How much money do you make? My name is Vivian Tu, better known as your rich BFF and your favorite Wall Street girly. My podcast, Net Worth and Chill, is back and better than ever for season two. We've got finance experts and your favorite celebs answering all those taboo money questions you've been too afraid or too embarrassed. When did you first hear about ranked choice voting? Like, how did you become aware of it? Before we left New York.
I got to vote in the election for Mayor Adams. Ooh, there's a lot going on up there. Ooh. Since Election Day, we've gotten lots of questions about ranked choice voting. Why don't we have it? Would it change our politics? What even is it? That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka, a podcast about media and tech. I'm Peter Kafka. I'm the Chief Correspondent of Business Insider. That is a long intro. I'm going to work on that. I promise. Anyway, happy Thanksgiving if you're in the U.S. If you're not, I wish you well anyway. And thanks to everyone who's been listening and writing, sending me texts and whatnot. Maybe you just asked me for an internship. Sorry.
A bunch of you liked last week's conversation with Chris Balfe. He's the guy helping the likes of Tucker Carlson make money online. I'm very glad to hear that. That is the kind of conversation that is one of the things I want to do on this show. So if you've got other people you'd like to hear me talk to, please hit me up. And since I often say this at the end of the show, if you like the show to send me a note or a text or to ask for an internship, that's great.
Just please tell someone else about it. That is how we're going to grow this thing and get it to more people. Okay, today's show is another good conversation about the media business and how to hopefully build something sustainable. It's a chat with Jason Kebler, who used to run tech coverage for Vice. Now he and three other former Vice co-workers have built their own sites called 404 Media. They're making good journalism and good money.
No VCs required, no benevolent billionaire either. How'd they do it? And can other people do what they've done? I'm glad you asked because that is the meat of our conversation. So let's get right into it. Here's me and Jason Kevler. I'm here with Jason Kevlar.
He used to be editor-in-chief of Motherboard at what used to be called Vice or Vice Media. Now he's one of the co-founders of 404 Media, which I want to call a co-op, but it's not a co-op. It's an employee-owned publication focusing on tech news. Welcome, James. Hey, thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming on. I've been tracking you for a while. I really like the stuff you did at Motherboard. I like the stuff you're doing at 404. And I like the story at 404. And one of the things we're interested in in this podcast is how do you put a media organization together? How do you keep one afloat? business models under the sun and you are one of the several people we've had on who've done that we're gonna build our own thing
Defector was on there. We've had a lot of journalists who are also doing sort of solo sub stacks. You guys have been doing this since August 2023. So you're about 16 months into it. Yeah, that's right. That's the thing is how do you put one of these things together? It's gotten so much easier. This is something that I've been interested in for a long time. Like when I was in college, I took a journalism business class and I remember I wrote a big paper about the business model of Gox.
media by the way I wish they had more journalism business classes in journalism school it seems very valuable yeah I don't think it was that useful actually but it was I mean it was something I was always very interested in but I mean if you wanted to Like you could have a sub stack and sub stacks been around for a while, but I feel like the.
ability to have it be anything more than just a newsletter like to actually just have a website and have these other arms is something that has really just become a lot easier really only in like the last 18 months maybe
So we're going to get into the nitty gritty of it, but just big pictures. August 2023, the New York Times, which is a good place to launch a publication, especially like the kind you're doing, says that you and three co-workers each kicked in a grand total of $1,000 each to get this.
thing up and running that you determine how much you're paying yourselves once you figured out how much revenue you're bringing in. I'm assuming there's revenue since you're still here 16 months later. How's it going? Big picture. It's going great. I mean, it's going better than I think we had any.
reasonable ability to guess like one of the things that like I've watched a lot of websites launch and I feel like there is often a really big like announcement and then there's this downtime where they're it's like hey a new website is coming and there's a long period of time where they hire up and they get their vc funding and they go and write their launch stories and then the launch stories are often very good
but then it's like what comes on day two what comes on day three what comes on day four and it feels like they really put the business they try to figure out the business first and i think what we wanted to do was to figure out the journalism first and hope that the business would follow and so it was very important to us to like have revenue from day one like we turned on subscriptions to start but it's like when we started this we had no idea
how many people would subscribe and there was also just like this idea like I don't know like run a regression analysis and like these different scenarios and we talked to people and they're like okay like here's your best case scenario, your mid case scenario, your worst case scenario. And I was like, well, how do you know what those scenarios are? And they're like, oh, you just have to guess. I was like, so why would we even do that? So we launched. Now you're bankers. Yeah, it was like.
