If you’re looking for the high-water mark of New Media publishing—a fuzzy industry term for the digital-native platforms that started colonising the internet in the 2010s—it’s got to be November 2016. That’s when NBCUniversal doubled down on its initial $200 million investment in BuzzFeed, supercharging the website’s valuation to an eye-watering $1.7 billion.

That was the peak. Though nobody knew it at the time.

At this point, BuzzFeed was still best known for cat memes and sugar-rush listicles like ‘10 Food Photos Everyone Instagrammed in 2016’ (you’ll never guess number six!). And yet, huge corporations and investment firms—who don’t give a shit about Instagrammable food but care very much about humdrum things like stable returns and long-term profitability—were saying BuzzFeed was worth $1.7 billion. What was wrong with this picture?

Fast forward to 2024, and following several high-profile rounds of layoffs, along with the official collapse of BuzzFeed News in 2023, BuzzFeed currently has a market cap of just over $99 million. That’s million, with an ‘m’. Not exactly chump change—especially considering how much ‘Struggles-Only-90s-Kids-Will Understand’ content they’re still churning out. But not exactly the trajectory investors were banking on.

So what the hell happened?

Well, the same thing that happened to most of the vaunted New Media brands. Digital traffic shifted away from Facebook and towards the likes of YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Meta turned off the free distribution tap, forcing publishers like Vice and Pedestrian to pay more and more to reach a smaller and smaller audience. Advertisers started fleeing to the more reliable shores of Google and Facebook itself (which, unsurprisingly, was not unhappy with this whole cut-out-the-middleman turn of events). Readers got bored of shallow listicles and moved on to shallow video content instead.

BuzzFeed had built its reputation as an agile disruptor, running rings around the plodding mastodons of Old Media. And now, faced with its own digital reckoning, it was stubborn and slow to adapt. It’s a story we’ve seen play out again, and again, and again. In the last few years alone, the golden promise of New Media platforms like Vice, Business Insider, Refinery29, Pedestrian, The Messenger and Pitchfork has been very publicly smashed. One by one the mighty have fallen. Since 2020, more than 50,000 media jobs have evaporated, leaving the industry in quite a state.

The old journalistic model, where newsrooms thrived on in-depth reporting, subscription revenue and consistent ad sales, didn’t work in the 21st century. And this new model, powered by fickle algorithms, trend-driven clickbait and big oceans of investor money, clearly sucks too. So where does that leave us?

If a bunch of pissed-off, anti-capitalist journos have their way: in a very interesting place.

“It’s true in banking and everywhere else: the rainmakers, the people that bring the money, they’re the ones calling the shots,” says American journalist Maria Bustillos. “For most of those New Media sites”—your Vices, your BuzzFeeds, your Pitchforks—“that was advertisers. And when money is calling the shots, you don’t have a journalistic organisation anymore, not really. Sooner or later the money’s going to come and interfere. It always does.”

Bustillos is the co-founder of FLAMING HYDRA—all caps, hard to slay—a doyen of what we might end up calling, if things go well, the New New Media. The platform describes itself as a publication “for all kinds of people who like to read and write whatever we want, and to connect in an unmediated way, with no weirdo surveillance or profiteering—like the old internet used to be”.

The important words in that sentence are “unmediated” and “profiteering”. And this is what makes FLAMING HYDRA different to the Vices and BuzzFeeds of yore. Instead of a media company owned by investors and controlled by advertiser revenue, it’s a co-operative platform, owned by its writers and funded entirely by subscribers (also known as ‘Readers’). Profits are distributed among members, who each have a stake in the platform’s success. Growth is lovely, but it’s not oxygen.

“Here’s our thing,” says Bustillos. “We don’t have anyone to keep in fast cars and cocaine. It’s just a bunch of writers, and we just do our thing. No interference. We don’t have to pay people’s salaries either: every member contributes one piece per month, and we share equally in the revenue.”

Free media may be free, but a lot of it is free poison.

For maybe a hundred-odd years, this had been every hack’s idle daydream: a publication owned by journalists, run by journalists, without interference and with loyalty only to the quality of their work and the attention of their readership. And for a hundred-odd years, such a thing would have been logistically and financially impossible. Printing and distributing newspapers is famously not cheap.

But one of the few good things the internet has done is allow people like Bustillos to outsource or DIY many of the traditional nuts and bolts of Old Media.

