Show is over at Ozy
Media biz shuts amid scandal & advertiser walkout
Ozy Media said late Friday it would shut down after big advertisers put their campaigns on hold and the digital-media startup’s billionaire chairman resigned amid a slew of bizarre scandals — including surprise allegations from reality star Sharon Osbourne.
“At Ozy, we have been blessed with a remarkable team of dedicated staff. Many of them are worldclass journalists and experienced professionals to whom we owe tremendous gratitude and who are wonderful colleagues. It is therefore with the heaviest of hearts that we must announce today that we are closing Ozy’s doors,” a statement from its board said, according to The New York Times.
As of Friday evening, the site was still online. There was no immediate indication of when or how it would turn out the lights.
Ford, Airbnb, Goldman Sachs and Target are among the firms that had earlier pressed pause on their campaigns with the media company, costing Ozy as much as $5 million in revenue, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing unnamed sources.
Late Thursday, billionaire Marc Lasry resigned as Ozy’s chairman after just three weeks on the job. “I believe that going forward Ozy requires experience in areas like crisis management and investigations, where I do not have particular expertise,”
Lasry said. “For that reason, I have stepped down from the company’s board. I remain an investor in the company and wish it the best going forward.”
Separately Thursday, reality star Sharon Osbourne said the company’s disgraced co-founder and CEO Carlos Watson falsely claimed that she and her husband, heavy-metal legend Ozzy Osbourne, were investors in the company.
Earlier this week, a New York Times report uncovered that Ozy’s co-founder and COO Samir Rao impersonated a YouTube executive on a call with potential investor Goldman Sachs.
That article and several follow-ups have also claimed that Ozy frequently inflated key business metrics to other investors and even lied to its own employees about business operations.