What if we just launch and however many people sign up, sign up, and then we can take it from there? I do want to talk about the journals, but let's keep going on the dollars and cents. So can you tell us how many subscribers you have?
So we have 7,120 paid subscribers right now. That's what, $10 a month? It's $10 a month, $100 a year. And then we have like a super fan tier for people who are... super well off um and it's that's a thousand dollars a year so i mean we have like 40 of those okay which is great um and then we have 77 000 free
um sort of people on our newsletter and so our model is if you pay us any amount of money you don't see any ads at all so like no ads on our website no ads in our newsletter no ads on our podcast But if you're on that free list, then there's like banner ads, there's podcast ads, and there's newsletter ads. So the overwhelming majority of our business is focused on subscription. But I think the ads has been an important.
part of it so 7 000 subs 10 bucks a month i'm a journalist not a business person so i take out the calculator i get to 840 000 a year for a run rate I don't have the actual number in front of us. But you're in that ballpark. Yeah, and then it's also just like, you know, we have expenses, of course. a really big one for us is like litigation insurance because we were involved in a few lawsuits at vice and it was like if we're going to do this we want to be adversarial and do
you know, real reporting and probably will upset some people. So we have like, you know, a lawyer and we have litigation insurance and we have hosting fees. Jason, you got, you got to one of my questions. I was going to ask you about the cost of insuring a business like yours.
Because I've had to take out insurers for this podcast, which surprised me. It's a decent amount of money. And you guys are doing much more aggressive work than I am. So I'm assuming whoever is funding you, whoever is insuring you is charging more than I'm paying. I don't know what you're paying. But the point is, you've got meaningful costs plus a lawyer on retainer. So overall, give me a ballpark for your overhead, non-salary costs.
You know what? I wish I had that in front of me. I think it's like we're spending like $10,000 a month ballpark on just making sure the website is up. that's off the top of my head i mean some some months it's more some some months it's less it's like we're paying ghost fees which are not that much it's like less than substack for ghosts we have that's this that's the platform you're using to that's the platform we're using which is like
it's an open source non-profit which is kind of cool but it's it's our newsletter sending infrastructure but then it's also our website we also have this service called outpost which is a plugin for ghost that like helps us when you sign up it's like the onboarding flow and stuff like this so i mean this is like nitty gritty i guess but it's also without these services i don't think we could
Right. This is what distinguishes you from somebody with a sub stack or what we used to call a blog post. But in very rough terms, it seems like even after factoring lawyers and web hosting and ghost fees, et cetera.
You guys are making a real business here. You can all pay at least the four of yourselves a grown up journalism salary. We are. And that's why I said I hadn't like no. ability to it's going better than i could have ever imagined basically because yes we are able to pay ourselves like real money and we're also at a point where i think we'll be able to bring
new employees on it's like very recently we hired someone part-time to run our social media and it's like when we launched it was the four of us doing everything and now it's like we're able to take a look at like what are we spending a lot of time on and where can we sort of make our lives a little bit easier by bringing people on so that includes things like podcast production and stuff like that like we were doing all that ourselves
Very bad. Lots of people complaining about the audio quality and the levels and things like that. And we got to a point where it was like, oh, we can pay an audio engineer to do this for us. And you said it's better than you could have imagined. What did you think sort of the minimum you'd need to keep...
to make this an ongoing, like, were you imagining a world where you guys got off to a good start, but you weren't making close to $900,000 a year? And so, you know, you needed to have side gigs to keep this going. Was that something you were thinking through in advance? Yeah, so when we decided to do this, we launched in August and we told ourselves that we would do it until...
January. Like we said, we'll give it four months no matter how it goes. You get zero dollars. Keep going. Zero dollars. And it's like we were in the, you know, had the good fortune that I was saving money from Vice. We were all gainfully employed for many years. So I had saved up enough money where I was like, I can make zero dollars, pay myself nothing until January if we have to. And right after we launched.
you know i think in the first couple days we got about like 600 subscribers so to be totally honest with you i feel like we fell into this kind of like middle ground where it was like enough people signed up that there was clearly an audience but not enough signed up where it's like this is definitely going to work we can do this forever
and i think in those first few months it's like we paid ourselves like one thousand dollars like it was very very little that we were paying ourselves then and it was unclear whether it was going to survive even though the response was amazing it's like
People seemed very excited when we launched and said like, hey, this is really cool. I'm glad that this type of journalism is going to exist in the world. You know, as you mentioned, there was a New York Times article, which... was a surreal experience doing like a photo shoot with them like that sort of thing but yeah it was for us it was like we'll do this four months and you know kind of within the first few weeks it was like okay
It seems like this is going to work because we launched and there was that like initial spike of interest. But then the really cool thing was. every time we had a big scoop or a big story we got new subscribers which is probably what you would expect to happen but having not done this before it's how it's supposed to work which does which also doesn't mean it's gonna work
Exactly, exactly. And like, personally, I mean, I put my whole kind of like life into vice for 10 years. And so I think if this didn't work, I would have taken. a break like i don't know what i would have done but i think i would have like left journalism for a bit um because this was like I had thought about trying to do a sub stack on my own or try to write a book on my own or something like that. But then Joseph, Sam, and Emmanuel kind of all separately came.
