They're a venture-funded media company, so they create content and sell eyeballs to the tune of $75M in revenue in 2022. You might also know them as SB Nation, Eater, The Verge, Vox, Curbed, Recode, Racked, Polygon, Concert, and Vox Creative.
Not sure where your parent got their numbers but they seem off.
> Vox Media, co-founded by Mr. Bankoff in 2011, is the publisher of Vox.com, The Verge and SB Nation, as well as New York magazine and its related websites, which it bought in 2019. Group Nine operates the lifestyle sites PopSugar, NowThis, the Dodo, Thrillist and Seeker. The combined company, encompassing nearly 350 million social media followers and six billion monthly video views, is expected to generate more than $700 million in revenue and $100 million in pretax profit next year, according to two people familiar with the financial details.
One of their huge endeavors is to build an ad-tech company that serves ads based off of first-party data that they gather on Vox Media sites. It's a fairly ingenious way a media company is diversifying their revenue tbh, especially with the upcoming death of the cookie: https://www.voxmedia.com/2022/6/9/23161429/vox-media-unveils...
Vox also pays the editors of some blogs across their network, some as contractors and others as full time. Beyond the layoffs, they've cut off entire segments of that support, as well as any first-party monetization for the affected blogs: https://twitter.com/AndrewLeighNYC/status/161647777824496025...
Doing what?