What is Topix?

Topix is a technology company focusing on entertainment such as celebrities, pop culture, the offbeat, health, current events, and more.
Every month, more than 25 million highly engaged users spend an average of 7 minutes per session browsing Topix's growing collection of high quality content.

Topix is a company retooled from the ground up to succeed in today's media landscape.

Welcome to Topix!

Topix LLC is not affiliated in any manner with Tokyo Stock Exchange, Inc.

Topix in 90 seconds:

Topix in the news:

Meet The Topix team

Topix Management Team

Chris Tolles, CEO

Chris is CEO and co-founder of Topix, which he has led since 2007. He joined the founding team in 2004, when Topix launched as an aggregated news site, later becoming the biggest community news site in the U.S. Chris then steered the company to become a high-growth, editorially driven entertainment site leveraging the largest audience platforms on the Web.

Before Topix, Chris co-founded Spoke Software, the first enterprise-focused social networking company. Prior to Spoke, he co-founded the Open Directory Project, the most extensive human-edited directory of the Internet, and sold it to Netscape/AOL. His sales and marketing career began at Sun Microsystems, where Chris rose to become head of marketing for Network Security products. He has a degree in Computer Science and Economics from the University of California at San Diego, where he was awarded the Michael Addison Award for his thesis on the structures of the electronic-information industry. Chris is a native Northern Californian, a long-term San Francisco resident, and an Eagle Scout.

Steve Rubinstein, COO

At Topix, Steve oversees day-to-day business, revenue operations, and strategic management. He brings leadership and engineering experience from many different industries and software types, including gaming console, shrink-wrapped and Internet software. He also volunteers with the local school district and is a board member with a local sports club.

Before Topix, Steve was a development director at Electronic Arts, delivering Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 simultaneously on multiple gaming platforms. At Netscape/AOL he worked on the Netscape website, Netscape browser, and as technical director for AOL Shopping. At Apple, he developed a cross-platform printing engine for FileMaker Pro. It was around this time that he invested in a small restaurant in Yountville called the French Laundry.

Steve began his career at a small startup that later sold the marketing rights for its product to IBM. He has a degree in electrical engineering from Rutgers University.

Mike Sawka, VP Engineering and CTO

As the head of engineering, product management, and operations, Mike has overseen Topix's transition from a traditional news and forum site to an analytics-driven audience platform. He spearheaded Topix's Big-Data initiative to integrate website metric data with ad buying and revenue data to create centralized business intelligence reports. He also led the migration of all of Topix's legacy infrastructure of owned hardware to the cloud.

As architect at Topix, he is responsible for all of the backend technology, using a NoSQL model to achieve minimal downtime. He has experience working at every level of the technology stack, from HTML/CSS/JS to Apache/Perl to low-level systems and operations tasks. In addition, he has years of experience with all aspects of publisher ad serving, including implementing and evaluating ad networks.

Prior to Topix, Mike was architect at Spoke Software, the first VC-funded social network, and a key early hire. Mike was a a developer at Siebel before joining Spoke, and previously interned at Microsoft and Intuit. He holds a BS with honors and distinction in computer science from Stanford University where he received the Terman Engineering Award.

Sara Davis, VP Audience Acquisition

Sara leads the team that connects Topix.com with an audience of millions. After a stint as a Topix community manager, she became head of social media and marketing, where she forged our winning strategy for traffic acquisition and audience development.

Prior to landing at Topix, she served as a marketing consultant for companies, including Pixoria, Menuette, MouseLabs, Hubbard One, and Black Dog Design. She is an authority on social media and organic audience growth.

Sara is also an award-winning actress and singer, and holds a Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University. Her creative side fuels everything she does, from her dramatic work to her artfully honed social media posts and content promotion.

Daniel Swartz, Director of Product

Daniel is director of product at Topix with a deep background in UX and visual design. He spearheaded A/B testing in both user experience and visual design, leading to better monetization and user retention.

Prior to Topix, Daniel was director of product and design at Blekko, holding a leading role in the development and evolution of its various search products until its acquisition by IBM five years later. Before that he was lead UX and visual designer at MerchantCircle, an online marketing and lead-generation tool for millions of small businesses. While living and working in Germany, he consulted for SapientNitro, working on a variety of projects for banks, airlines and other high-profile companies throughout Europe. Daniel holds BA and BM degrees in history and music from UC Santa Barbara.

Jonathan Ward, Director of Community

Since joining Topix in 2010, Jonathan has driven customer support and community development across all verticals and social media platforms. In his two decades in Silicon Valley, Jonathan has worked for such notable startups as Winamp.com and Nullsoft, where he provided editorial and content management. At Grouper he directed the product and content creation teams before the company was acquired by Sony and rebranded Crackle.