to me and was like these are your co-workers these are my colleagues my co-founders and people i worked with for a long time at vice and i was their boss back at vice so they all separately talked to me and were like we're gonna quit because vice was like falling apart they're like we're we're getting out and so that's sort of like how this happened was like i was kind of
realizing that my time at Vice was coming to an end and I was going to start, you know, a sub stack or I was going to try to write a book or something. But then these people who I really respected and really...
love working with so that they also were going to like separately start their own sub stack or something like that. And it's like, well, what if we just did it together so that i'm not just bombarding people with my own emails all day every day and it's like they'll get a mix of different topics from from each of us at the moment it's egalitarian you guys are all
I'm assuming getting paid equally. Yeah, we're all paying ourselves the same. We're all 25% owners. I think that... the management of the company has been easier than i thought that it would be because i think we have very good like complementary personalities and and styles and so on and so forth it's like emmanuel is very organized and
joseph is um very we're all buttoned up and good journalists but like he will sometimes be a break when i'm like let's just do this like let's put something out and he's like no let's like do it properly etc etc and i think that if we were to grow we would probably have to figure out how to like manage new hires and what you know ownership would look like then and that sort of thing but i think with four people it's not so many people that we can't like
What happens when you guys have a throwdown and then the vote is two versus two? So there's no votes. We sort of told each other from the outset that anyone can veto anything. So if any one person is like, I hate this idea.
then we just don't do it. I don't think I can work with more than four people. Well, I think that's the thing. It does work with four people. I think with five, with six, with seven, it's probably you have to get into a more traditional... like who is the boss sort of situation but um
So far, it's working very well. And you mentioned the times and the launch and the scoops drive subscription. So that's part of the answer that I was the question I was going to ask you, which is you launch in 2023. Twitter's already been sort of ripped up by Elon Musk. Facebook doesn't want to be in the news business, so you're not going to grow through Instagram, et cetera, or threads. What we used to call social networks are just kind of atomizing.
So that's difficult. So how did you think about sort of how you would get your stuff in front of people? Or is it simply literally write a good story, hope people share it with each other on email or something? It's a little bit of all of that. I think that our guiding principle for an article is would this be something that people want to share with other people in a group chat?
It's like a like a holy shit, like you got to see this type of thing. And that is sort of our guiding not not always. But, you know, I feel like I've succeeded as a journalist if I do a story and people want to tell their friends about it at a bar like. face to face and so a lot honestly a lot of our growth has been word of mouth um like i regularly get emails from people saying oh my friend told me about this website and now i'm on it
And that's really hard to measure. But at the same time, like very anecdotally, the more we grow, the faster we grow, which is pretty awesome. And I guess also makes sense. But it's like the... Month over month subscriber growth over the first few months was, you know, a few people a day.
As more people subscribe to us, that network effect of people telling their friends about us gets a lot larger. All of that said, it's like we are on every social platform. We're putting our stuff out everywhere. We've also been kind of like railing against the fracturing of the internet, especially as driven by AI and AI spam. And I think that...
It's sort of a time-tested thing, but complaining about the platforms by reporting on them and showing the fracturing of the internet helps a little bit. When people subscribe, when they pay you money...
How much of it do you think is, I like this work, I value the work, I'm paying for it just like I pay for any other service, but it's free so they don't have to pay. And how much of it is, I identify with either the worldview of the website and or the fact that... these are people from vice and now they're doing it by themselves and they're they're they're indies and i i'm supporting indies in part because they're indies yeah
That's a great question. I think that when we started, people knew our work from Vice. But as we've grown and as we've done our own, I mean, we were doing our own reporting at Motherboard. But as we're doing reporting for 404. So many subscribers come to us and say, we had no idea who you are or that you existed at all. They're just responding to the work.
We're responding to the work and that's been really great to see. I do think that there is a type of person who is probably subscribing to a lot of different substacks, who's subscribing to Aftermath and Defector and Remap and these other, Hellgate, other independent.
publications and they're doing it because they want to see a different model succeed. That said, I do think that people are coming because they want to read our stories and we do paywall them sometimes. And it's like, that is working. We'll be right back with Jason Kebler, but first, a word from a sponsor. Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist of all time. And over the course of 40 years, we managed to be hung up on her and her music.
