, DBLTAP and 12Up. Minute Media has taken a technology-first approach to publishing, relying heavily on video and other media formats.

Mental Floss is Minute Media’s first strategic acquisition as it focuses on growing the company’s millennial user base and expanding properties.

Following the acquisition, Minute Media will manage Mental Floss’ digital assets, including its website, social channels, programmatic and direct advertising customers. They will continue to operate under the Mental Floss brand.

Minute Media will also focus on building Mental Floss’ video production and content surfacing capability on-platform.

Rich Routmantold, Minute Media president, told: “Video has been at the core of Mental Floss' DNA for years, including its YouTube channel with over 1.3m subscribers. This is a key area where Mental Floss can benefit from our video technology and monetization capabilities.”

“The main point of this new direction is the focus on non-organic growth streams. We're intent on being acquisitive and aggressive here as we pursue options well beyond Mental Floss,” said Routman.

“We've proven that we can operationalize media business at better margins than the industry standards. The more assets we integrate into our central platform technology, the more robust we can make the company,” he added.