The Latest in a Long Series of Body Blows

January 19, 2022 2:33 PM

The Onion, Inc. Union reports on a mass resignation at "The A. V. Club" (SL Twitter)
posted by Ipsifendus (63 comments total)

I blame Peter Thiel.
posted by chasing at 2:38 PM on January 19, 2022 [21 favorites]

also Hulk Hogan
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:42 PM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

Damn. Hopefully they start up a Defector-type pop culture site soon.

Until then, perhaps a naive question: where do the cool kids get their RSS-ified pop culture news and regular TV episode rundowns? Quality of the latter has definitely decreased recently on AVC but breaking up is hard to do.
posted by supercres at 2:45 PM on January 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

supercres, I always have an eye on primetimer.com.

And, I'm sorry to hear this about the AV Club staffers...AV Club was always such a mainstay for me. I'm really glad they had a union. So much experience and skill fucking G/O Media are flushing away!
posted by theatro at 3:00 PM on January 19, 2022 [14 favorites]

Brain Sturgeon, aside from an astounding failure to read the room, your up-to-the-minute usage of "woke" misses the target by a couple years. Gawker is literally owned by a different company (bought for pennies on the dime, it was), and Univision unloaded Gizmodo Media to a bunch of VC assholes with radical new ideas that were old a decade ago. One of their first official acts was to just shut down the entire politics vertical of the site (during election season), and then alienate the staff of their incredibly popular sports and culture site, issuing ultimatums, firing editors, and finally, inspiring a mass resignation. Since then, they've consistently bled talent, losing nearly all of the writers and editors that made it anything close to your idea of "woke."

Basically, catch up, buddy, you're painfully behind.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:04 PM on January 19, 2022 [129 favorites]

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.
posted by octothorpe at 3:05 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

On the one hand I am endlessly amused by the complete inability of G/O media to do anything, at all, ever, without shooting themselves directly in the nutsack. They are high among the most incompetent bags of ass I have ever seen. To save a literal handful of dollars on salaries, they will tank their most valuable property--one that is their most valuable property chiefly because they already fucked over their previous one by being dipshits.

On the other hand, I do feel like people are eager and ready to throw the new writers under the bus. Already I see people on that thread getting pre-emptively venomous about the "scabs" at AV Club, just like at Deadspin. And I hate that also.

I think we'd all like to be so comfortably situated and so purely ethical that we would turn down a shot -- and if you're a writer? it might not only be your first shot, but also possibly your LAST-- at a living wage and insurance and a union Just On Principle but lord knows I'm sure as shit not.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 3:07 PM on January 19, 2022 [27 favorites]

Sad watching these storied sites driven into the ground. They even ruined the back archive by taking images out of old posts. Like a comedic Library of Alexandria being destroyed
posted by dantheclamman at 3:17 PM on January 19, 2022 [23 favorites]

This just sucks. I don't have anything smarter to say about it, but I really have loved AV Club, and now all my favorite writers are gone.
posted by BlahLaLa at 3:21 PM on January 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

That's exactly my point, they're perfectly willing to cynically purvey the idpol through their sites, while doing worse than nothing for social justice as a company.
posted by Brain Sturgeon at 3:32 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

If someone can get a telegram to publisher emeritus T. Herman Zwibel, he may set aside his silly fascination with President Harding’s teapot dome scandal to repurchase The Onion and its AV Club with some change in his trouser pocket.
posted by dr_dank at 3:34 PM on January 19, 2022 [48 favorites]

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

Because there are old articles that generate clicks because they were thoughtful and interesting, while costing basically nothing to maintain, especially if you’re not paying anyone to make new ones. Just passively collect ad money while doing literally nothing.

Also they’re idiots.
posted by jmauro at 3:37 PM on January 19, 2022 [17 favorites]

They even ruined the back archive by taking images out of old posts. Like a comedic Library of Alexandria being destroyed

I absolutely can't find a source for this (I probably read it on Twitter) but IIRC The Onion had a massive IT fuckup a few years ago which resulted in all their old images being erased, with no backups.
posted by neckro23 at 3:43 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

G/O Media — the parent company that runs 11 websites, including the former Gawker Media properties Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Deadspin, The A.V. Club, The Onion, and Jezebel — has removed images from articles published before 2019, sources have confirmed to Gawker. The removal took place without internal announcement — as one G/O employee put it: “We are still kind of flying blind.”
posted by octothorpe at 3:45 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