But as her artistry evolves, we can understand the true Madonna by looking deeper and deeper at what she has always held constant, her holy trinity of gender, culture, and spirituality. I'm producer Rihanna Cruz, and this week on Switched on Pop, we're going to be exploring the... queen of pop and getting into the groove as we listen to Madonna and try to understand pop music's most interesting diva. So open your heart and check out Switched on Pop wherever you get your podcasts.
Rachel Cohen had decided that volunteering her time wasn't really worth her time. I'm 32 years old, and I'd say really since I was in late high school, junior, senior year. But then she changed her mind. And then... That changed her life. Hi, it's Rachel with We Are Family. I have groceries and produce. On Today Explained, you will need something good for 2025, and we have an idea for you. All the news, even some good news, in your feeds every weekday.
Support for the show comes from New York Magazine's The Strategist. The Strategist helps people who want to shop the internet smartly. Its editors are reporters, testers, and obsessives. You can think of them as your shopaholic friends who care equally about function, value, innovation, and good taste. And their new feature, the gift scout takes the best of their reporting and recommendations and uses it to surface gifts for the most hard to shop for.
people on your list all you have to do is type in a description of that person like your parent who swears they don't want anything or your brother-in-law who's a tech junkie or your niece with a sweet tooth And the Gift Scout will scan through all of the products they've written about and come up with some relevant suggestions.
The more specific you make your requests, the better, even down to the age range. Every single product you'll see is something they've written about. So you can be confident that your gift has a strategist seal of approval. Visit thestrategist.com slash gift scout to try it out. And we're back.
I've been doing this whole interview backwards because we're starting. I'm talking about the technical stuff and not talking about what it is you guys actually make. So let's flip it around. How would you describe the journalism you guys do? I said it's a tech site, but it's a very specific kind of tech journalism.
Yeah, so there's two ways I describe it. One is ground up reporting. Like I talk about it like local reporting from the internet. And what that means is we dive into communities and write about... the biggest most important things in specific communities and try to like raise that up and what i mean by that is like the dvd rental kiosk company redbox went out of business
And there's this community on Reddit of people who are driving around from Walgreens to Walgreens, taking these things home and hacking into them and using them to dispense their own DVDs in their house. And one thing that they're doing is they're sharing information on this discord about how to convince Walgreens to give you a Redbox machine, how to hack into it, like how to sort of like reverse engineer it, so on and so forth. When I say like local reporting, it's like...
I'm in that community. I found that Discord. I'm talking to the people there. It's like, this sounds super niche and it is very niche, but it also tells you something about how people use technology and how big companies operate and so on and so forth. So there's that. And then there's also technology for humans by humans. I mean, I think that AI is changing everything, which is maybe the most bland.
description of all time but it's like how how is ai impacting workers how uh like how are people using it how is it changing how people interact with the internet and We're trying to tell stories about how technology impacts humans and the user versus the businesses of these companies, more or less. That's all... good and smart and sounds right. I would add to that from the outside. It seems like you guys have...
I don't know if a hostile view of technology, but definitely skeptical of tech, particularly when employed by big companies, corporations. You guys seem to have a pretty specific anti-corporate bet. I don't mean that pejoratively, just seems like where you're coming from.
And then also that you assume your readers are very interested in tech, maybe are in tech, care a lot about niche stuff. And if they've never heard of some of this stuff, because a lot of the stuff you write is pretty niche, I trust you to take you through them. Anyway, so like your lead story here as a headline, Pokemon Go data quote, adding amplitude to war is obviously an issue. Niantic exec says.
I know what Pokemon Go is. I know what Niantic is. I've played Pokemon Go. I cover tech for a living. I've got a guess at what you're writing about, but it's not immediately clear to me what it is or why I click on it. Not to focus on that story because there's a whole bunch of these. They're not packaged the way that traditionally a tech website, especially when I'm going for a big audience.
would would put together is that i'm assuming that's intentional on your part yeah it's mostly intentional the pokemon go one is interesting because we had like uh It wasn't even a scoop, but it was like an analysis that went pretty viral last week. And this is a follow up to that. And that's a good example because we do a lot of iterative reporting. We do a lot of stories that. are hyper specific and are honestly in our heads not intended for everyone but
If you're in that industry, you might see it and know what we're talking about. And in every article, we have a tip line for how to get in contact with us. And we get so many people reaching out to us from companies wanting to leak information or tell us something sort of based on following a story from like beginning to here's an update here's an update here's an update and then over time
we will be building out a narrative of how to tell that story. And then hopefully we'll do a big story where it's like, okay, if you don't know what Niantic is or like what this Pokemon Go war thing is, like we will do a big story. Being like, here's why you need to know about this.
normal person who doesn't normally pay attention to this thing. Do you think there's a through line connecting like the early phone freaks who were figuring out how to make a free phone call and a pay phone, and some of them went on to build Apple?
