Aug 11, 2008 02:02 PM
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Daily Candy, the email newsletter for women who like to buy things, was improbably successful. Former journalist Dany Levy founded it in 2000; it quickly became profitable, and she sold a controlling stake in the business to the private investment firm Pilot Group in 2003 for $3.5 million. Pilot Group sold the newsletter to Comcast last week for (an unbelievable) $125 million. But Levy, we hear, retained about a 20% interest in Daily Candy—which would mean that she walked away from the sale with $25 million. That would make her the undisputed internet cash queen of New York media. Take that, Laurel Touby!
A year ago, the boa-sporting Touby sold Mediabistro.com for $23 million. But lots of other people had smaller stakes in that company, so Touby walked off with a significantly smaller amount of cash than the total purchase price. She can't even afford to move out of her sixth-floor walkup! Meanwhile, Levy can now afford to buy as many Daily Candy-endorsed trinkets as she wants, forever until the end of time and beyond.
Still, Touby and Levy are the two most cash-rich media-centric internet entrepreneurs NYC has thus far produced. And they're both women! Is that notable? Not yet, but if Arianna Huffington decides to sell the HuffingtonPost for an ungodly sum and turn Republican again, it will make three, and an official trend. Until that time it means nothing.
[More about Levy's privileged family background at CityFile]
Send an email to Hamilton Nolan, the author of this post, at Hamilton@gawker.com.
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