I dumped A/V club (and the rest of G/O) after the Deadspin walkout. Honestly, I like this place and fanfare for discussion of entertainment properties. Also I added IndieWire, The Wrap, Paste, and Film Threat to my blogs list.
posted by anhedonic at 3:53 PM on January 19, 2022 [11 favorites]

The A/V Club hasn't really been the same since half the place left to found the ill-fated The Dissolve.
posted by octothorpe at 4:10 PM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

Isn't that vampire capitalism in a nutshell? It doesn't really make sense to me -- I suppose there's something about shifting funds around in maybe a money laundering kind of way but this sort of thing happens again and again, and has been happening for at least a couple of decades. Money managers for the obscenely wealthy buy some intellectual property or platform, absolutely run it into the ground in the most crass and inhumane ways possible, and then whatever they bought withers and dies -- but by then they've somehow sucked enough wealth or "value" out of it to use as leverage for doing it all over again. Again, I don't know where that so-called value comes from but it must be coming from somewhere or else it wouldn't keep happening
posted by treepour at 4:12 PM on January 19, 2022 [32 favorites]

I don’t really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

As a random guess, couldn’t it just be a bunch of crybaby rich assholes intent on ruining popular outlets that lean liberal or insult capitalism or whatever?
posted by Glinn at 4:16 PM on January 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

According to wikipédia, "G/O was formed in April 2019 when Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm, purchased the websites from Univision for $20.6 million."

I know nothing about GHP, but other private equity firms have been buying up "assets" like newspapers for short-term gain while gutting them leaving little left in their wake.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:21 PM on January 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Kayleigh Donaldson for Pajiba:

Venture capitalists continue to strip-mine our industry for parts, all while broken algorithms and outright lies help to sink the ship faster in the name of business. It was bad enough when the infamous ‘pivot to video’ all but killed large swaths of the internet because Facebook falsified numbers on the supposed money-making effectiveness of video over words. We know that people have never mattered to this lot, but the endless process of degradation never becomes any easier to bear. Those crooks went back to business-as-usual while the writers they screwed over tried to scrape together a decent life from six or seven side-hustles.

posted by rewil at 4:23 PM on January 19, 2022 [21 favorites]

Buried deep in the giant wheelbarrow of reasons that Spanfeller and the rest of his VC vultures are terrible, aside from their gutting of a vaguely profitable media empire (evidently, Gizmodo Media was doing decently, better than its then-parent company, Univision, before being sold off), their tone deaf dealings with staff, shutting down Splinter, gutting Deadspin, and discarding or otherwise losing talented staff like it was a competition is that, in the last two to three years (god, it has been that long, hasn't it?), they have done nothing new. There has been no launch of a new vertical, no major initiative or attempt to draw in readers. Back In The Day, there were regular, random stunt weeks, like Jezebel switching staff with Deadspin, which led to some jokey shit, but also some excellent writing. There was a lot of cross posting and the various sites really promoted each other. I still, out of habit, check Gizmodo, but there's just nothing there worth checking, I've realized. Io9 is a gutted shell, and it seems the only time I see a link to a G/O site anywhere else, it's a beloved writer/editor's final post where they say their goodbyes.

Spanfeller and the rest, they have nothing new to offer. They took over a media group that focused very much on new, that was, in many ways ahead of trends, and have done nothing because they have nothing new to offer.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:25 PM on January 19, 2022 [19 favorites]

The A/V Club hasn't really been the same since half the place left to found the ill-fated The Dissolve.

Yeah, once in a looooong while I remember the AV Club still exists. My feeling is always like when I go to Wikipedia and look up a band that used to share the bill with Hendrix and Cream and Jefferson Airplane and see “Years active: 1966 - present.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:27 PM on January 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

Tbh Peter Thiel & Hulk Hogan would make a pretty great Master Blaster cosplay.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 4:42 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Back In The Day, there were regular, random stunt weeks, like Jezebel switching staff with Deadspin, which led to some jokey shit, but also some excellent writing. There was a lot of cross posting and the various sites really promoted each other.