Right. That's the Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs sort of origin myth. And some of them wanted nothing to do with with big companies and went off and maybe they worked Electronic Frontier Foundation or they just were just doing home hacking on their own and they never wanted.
to make it a business but it seems like there's a to me looking at what you're doing it seems like it's for people who are immersed in tech to begin with whether or not they're doing it for a living but they their head is thinking about this stuff all the time like you're speaking their language yeah i hope
So, and I hope we're doing it in a way that feels authentic to them because we try not to parachute into these different communities, but at the same time, it's like a lot of our readers know more about. these things than we do. We write a lot about the open source community and open source governance and beefs within this tool that I've never heard of until I saw that there was a beef about it.
how that ladders up into some product that Facebook has made, for example. And that's like a hypothetical situation, but basically like our working theory is that If you write about the people who are making technology and who are using it, whether that's like an Amazon warehouse, you know, worker or delivery person or a software engineer, like a...
working on an open source project that gets acquired by Facebook, you can get a lot of scoops that way. And this is not to talk, I think it's just a different way of reporting on tech than a lot of other publications do where...
they do really good stuff but they're talking to executives very often a lot of their sources are high level people and i'm often jealous of their stories because i don't know like mark zuckerberg isn't going to talk to me i've tried to talk to him many many times over the years and they want nothing to do with me and that that's i get it but at the same time we're able to get big scoops about big tech because
lower level people or even like users are like, here's something that's going on and I have access to it and here you go. By the way, this is just useful advice for... I know sometimes people who are getting into journalism listen to that podcast. That is just a really good way of doing reporting full stop. Not enough people do it. If you are talking to the users and the people at the bottom of the org chart, you're going to get great stories.
no matter what you're covering. Do you ever feel like you should either write some stories that are for a less savvy audience, less immersed, or do you worry that maybe if you... continue to sort of keep this sort of high degree of sophistication about your stories that you're going to limit your audience? I think that we do try to reach a bigger audience. I think that...
Recently, we've kind of like got a bit of a narrow focus on certain things, but we want the masses to read our articles or at least some of them. And I mean, interestingly, like... my wife's aunt responds to a lot of articles that I do and is like, wow, this is really interesting. And she wasn't interested in this stuff before she started following us because she knows me personally. And over time, it's been interesting to see how sophisticated she's got on some of these topics.
which is just to say, we don't ever want to like dumb things down or speak down to our audience. But at the same time, I think we need to do a better job about this sort of like entry point. Like where are you? where are you entering the story and making it easier for people to to come to these kind of like heavy and off heavy heady and sometimes like very technical topics
Like I'm reading in your next headline here, Tether has become a massive money laundering tool for Mexican drug traffickers, feds say. So parts of that I get, and I know what Tether is, meaning that I've heard of Tether, but that's about it.
And I might click on it because it's salacious or it sounds salacious. But I'm assuming there's a big chunk of people who have literally never heard of Tether. Or maybe for your audience, it's a fairly small amount of people who've never heard of the cryptocurrency called Tether. Yeah, I think you're also getting us on Thanksgiving week, which means we're saving some of our bigger stories for not...
Not this week. Yeah. Or I'm just there's another version of it that I've seen because I do read a lot of your stuff comes to my inbox. I should pay you. Sorry. There was one you had recently where. I understand the impulse behind this kind of writing, which is you found a cool story based on FOIA documents. This one was about an alarm raised throughout Texas about like an escaped convict. I think I have the...
the details correctly. And basically, you went and found FOIA. Through FOIA, with the Freedom of Information Act, you found a bunch of very angry Texas residents saying, why the hell was this broadcast all over the state? It's not relevant to me. Totally interesting. But I was waiting for the...
and this tells me what or this is a bit and i was waiting for the like why i needed to know about this just sort of weird thing happening and the people were unhappy with it yeah um so i guess i'm kind of playing editor with you which is unfair because you volunteered to be on my podcast so my apologies but it's all good um no i i think the point is is taken though it's like we are we are four people and so but we're also trying to create a habit i guess it's like
We really like to publish and I think totally sort of unknown to the reader and there's no way that a reader would know. I'm talking through your edits live on your podcast, but it's like some of these stories we are doing.
