Will Vinit Bharara’s sale of Some Spider Studios to BDG bring him big gains

Some Spider Studios, founded by Vinit Bharara, announced this week that it is being bought by BDG Media, formerly the Bustle Media Group. The New York based companies own digital media channels which use Facebook and other social media to promote and distribute their content.  

BDG, with about 800 employees, is one of the companies consolidating digital media businesses in the U.S. Spider, its ninth purchase, will expand total readership to over 100 million. Spider has 125 employees.

The transaction “is a testament to the best in class team we’ve assembled,” Vinit Bharara, 50, founder and chief executive of Spider, said in a statement. Spider’s Scary Mommy, The Dad, and Fatherly channels, he added, empower “moms and dads to lead more fulfilling lives.”

Current ScaryMommy.com video titles include: Lil Nas X Dances Nude In Jailed-Themed ‘Industry Baby’ Video; In My Son’s Therapy Session, I Admitted That I Resent Him; My Mom May Be Gone, But I Found An Incredible Sign From Her In My New Home; and Mindy Kaling Addresses ‘Scooby Doo’ Fans Upset That Velma Is South-Asian.

Scary Mommy videos get 600 million monthly views and it has 16 million followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, according to Spider.

Videos on TheDad.com get more than 100 million views a month and the site has eight million followers on social media. Its current video titles include: Netflix Will Create Mobile Games First, Won’t Charge Additional Fees for Games; and Pets That Are Easy To Take Care Of And (Probably) Won’t Die When Junior Forgets To Feed Them.

Spider, founded in 2014, has a third platform Fatherly which has four million social media followers.

With revenues from Walmart, Disney and other advertisers, including through sponsored content, Spider became profitable in 2020.

Founded in 2013, BDG’s digital platforms include Bustle, a women-focused publication, The Zoe Report, a women’s fashion and shopping site; and NYLON, which covers fashion, entertainment and music.

In April this year, Vinit Bharara and his older brother Preet Bharara sold Café, which they co-founded, to Vox Media. The podcast company focuses on news, politics and the law. Preet, 52-years-old, was a former U.S. prosecutor.

Preet and Vinit’s father is a doctor and their mother worked in the office, while also raising the brothers. Their father is a Sikh and mother a Hindu. Both parents were born in Pakistan and their families fled to India at the time of the partition in 1947.

Earlier from 2005, Vinit Bharara served as the chief operating officer of Quidsi.com, which he co-founded with Marc Lore. The online retailer of diapers, soaps and other consumer goods was almost crushed by a price war launched by Amazon. In 2010, Lore and Bharara sold Quidsi to Amazon for more than $545 million. Amazon shut down Quidsi in 2017.

Vinit Bharara was previously the General Counsel of The Topps Company, the leading manufacturer of sports trading cards and novelty confectionary - Bazooka gum and Ring Pop, Push Pop and Baby Bottle Pop. Prior to that, he was a co-founder and General Counsel of The Pit, a platform for trading sports cards, which was sold to Topps.

He was part of a team that assisted court-appointed Special Master Judah Gribetz in drafting the distribution plan for the $1.25 billion settlement reached in the class action lawsuits initiated by victims of the Nazi Holocaust against Swiss banks, according to Crunchbase.

Vinit Bharara began his legal career at Cahill Gordon & Reindel in New York. He is a graduate in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, 1993, and got his law degree from Columbia University in 1996.

Spider is estimated to earn $10 million in profits on $50 million in revenues this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Bharara sold Spider to BDG for $150 million in BDG stock. He will be a strategic advisory partner to BDG while he plans to launch another company with Marc Lore.

Bharara and Lore are friends since they were students at the Ranney School, where they finished high school in 1989. Ranney, a private day school in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, currently charges $35,000 in annual fees for high school students.

Lore was an early investor in Spider, alongside Bharara, each initially investing $5 million. The value of their stake in BDG, resulting from the sale of Spider, will be tied to BDG’s prospects. Bryan Goldberg, the founder of BDG, is keen to take the company public, he told Techcrunch.

If the stock market continues to rise and there is big demand for BDG’s public shares, BDG stock owned by Bharara and other Spider investors will likely be valued far greater than $150 million. If the stock market stumbles before BDG lists publicly, or if BDG’s stock does not get a high valuation from Wall Street, the gains for Spider’s investors could be far less.

Apparently, Bharara has calculated the odds and expects a high valuation for BDG’s public shares. In a statement he said “We’re excited to be part of the growing BDG family and its ambitious, bright future.”   

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