Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly are going home — sort of.
Fox Corp., the backer of Fox News Channel, where all three of the aforementioned hosts led shows, is acquiring Red Seat Ventures, a digital media company that helps manage business concerns for a bevy of news personalities who have gone independent, including the former Fox trio.
The move appears to be aimed at bolstering Tubi, Fox’s free, ad-supported streaming outlet. Red Seat Ventures will operate as a standalone unit of Tubi Medi Group, and Paul Cheesbrough, CEO of that operation, was named Red Seat Ventures’ chairman. Founding partners Chris Balfe and Kevin Balfe will continue to lead the business. Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.
“From the beginning, Red Seat Ventures has had the opportunity to work with some of the most influential creators in the world to grow their new media businesses and develop their personal brands,” said Chris Balfe, in a statement. “In aligning with Fox, we will be able to build upon that investment and expand the services we provide to our creators, while continuing to maintain the independence and integrity of their brands, which is truly the best case scenario.”
Balfe worked for years with another Fox News exile, Glenn Beck, helping him with his production company, Mercury Radio Arts, as well as his media outlet, TheBlaze. In recent years, Red Seat Ventures has struck up alliances with Eric Bolling, Nancy Grace, Dr. Phil, Dana Loesch and Chris Hansen.
The acquisition shows Fox cultivating traditional talent in a bid to harness viewers in non-traditional venues. Podcasts, streaming programs and newsletters have fast become the tools of independent creators, who lack an old-school distribution system, but can easily cultivate fans and a community one subscriber at a time. Many of their ventures are quite successful, and they can keep more of the revenue they generate.
This isn’t the first acquisition Fox Corp. has made along these lines. In 2021, Fox bought Outkick, the conservative-leaning sports-news site founded by entrepreneur and online personality Clay Travis.
The company sees an opportunity to “drive additional scale in genres such as sports, news and entertainment,” Cheesebrough said in a statement.
Kelly and others who work with Red Seat will remain independent from Fox Corp., she said in a comment posted Monday via social media. Kelly said her program “is owned 100% by me. Happy for Fox & Red Seat but it has virtually nothing to do with me.”
Though smaller than contemporaries such as Disney or NBCUniversal, Fox has thrived in recent years by casting off assets devoted to traditional scripted entertainment programming and focusing more intently on content meant to be watched live, particularly sports, game shows and news programming.