hoping that someone will see us see it and send us other ideas and it's that's hard to message to an audience because we do stories that are like everything you need to know about crazy thing everyone is talking about that hopefully a big audience will see but it's hard to differentiate that on our website from here's a cryptocurrency article that we hope
a hacker will see and will dump us a bunch of documents about Tether. There's definitely, I mean, again, speaking to the up and coming journalists, I mean, sometimes you see this stuff. It's not a beet sweetener, but there is definitely a point.
which is a whole other discussion. But there's a point to you publish one story, it will generate more stories down the line. And not every story has to be a banger that breaks traffic records. And sometimes it is fine to write for a fairly narrow audience because you'll generate more. interesting stuff out of that down the line. Now that I'm done being I was going to say subtweeting your copy. It's wrong.
Editing your copy for you, you could take a victory lap. What's your biggest, best breakthrough story, thing you're most proud of? The thing I personally am most proud of that I've worked on is I found the people who are spamming. Facebook with Bizarre AI
Shrimp Jesus was sort of this large meme for a while where it was just like really bizarre images kept going viral on Facebook. Explain what Shrimp Jesus is for people who have not seen it or read about it. Shrimp Jesus is sort of like a stereotype. stereotypical image of Jesus, but his arms are made of shrimp and then like coming out of those arms are more shrimp.
And this was like an image that was posted on Facebook that got millions and millions of views and likes and shares. As it should. Yeah, as it should. I mean, shrimp cheese is a great, great image. But there's been like this very bizarre. bizarre sort of like AI spam that has been going repeatedly viral on Facebook. So it's like images of like, quote unquote, women who are like 115 years old celebrating their 115th birthday, stuff like that.
This was like a meme on, mostly not on Facebook, like on Twitter and elsewhere, where people were like, what is going on? Facebook is cooked.
and i was able to figure out what the scam is more or less and what it turns out is that there's like an entire industry of hustle bros in india who have learned that they can get small payments from facebook for going viral um and so there's all these guides that are like in hindi in filipino and you know it's in vietnamese and these guides and all these prompts that are like ai generate prompts that are being shared so on and so forth and
I spent like months just kind of like trying to find these people because I thought that that was what was happening. I was like, this is so weird. Something we could tell that the pages were being operated largely out of India and Vietnam because of Facebook's like, you know.
transparency stuff. And I finally found all the guides and I talked to some of those people and sort of did like a big explainer about it. And I thought that that turned out very well. It is a great story. It's also, I mean...
completely obvious and predictable this would happen, right? Anyone who's, you don't have to be that sophisticated about social media and tech to know that when you had these tools, they would accelerate what was already happening, which is people in various countries figure out. ways to game the system or in the part of the surface, big surface area to attack. Right. 2015 and 2016, it was people writing fake Hillary Clinton stories, not because.
they wanted donald trump to win but because they could mine a couple pennies out of facebook doing it and then do it at scale and make real money Right. Yeah. I mean, it was basically the exact it's the 2024 version of the fake news farm from exactly as you said.
Do you think Meta and Facebook and the YouTubes of the world, I will always ask them about that and they give me a non-answer. Then they say something like, well, if people are liking it and sharing it, that's the thing that's most important. And it doesn't actually matter if it's made up, which kind of...
It doesn't matter what tools they use to assemble the thing. If people are willingly sharing it, then that's a value and that's what we care about, which sounds semi-reasonable. What are they getting wrong? Yeah, I mean, I think that their spam problem, the people who are doing this are so sophisticated that it is not necessarily what Facebook users want.
Maybe to a degree, real people are interacting with this, but I found software out of Vietnam, for example, that allowed you to import thousands of Facebook accounts that had been hacked or stolen from other people. So not only are they posting... the images but then they're commenting and liking on them sort of in an automated fashion and so they're getting a huge boost in the algorithm to start with and so
How much people actually want to see this stuff, I think, is up for debate. But you're totally right that Facebook's main and Meta's main sort of response to this is, well, if people like it, what's the problem? I think it's a problem, but at the same time, I find it just to be very fascinating story about emerging economies and how people are making money on the Internet. And to some extent, like Meta has armies of people.
posting copy either copy pasting ai generating straight up stealing content from chinese social media and reposting it on facebook like these spammers like evolve their strategies like every day and it's been interesting to see how that has happened we'll be right back with jason kebler but first a word from a sponsor and we're back
i want to ask you about something you wrote that isn't an investigation it's just an essay you wrote recently uh about basically you think the blue skies moment is here this is a real thing which you're not the first person to mention that a lot of a lot of people who listen to this podcast are have become blue sky fans
recently what was interesting to me is that the thing you were giving up on or not really giving up on but moving there moving to blue sky farm wasn't twitter wasn't threads it's mastodon now mastodon to me seems like the most 404 media platform there is, but it's also why I don't use it. I can barely figure out how to get onto Mastodon, and it seems like it's way too difficult for a normal person.