Distribution? FLAMING HYDRA sends its content out via newsletter. Prices start at $3 US a month or $36 a year. Printing? Not an issue, FLAMING HYDRA is online-only, just like BuzzFeed. Advertisers? Good riddance, who needs ’em. The publication still needs editing and stuff, but these days you can more or less get a functioning online newspaper up and running from your bedroom, with overheads so lean they would have given William Randolph Hearst a heart attack.

At the moment, Bustillos edits FLAMING HYDRA as a volunteer, which doesn’t make the whole thing sound particularly lucrative. But then, that’s kind of the point: HYDRA’s whole purpose, as they point out on their website, is to bring back the innocent vibe of the early-’90s internet, when the Web felt more like a playground and less like some nightmarish corporate-sponsored meatgrinder.

“I really like that fortress idea,” Bustillos says. “There’s zero ads. No investment. Just subscribers and donations.”

FLAMING HYDRA is not the only journalist-run media co-operative. Nor is it the first, or the most profitable. In 2018, when the Denver Post was being dismantled and sold for scrap, ten journalists abandoned ship and launched their own paper, The Colorado Sun. The idea caught on, and according to Columbia Journalism Review there are now close to a dozen worker-owned publications in the US alone, including 404 Media, Aftermath and Hell Gate.

But the gold standard? That might just be the sports/culture/politics site Defector, which also goes by another name: “The last good website”.

“The whole thing came together very slowly, then very quickly,” says Defector co-founder and editor-in-chief Tom Ley. “We all left Deadspin under the impression that we’d like to start our own website, but we’d need some money to do it. So for the first six months we were looking for someone to give us cash.

“Then the pandemic hit, and everything changed, and we decided to just do it ourselves, take on the risk ourselves. And it ended up working for the best—had we gotten some rich guy to invest, it would have given us millions upfront, but then we’d be on the hook. They would have owned us. In every sense of the word.”

Defector’s story goes like this. In 2019, Ley and his fellow journalists were working for the edgy sports and culture website Deadspin. When Ley got his start at Deadspin, the publication was still independent, but it quickly came under the corporate umbrella of Gawker Media. When Gawker went belly up in 2016 thanks to a shadowy, Peter Thiel-funded lawsuit(Ed: Peter Thiel, please do not sue us), Deadspin got sold to Univision for $135 million. In 2019 it was sold again, this time to a private equity firm that rebranded the site’s parent company to G/O Media. Pucker up for the kiss of death.

“Long story short, we were bought by a bigger company who didn’t want us anymore,” Ley says. “It was a slow sort of unravelling there at the end.”

As conscientious, hard-working journalists, the editors at Deadspin started casting around for a good story. And they found one. The site’s editor, Barry Petchesky, published an article depicting G/O Media as soulless, micromanaging ghouls, quickly followed by a piece inviting readers to give feedback on Deadspin’s annoying new auto-play videos. Managers deleted the posts and ordered the team to “stick to sports” (a “clear violation”, Petchesky argued, of the company’s collective bargaining agreement). Petchesky was promptly sacked, and Deadspin’s entire 20-strong editorial team walked out in solidarity. Tom Ley was one of them.

“When Barry got fired for not following the boss’s instructions, we were all super pissed and quit the next day,” Ley says. “And we went about a year without jobs, trying to get this new thing off the ground.”

Ley and his fellow defectors (get it?) quickly realised they’d have to come up with a new model for their website, otherwise what happened at Deadspin would simply happen again. Private equity would come in, and the money would flow for a while… until it didn’t, then the whole thing would be gutted from the inside. They were tired of working for advertisers and funding the yacht budgets of hedge fund managers, so they settled on a new monetisation approach: subscribers all the way.

“That was the only solution we could come up with, because at Deadspin and the other media group sites, the ad-based economy was a huge problem,” Ley says.

“It was eating away at the company in a lot of different ways. The economics of Facebook and Google sucking up the market, putting downward pressure on publications who relied on them for revenue. Changes in editorial priorities to get more views, more clicks. Then the sales team would break the website, so every time you open a page you get six different popups and ads and little windows.”

When you stop slavishly chasing clicks and sucking up to advertisers, you start to see that people actually want to read all kinds of interesting stuff.

As a reader, does this lifecycle sound familiar? Publication starts as rebellious and independent, but quickly gains readers, attracting the attention of investors, who flood the platform with cash. The publication scales and grows quickly, perhaps too quickly, driven by cheap and easy money. But those same investors soon start demanding a return on their investment. The editorial direction pivots towards pleasing advertisers, rather than readers, smoothing out the distinctive voice that made the whole thing popular in the first place. Content is valued for its quantity rather than its quality, because algorithms, right? Eventually the readers get bored and leave, then the advertisers leave, until all that’s left is a bunch of suits in a boardroom, wondering where all the money went.