As far as I can tell (I was a regular Jezebel and Deadspin reader Back In the Day and have followed all the drama), the various verticals have all been pretty well pitted against each other by the vultures. For a while Jezebel was actively working against new Deadspin, scooping them on stories and sniping at the writers on Twitter. That seems to have settled down a bit but I wouldn't be surprised if the kibosh on crossover stuff is coming from the staff rather than above.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 4:45 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm still looking for a replacement for io9.
posted by technodelic at 4:54 PM on January 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

I'm really angry about this. I like reading AV Club. I rely on its What's On Tonight (or whatever it's called) section to inform me about new shows I may not have heard about. The action the company took to bust the union and make the writers' lives miserable is disgusting. Sadly, I'll be looking for a replacement, although I doubt I'll get quite the same mix that the site offered.
posted by sardonyx at 5:02 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

they have done nothing new

The funds that bought it don’t do anything new. The goal is to strip it of everything worth anything then leave the rotting husk to the creditors who helped them buy it, while walking away with all the cash they can carry.
posted by jmauro at 5:02 PM on January 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

Odd, I used to read 5-6 Gawker sites regularly. Now the only one I occasionally visit is Jalopnik, and that's just to see what Jason Torchinsky has written.

Seriously y'all should just follow Jason. Check out this article on GM Trucks.

And I don't even like cars.

I don't know if Jason should view that as a compliment or not.
posted by midmarch snowman at 5:31 PM on January 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

Torchinky is great. I loved his Jason Drives This videos.
posted by octothorpe at 5:37 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

Given that the first thing they did was shut down the politics section, that probably was the point.
posted by notoriety public at 5:41 PM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

I miss all the Jalopnik guys, but I can rarely get through an article without the site shitting the bed and then throwing it's now shitty toys out of the pram.
posted by wotsac at 5:42 PM on January 19, 2022

That's exactly my point, they're perfectly willing to cynically purvey the idpol through their sites, while doing worse than nothing for social justice as a company.

'idpol'? They do TV show reviews. What on earth are you even talking about?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:49 PM on January 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

The best answer, ironically, was written by a former writer for G/O Media: The Adults In The Room

The question I hear the most about the owners of this company is “Why did they buy a bunch of publications they seem to hate?” I and my colleagues have asked Spanfeller only slightly more diplomatic variants of that question on several occasions. The answer he has given is that the publications didn’t cost him much and that he liked their high traffic numbers. The unstated, fuller version seems to be that he believed he could simply turn up the traffic (and thus turn a profit), as if adjusting a faucet, not by investing in quality journalism but by tricking people into clicking on more pages. While pageviews are no longer seen as a key performance indicator at most digital publications—time spent on the site is increasingly thought to be a more valuable metric—Spanfeller has focused on pageviews above all else. In his first meeting with editorial leaders, he said he expected us to double pageviews. Several weeks later, without acknowledging a change, he mentioned that the expectation is in fact to quadruple them. Four months in, the vision for getting there seems less clear than ever.

This company’s websites already have larger readerships than most of their competitors, and much more loyal ones. Yet Vox and Vice and BuzzFeed are, on paper anyway, worth billions between them; this company recently sold for a tiny fraction of that. Those companies’ path to those valuations (which are obviously inflated, but that’s not the same as not “real”) was not through scammy advertising on scammy SEO plays, but through investing in sales reps and creative revenue ideas and good stories that people wanted to read. Great Hill Partners is correct that an opportunity for huge profit exists here, too, but they want a quick cash-out rather than the growth that comes from a well-run business. This makes no sense on its own terms—who gets into media to turn a fast buck?—but more than that betrays a curious lack of greed. Who would squeeze publications to save thousands of dollars here and there when hundreds of millions are on the table? [...]

The numbers apparently do not matter to my ostensibly numbers-obsessed bosses, for reasons I can’t quite understand. When I have told them that the data show that non-sports content brings more traffic and more revenue opportunities, I have been ignored. When I have told them that the data show that readers prefer publications with a distinctive point of view, that Deadspin succeeds precisely because it doesn’t try to be all things to all people, I have been told that being all things to all people is in fact exactly the way to grow pageviews. The reason my colleagues are not going to suddenly start sticking to sports is not about editorial purity, it’s about the opportunity to grow the audience and make more money for Great Hill Partners. But the adults in the room know that we’re wrong, despite all evidence, because they just know. [...]

The editors and writers and video producers and artists and sales reps and product managers and so on—the people who made this a successful company while also making it the best place I can imagine working—are its actual leaders, and the reason that, despite it all, these websites will continue writing things the rest of us want to read. But none of those people are the richest person here, which means they will keep succeeding despite—not because of—the man who is. He doesn’t know what they know; he doesn’t have to know. No one like him does.

The whole article is worth a read.