So two questions. One, why is Blue Sky interesting to you now? And two, has sort of the experience of being on Mastodon, finding it to have a pretty limited user base, which you talk about, like it's very for technical people, has that informed your thinking about...
The project you're working on now, that is about 404 Media? Yeah. So, I mean, we're on everything. We're like, we need to meet our readers wherever they are. We're trying to be like native on every social media platform. I mean, ultimately.
i just want to like be able to reach people directly i would like to just send an email and be done with it or have people come to our website and be done with it but that's not how the internet works i've also joked about like i will go like staple my blog post you know uh phone polls if i have to just to get people to read my stuff um but my two sorry a year ago
I wrote an article that said Mastodon is the good one. And I put all my eggs in the Mastodon basket. And this is me like taking the eggs out of that basket and putting them in blue sky while still like I'm still going to post on Mastodon. But I think that what Blue Sky has that Mastodon does not at this moment is there's just a bunch of people there. And I think that the Fediverse, what Mastodon is trying to build...
where you own your own audience and you can sort of port it from server to server to server. That is the premise of what people call the Fediverse. Right. Just backing it up for folks. Right. I think that there's still promise there, but I think that as a Twitter replacement where you can just go build an audience on Mastodon, there's...
I'm really into sports. I haven't seen like any sports talk on Mastodon at all. I'm really into like music. I don't see a lot of music discussion. And I think it's like, it's a great place if you want to talk to other social, like.
uh software engineers open source people privacy experts hackers that sort of thing and so gonna continue to be there but i really do think that like at this moment there's enough juice on blue sky if you will that it's like okay like we can focus most of our attention here their politics and they're sort of like um the way that it's built is decentralized enough that i don't feel like i'm just
gonna get rug pulled in three months so i don't know that's that's kind of my thinking and i get that there's a portion of people on social media again some of them listen to this podcast who are really into the idea of decentralized media who know what the fediverse means who can understand why they think that's a good idea And then there's everybody else. And in your essay, you make this reference to, you know, I'm going to read quote here. Threads is perfectly fine.
For people who don't want to even do the tiniest bit of work to take a microscopic bit of power away from a company that has dominated global social media to disastrous outcomes for 20 years. And who cannot be bothered to do the bare minimum amount of introspection or reading to understand.
why a viable platform not owned by Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk might be something worth building toward. Now, I posit that there's a bunch of people on social networks who don't want to be on a specific one because Mark Zuckerberg owns it and Elon Musk owns it. And if Jeff Bezos owned one, they would be again. that too. But...
But why put the onus on having to do work thinking about how the platform works on a user? Isn't the whole point to get a user there and get them to participate? And if they want to dive deeper and understand how it's working.
they can do that, and if not, they can move on? Yeah, I mean, I'll admit that this, one, it's painful to hear my words read back to me. Sorry. So thank you for that. But two, I have like... train my threads algorithm in some way where i only see people complaining about blue sky and or about threads and so i'll admit this is a bit of a straw man where i'm just like there are people who say I don't want to be on X because of Elon Musk. And...
I don't necessarily like threads that much, but like, I don't feel like learning a new thing. And it's like, that's anyone can feel that way. Like if you don't want to use another social media network, like I don't want to know how my car got made. I want to drive the car.
Yeah, but I guess it's just like, if you care about Elon Musk and what he is doing to society, I think you should also care about what Meta has done to society. And so I guess I don't see being... like a Threads fanboy as being like a much of a political statement.
Which I don't know if what I just said makes any sense but it's like if you're ditching X to go on threads because you think threads is better and you don't want to move to blue sky because It's like you feel lazy about it. Like I don't think that that's a good
So this is directly related to the last piece I wanted to ask you about. I really recommend everyone read it. It's really nice writing. I thought it was great. It's called The Billionaire is the Threat, Not the Solution. It's a personal story. You're writing about your dad. who worked in literally the printing presses of the Washington Post for decades, got you into journalism, and you wrote this right after the Jeff Bezos non-endorsement scandal story broke.