He took a brief detour into the food service industry, co-founding one of San Francisco's earliest gourmet food-truck companies, Kung Fu Tacos, before finding his way to Topix. He attributes his current level of success to having done some seriously questionable things in past lives.

Meet the Topix Editorial Team

Come work with us

Featured Positions

Interested in joining the Topix team? Please send your resume and cover letter to [email protected] with the position name as the subject line.

Business Development Director for Programmatic Advertising

Topix is looking for Business Development Director for Programmatic Advertising with deep understanding of programmatic advertising, analytics & industry people.

Our company is based in the SF Bay Area; role preferably based in NYC, but open to consider SF, LA or other geo for the right candidate.

What do we require from you?

  • Business development role at a publisher with 1B+ monthly ad impressions; growing, profitable for the past 2 years.
  • Site Monetization is 100% programmatic advertising through header/bidder integrated networks.
  • Goal for this role is to evangelize and profitably scale up relationships between Topix & ad buyers.
  • The ideal candidate will have successfully increased business from companies such as Xaxis, Publicis, GroupM, TradeDesk as a publisher or other content/services provider.
  • Understanding who the right buyers are for our audiences, a rolodex of contacts in the industry and understanding the value proposition for buyers will be keys to success.
  • Deep understanding of programmatic advertising, analytics & industry people, trends and issues also required.

Perks

  • Space to grow professionally in a small company with awesome co-workers.
  • Excellent benefits.
  • Competitive salary package, plus possibility to earn bonuses based on company performance.

Digital Media Reporting Analyst

Topix is looking for an analytical, intellectually curious and data-driven individual to join our Ad and Revenue Operations team as a Digital Media Reporting Analyst. Primarily focusing on revenue reporting for online advertising, this role will be a key player in supporting the growth of the business.

The ideal candidate will be comfortable in a fluid start-up environment and will bring an energetic, proactive and creative approach to their work. This job will be based in our headquarters in Palo Alto.

What will you be doing?

  • Gain experience and learn about all the available ad products and capabilities on Topix properties: display, mobile, video, programmatic, etc.
  • Trafficking and reporting within our DFP ad server
  • Reviewing and reporting daily revenue data for accuracy and discrepancy
  • Conduct in-depth, data-driven reviews of performance metrics including revenue, margin and discrepancies for specific partners
  • Provide delivery reports for monthly invoicing to the Finance team for all revenue sources
  • Prepare and analyze buyer and advertiser reports for opportunities and potential issues
  • Run, review and analyze ad hoc reports on site layout, ad experiments and marketing

What do we require from you?

  • Experience in digital advertising and/or analytics preferred
  • Curiosity, strong analytical and problem-solving skills and a passion for learning new things
  • Must be extremely proficient with Excel- at ease with Pivot Tables and Advanced Functions
  • Familiarity with Looker, Staq, Tableau, Google Analytics a plus
  • Enjoy working in both individual and team settings
  • Proactive self-starter with exceptional attention to detail, organizational and time management skills, who is resourceful and an excellent team player
  • Bachelor's degree in Business, Statistics, Economics, Math or equivalent experience required
  • Excellent interpersonal, written and verbal communication skills

Perks

  • Space to grow professionally in a small company with awesome co-workers
  • Access to a fabulously-stocked kitchen and snack room
  • Excellent benefits
  • Competitive salary package, plus possibility to earn bonuses based on company performance

Front-End Engineer

Topix is looking for an experienced front-end engineer to join our team in Palo Alto! You are a creative force that helps build and drive our success. You're not just a small cog in a big wheel here. You have a say in what gets built and how to build it.

What we're looking for:

  • Solid background coding pure JavaScript and experience with related frameworks
  • Good grasp of HTML, CSS, and related web technologies
  • Experience working on high-traffic publicly available web sites (not intranet or tools programming)
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills
  • Self-motivated, able to contribute to product requirements - and then design, code, debug and test independently
  • Familiarity with software best practices and architectural design patterns
  • Awareness of cross-browser compatibility issues and client-side performance considerations is a plus
  • Experience with React, PHP, Python, PERL and working across the complete web stack a plus
  • Excited to learn new technologies

    Perks

  • A carefully stocked kitchen.
  • Flexible hours.
  • Working with talented individuals without the ego that you might find elsewhere.
  • No bureaucracy to get in your way.
  • A sane development environment that is centered around making the right design and implementation tradeoffs.
  • We don't spend time worrying about meaningless and arbitrary schedules.

Data Scientist

Topix is seeking a data-driven individual with a passion for applying statistics and analysis to uncover valuable insights from large scale datasets. You'll work closely with engineering, editorial and marketing stakeholders to understand analytic needs, perform and share complex analyses, and help shape many aspects of the website. We're looking for a thought leader who is interested in formulating and tackling deep analytical questions in the online advertising space, and is also looking to quickly grow his/her skill-set.