“Power always tends to be cool until it’s threatened,” Maria Bustillos says. “Then you realise it was never cool. This current crop of money bags, they’re fundamentally opposed to people speaking their minds.”

In his introductory post for Defector, Ley wrote that the platform’s purpose was “to create a financially stable and independent publication that exists for reasons beyond squeezing out profits for some people in a boardroom, or fattening itself up for an acquisition.” And four years later, he’s basically done it.

Defector proudly publishes all its financials and annual reports online, keeping things as transparent as possible. In their third year, the collective brought in $4.4 million in revenue (up from $3.8 million in year two), and used that money to pay the salary and benefits of twenty-five full-time employees, not to mention eighty-six other writers, producers, artists and designers. About 85 per cent of that revenue comes from paid subscribers. It’s living, typing proof that the model works.

Against all the odds, Ley and the Defector crew have built not just a media site, but a profitable media site. On the surface it might look like Deadspin, but under the hood it’s an entirely different, thoroughly independent beast. And they did it all without becoming beholden to anyone except readers, which is great, because it means their only financial incentive is to keep writing things that people actually want to read.

And when you stop slavishly chasing clicks and sucking up to advertisers, you start to see that people actually want to read all kinds of interesting stuff. In the last few years, Defector has published your standard sports site fare (A Guide To The Future Bench Heroes Of The 2024 WNBA Playoffs, for example.) But they’ve also published a comprehensive list of the Worst Shit In 2023 (it wasn’t a short list), and a spirited debate over whether a million monkeys at a million typewriters really could have written Macbeth. (TL;DR: it’s complicated.)

Media owners have been trying to figure out how to sustainably fund journalism for at least the last seventy years. Maybe, just maybe, sites like Defector and FLAMING HYDRA have figured it out. So I ask Ley: has he finally cracked the content code. He thinks for a moment before replying.

“I wouldn’t say we’ve cracked the code,” he says. “We’ve found one version of something that works. Whether a website’s good or not really depends on the ambitions of the people running it. If you said, ‘My idea of a media company is being relatively comfortably, employing about twenty to twenty-five people and publishing eight stories a day,’ then yeah we certainly have cracked the code for making that media company.”

Bustillos agrees. “All we’re trying to do is prove that there’s a small, organic alternative,” she says. “And all it has to be is that. All it has to do is exist. Chasing hockey-stick growth is like going over a cliff with the other lemmings. It’s not success. We have defined success incorrectly. Endless growth is bad.

“What we need to do is refocus people’s attention on the idea of Why. Why is the person writing the thing I’m reading? Why’d they do it, why are they publishing it? And if it’s free, why is it free?”

This is something that doesn’t get talked about much in the whole media-monetisation debate. As readers, we’ve been conditioned to believe that the stuff we read online should be free. Which is ludicrous, when you stop to think about it: why should journalism be free, any more than cars, or movies, or sandwiches? The simple fact is that there’s no such thing as free media. If you’re reading something for free, that’s because someone is spending a lot of money to make it free, and they’re not doing that out of the goodness of their cold, corporate heart. They’re doing it because they want something from you. They want your anger or your data, your money or your vote.

As Bustillos says, “Those who’ve watched Twitter devolve into a giant fatberg of crypto scams and hate can tell you that corporate owners really can and really will control what you see. Who pays for the writing determines the tenor of what you read, the flavour of it. Free media may be free, but a lot of it is free poison.”

Ley agrees. “If I could wave a magic wand tomorrow, there’d be huge amounts of government subsidies for quality, independent journalism,” he says. “We’d treat journalism as the public good that it can be.” For now, he says, “we’re probably moving into a new phase; an in-between phase.

“The large-scale, ad-driven model blew up in everyone’s faces, and now we’re moving back to this kind of smaller movement, closed off behind paywalls. Kind of a liminal space.”

When looking back on the New Media brands of the 2010s—not on all the ludicrous valuations and cocaine-fuelled bubble hype, but on the optimism and spirit in which they were born, when it looked, for a brief moment in time, like a new form of journalism might thrive—you can kind of hear the echoes of Hunter S Thompson’s famous ‘Wave Speech’. Despite being written long before the internet, it somehow sums up that familiar capitalist decline, from rebellious hope to corporate enshittification. And we’re paraphrasing here:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastical universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than 10 years later, you can go up on a steep hill and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.