And I think the headline's pretty clear, right? Like... Your argument is you're going to continue to have these problems as long as you're looking for billionaires to own your media. And it's funny that we're talking today because I read a story on reliable sources talking about the idea that Elon Musk might buy MSNBC. which I think is really just a troll. But Brian Stelter, who's great, has been on the show a bunch, made a reference to, well, I heard from a benevolent billionaire.
who might want to buy MSNBC. And I thought the idea of describing really anyone as benevolent, let alone a billionaire is a choice. But it also, and I also don't think that's practical either, but it just seems like we can't be reliant on billionaires. I agree with you. I don't think we can rely on billionaires to fund our media. Long preamble. That said, this model that you've built works for you and your three co-workers and co-owners.
it can't work for everything what what kind of journalism does what does your model support what does it not support yeah i think that's a really good question and i've thought a lot about it because like I have watched many... I've watched Vice die. I've watched BuzzFeed die. I've watched like many, many like Mike.com, like all this entire generation of online media companies either die or lay off hundreds and hundreds of people. VC funded.
With that model, we're going to grow really fast, hire a lot of people. And then, you know, underpants gnome or someone buys us or we go public, which is a pretty standard model for lots of. tech, right? It was a novelty for media that they were doing this in 2010 and 2015. Right. So this sort of like subscription, you know, independent model works for us. We've, we've created four journalism jobs and it's like other independent media companies have start have.
created a few dozen more but it's still like a tiny tiny drop in the bucket um i think that a lot of people are making money on substack these days but like i don't know what that you know raw numbers are it's got to be a small number And so it's clear that we need to build back the media in some way that is sustainable. And I think that for us, it's like, you know...
It's not my job to rebuild the entire media, but I'm very interested in that question. And so we wanted to basically strip the media company down to like the smallest possible thing that it could be.
um because at vice they had really expensive offices tons of middle managers all these marketing people so on and so forth it's a very expensive company to run and so we're like how do you make a business that's very simple and then can you scale it from there and i think that it works one because people want to get behind the mission but i'm curious like how
how many of these there can be and my theory is that there can be a lot of them i do i really do think that i think subscription fatigue is possibly a thing but it's like 7,000 people have subscribed to us. There are millions and millions and millions of people. And lots of our subscribers are not even in the United States. And so I do think that the market can support a lot more of these. It's just a matter of how do we make it.
easy for people to do it and then how do you solve the like you can get sued out of existence at any moment Yeah, I wasn't asking. I know better than to ask you to solve the media crisis and to explain, you know, it can't be government funding. It can't be a subscription. But just to focus it a little bit more narrowly, this this.
It's not, you're not doing a substation. I'm not going to call what you're doing niche. You built a real business and God bless you at the scale you're doing. What are, what are kinds of stories and projects you can't do? Cause you don't have. apparatus, staff, whatever you would need to do X, Y, or Z. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's the, uh, like spend three, six, 12 months on an investigative story and then publish it. And
maybe it wins an award and tons of people read it or maybe no one reads it. Like that is a model that we're not even trying to do. And I think that that's an important model and maybe one better suited for like... nonprofits and the new york times and washington post um i think that there are a lot of newsletters where it's just kind of like here's a roundup of various things and i think that that works but i think something that
I think the reason that it's working for us is we're breaking stories. Like we are telling stories that you can't find elsewhere. And then hopefully the newsletter writers will include us. That's a bit more of an adversarial type of journalism. We do investigative journalism, I think. And it's also like a bit of a riskier one, too, because we're pissing people off regularly.
i know you didn't ask me to solve the the media and i don't think that i can but i do think that there's tons of space for things like us in across a bunch of different industries and i hope that more people we'll take the you know forgive me but like glorified substack root but focus it on reporting and adversarial reporting because i think people want that and i think people are willing to pay for that i just think that it's
I don't know. I don't know why more people haven't done it. And I think that we're starting to see more and more people start these independent publications. And we talked to a lot of them, and I think that they're great. But I think the market can support. a hundred more yeah i i think a lot about sort of where doesn't this work it does this work for local news and i think those are all fine questions for me to ponder maybe on a podcast but
First and foremost, we should just be applauding you guys for building a thing and hoping that more people like you build more things. So thanks for building, Jason. Thank you so much for having me. This is fun. Thanks for coming on the show. This is great. Thanks again to Jason, who is smart and also very patient with me. Thanks also to Jelani Carter, also smart, also patient. He edits and produces the show. Thanks to our sponsors. They're geniuses.
They bring you this show for free. Thanks to Bon Appetit, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, for bringing their simple is best stuffing to me. And thanks to TikTok for sharing that recipe with me last year. It was life changing. And obviously, thanks to all of you who listen. We literally cannot make a podcast without you. It is literally the whole point. You're not supposed to use literally, except when you literally mean it. And I literally do. Happy Thanksgiving.