You will be able to harness and examine a tremendous amount of data relating to user behavior, content performance, ad revenue and marketing spend gathered while our revenues and site traffic have skyrocketed. We are looking to aggressively expand our in house data science capabilities to help us sustain and further increase our growth trajectory.

Job Requirements:

  • Perform hypothesis-driven analysis and communicate results to senior management
  • Conduct deep and continuous exploration of high-volume heterogenous data
  • Build and automate models for time series forecasting, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, regression analysis, classifiers, etc.
  • Using big data to independently generate insights and develop clear visualizations to convey complex ideas in straightforward ways
  • Interface with internal and external stakeholders to gather clear analytic and experimental design requirements

Required experience:

  • Beyond entry-level experience using applied data science on business problems
  • A minimum of a Bachelor's degree (advanced degree preferred) in statistics, engineering, computer science, or any other quantitative field
  • Deep understanding of advertising analytics and developing A/B testing experiments
  • Top-notch analysis skills and the ability to explore complex data sets and extract insights
  • Expert-level skills with SQL required
  • A passion for Python or R and the Jupyter environment
  • Experience with pandas, numpy, sk-learn

What we offer:

  • Full benefits that start on day one
  • A commitment to ensuring you have the tools you need to succeed
  • A culture that emanates education with access to resources to grow your skill-set
  • Creative office space that is modern and spacious
  • A unique opportunity to help build a data science team from the ground up
  • Friendly co-workers (and a maybe a cute dog or two)

Account Manager - Programmatic Direct Sales

We're looking for a strong sales performer who can drive private marketplace sales to augment our burgeoning programmatic offerings for our premium, high engagement content on Topix. Reporting to our COO and working with Ad Ops, marketing and yield management, you'll be spearheading development and growth of an important new business for Topix.

Responsibilities:

  • Prosecuting new private marketplace deals, and managing ongoing revenue through those channels.
  • Build, maintain and effectively manage relationships with Agencies, Trading Desks, DSPs, networks, and all demand sources. Uncover their needs, and ensure we meet their KPI's to help ensure long term satisfaction and ongoing and increasing spend.
  • Identify and help create the PMP packages that will be most effective to be marketed to buyers
  • Work closely with partners to build the business and proactively identify opportunities to grow and extend our existing business.
  • Partner with engineering and AdOps to successfully deploy new Private Placements and maximize renewals and throughput.
  • Understand profitability and margins of deployments to ensure additive incremental margin with all Private Placements.

Qualifications:

  • Strong understanding of digital advertising, and specific players and platforms in the programmatic landscape
  • Established connections & digital agency relationships. You should be able to name names at multiple agencies and walk through how you sold them on PMP's
  • Demonstrable success in selling private marketplace deals with multiple brands, ideally for a publisher (ideally, currently working at an agency or publisher)
  • Strong quantitative & analytical skills. Spreadsheets are a lifestyle choice for you
  • Experience with DFP and an understanding of how trafficking and ad delivery works
  • Flexibility to travel to the ad industry hot spots
  • You're sharp. Be the kind of person who notices opportunities or threats proactively and can grab the company by the hoodie to do the right thing
  • Be Fun to work with

Working at Topix offers you:

  • Highly competitive, market driven salary and bonus structure
  • A fun and focused group of co-workers that are all aligned to help you achieve the goals
  • Exceptional Medical and Dental insurance plans along with a generous vacation policy and 401k
  • The web traffic, viewability and brand safety of our content and web sites necessary to succeed

Marketing Manager, Social/Paid Content

We're looking for a creative, self-starting marketing professional to help drive traffic to our fast-growing new verticals focused on pop culture (offbeat.topix.com and stars.topix.com).

Responsibilities:

  • Create ad copy and social media posts for some of the funniest, most addictive content on the web
  • Manage a very large volume of Facebook advertising campaigns
  • Develop and maintain advertising campaigns with partners like Taboola, Outbrain, etc
  • Oversee our social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and Instagram

Requirements:

  • At least one years' experience managing paid Facebook advertising campaigns for content, including knowledge of targeting, testing custom audiences as well as lookalike audiences
  • A love of statistics - you love digging into data to find out what is working and why
  • Knowledge of pop culture and the social web
  • Experience writing on entertainment or humor is a plus
  • Meticulous editing and self-editing skills
  • Must be detail-oriented so that you can produce perfect work at high speed under pressure
  • Comfortable multi-tasking in a fast paced, start-up team environment
  • Excellent collaboration, problem solving and communication skills; ability to work cross-functionally
  • Sense of humor and strong work ethic

Perks of the job:

  • Work with experienced, kickass writers, editors, and engineers
  • Space to grow professionally in a small company with awesome co-workers
  • Access to a fabulously-stocked kitchen and snack room
  • Excellent benefits