Glassdoor acquires Fishbowl, the go-to gossip app for the ad industry

Glassdoor, the site that lets employees anonymously review their companies, is acquiring Fishbowl, an app that allows users to have “candid and relevant conversations about workplace topics,” as a press release about the deal demurely puts it. In reality, both platforms allow workers to share sometimes scathingly harsh, anonymous takes on their employers and colleagues—Fishbowl is particularly popular among cranky advertising industry pros—and the combination of the two companies offers a blunt bulwark against the more straightlaced and polite LinkedIn. Fishbowl will now be known as “Fishbowl by Glassdoor.” Terms of the transaction were not revealed, but Glassdoor has access to vast resources. Launched 14 years ago in San Francisco, Glassdoor was acquired in 2018 for $1.2 billion by Tokyo-based human resources conglomerate Recruit, which also owns the Indeed job-listings site. In May, Recruit reported revenue in the fourth quarter ended March 31 of $5.61 billion. Fishbowl, which is available as a free app on both iOS and Android devices, was launched, with a focus on the consulting industry, by San Francisco technologists Matt Sunbulli and Loren Appin in 2016. By 2017, Fishbowl opened itself up to advertising agency employees. Although users can choose to post anonymously, the app requires a work email address for verification at sign-up. Ad agency employees quickly turned the app into the go-to place for sharing workplace insights—and sometimes content—that their employers would obviously prefer they wouldn’t. In 2018, for instance, Ad Age reported about the posting on Fishbowl of a Havas video that the company said was intended only for internal use. “Havas calls BBDO, FCB and Leo Burnett ‘shitty’ in video, and we have the reactions,” as our headline put it—and those reactions, as seen on Fishbowl, ranged from “What is this even?” to “Actually, these guys are right on the fucking money.” In July 2019, Fishbowl announced that it was letting thousands of waitlisted marketing employees from companies including Nike, PepsiCo, Google, Facebook and Apple onto the app. “What our approach has been is to gain really deep adoption for different professional verticals and then roll out from there,” co-founder Appin told Ad Age at the time. Glassdoor says that it sees 55 million user visits per month, and that it hosts over 95 million “reviews and insights” about more than 1.7 million companies, while Fishbowl has more than 1 million verified industry professionals who have posted “18 million conversations, comments and messages in thousands of bowls”—including the Coronavirus Work Life, Women in Advertising and Black in Tech bowls. Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong issued a curiously straightlaced, polite statement about the deal—“With this acquisition, we’re giving job seekers and employees an unmatched real-time look into the employee experience across companies and industries ...” (and so on)—while Glassdoor Product Director Ehren Reilly took to Twitter to say that the point of snatching up Fishbowl was “to power a more conversational version of workplace transparency.” But a promotional video (below) for Fishbowl by Glassdoor released this morning makes clear that the combined companies are in the disgruntlement-venting industry. In the video (which features a cameo appearance by Cindy Gallop), titled “Real talk with professionals in your industry,” we hear the thoughts of employees silently suffering through a video conference—“So, what was the purpose of this meeting?” and “Wait, did he just take credit for my idea?”—before an announcer encourages us to use Fishbowl by Glassdoor to “get answers to the questions you would never ask out loud.”

Glassdoor acquires Fishbowl, the go-to gossip app for the ad industry

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