(archive link, fuck giving Zombie Deadspin clicks)
posted by rorgy at 6:13 PM on January 19, 2022 [50 favorites]

My oh my the early 10s were some salad days for the fun internet
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 6:21 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Whether you’re in this industry or just a fan of its work, it’s become increasingly crushing to see the same cycle of patterns play out. A site with a unique identity and loyal readership is bought out by some Silicon Valley conglomerate that starts raving in buzz-speak about how they love the ‘content.’ They don’t want to change anything, no siree, they’re fans too, and they just want the site to be its best self, Oprah-style. Then writers start leaving. The distinct atmosphere of the site changes. A lot more generic listicle posts and clickbaity headlines appear. There are rumblings about management ignoring union organizers or outright targeting them. Job postings go viral, revealing the staggering workloads expected of an employee for well below the minimum wage. Soon, that site you loved just looks and feels like a dozen other sites, covering the exact same headlines, reviewing less niche works, making the same lists of painfully familiar things You Won’t Believe. And you know it’s not the writers’ faults, but something just isn’t the same anymore."

Remember when re-locating to California was a status symbol of...
posted by clavdivs at 6:23 PM on January 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

...of...
posted by clavdivs at 6:23 PM on January 19, 2022

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

The more I think about it, the more this phenomenon reminds me of blocks of big city real estate that are bought up by speculators who raise the commercial rents so high that no business can afford to thrive. They become barren wastelands of high end condos that no one really lives in and commercial districts that have no stores, just empty and boarded up storefronts
posted by treepour at 6:28 PM on January 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

The Adults in the Room (and How Things Work, written on the occasion of Gawker being shut down) are solid examples of What We've Lost. I don't feel bad about capitalizing that at all. For that weird, brief shining moment (basically, from the Tommy Craggs, post Daulerio era) Gawker and its subsites were regularly serving up some of the best writing available. For the most part, that's gone. There is very little that is publicly available that has writing on so many different topics that is so consistently good anymore. There are little kingdoms and principalities behind their own paywalls (and Defector is fantastic, and worth the money, but that means I can't afford Discourse), and we haven't really been able to replace that.

And, as far as Splinter being shut down, I don't, in general, go in for conspiracy talk, but goddamn, its easy to believe a conversation in a back room somewhere that ended with a rolodex being opened, Spanfeller being called, told to buy Gizmodo for a fraction of his wealth, and by the way, close Splinter. Everything about the acquisition made no sense. Gizmodo wasn't remotely in his wheelhouse, he clearly has no interest in the site, and there wasn't even that much wealth (as talked about in The Adults in the Room) worth looting. All the pieces for a solid conspiracy to believe in are there, but I keep reminding myself not to think about it, because, as we've seen thousands of examples in the last ten years, that way lies madness.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:40 PM on January 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

If they formed a new company, I'm d imagine they d do ok as a co-op
posted by eustatic at 7:31 PM on January 19, 2022

The AV Club was much, much better way before Gawker/Univision/G/O/Whofuckingcares bought them. When some of the wiseacres at The Onion decided to get serious-er about their pop culture. Lots of us have been hanging on for a while purely out of nostalgia for the Elder Days. That's becoming harder and harder, though, and no longer really worth the effort.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:06 PM on January 19, 2022 [16 favorites]

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

"So, if you can leave your laptops where they are, and hand in your passes, security will be coming around now.

"I've been through everything you've shown me.

"Food and weed, those are the only two verticals driving revenue, so we're folding them in and, uh, yeah, you're all free to leave."
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:02 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Moving to LA from Chicago without a COLA is rough, but they kind of lost me with the idea that what made it really offensive was the work location in Culver City. That’s a perfectly reasonable place to work and its quite close to lots of perfectly reasonable places to live. Is the point show recappers and press release rewrites/commentators have a human right to live only in Silver Lake or South Pasadena?
posted by MattD at 9:23 PM on January 19, 2022

Boo G/O. Another former AV CLUB fan, and Deadspin fan, and Splinter fan. I do still read Jalopnik.
posted by CostcoCultist at 9:56 PM on January 19, 2022

Moving to LA from Chicago without a COLA is rough, but they kind of lost me with the idea that what made it really offensive was the work location in Culver City. That’s a perfectly reasonable place to work and its quite close to lots of perfectly reasonable places to live. Is the point show recappers and press release rewrites/commentators have a human right to live only in Silver Lake or South Pasadena?

The goal was to get all of the Chicago staff to quit, since they were the longest serving, highest paid people on the site and they also didn’t want to relocate to LA for effectively less money. I guess it was a success for G/O in that respect.
posted by jmauro at 11:02 PM on January 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

smart, ad-supported pop culture journalism has been dying since the big city american alt-weeklies started drying up post-great recession. it just took websites that served a similar function another decade or so to catch up.

sadly, the future of that sort of journalism is either paywall niche interest stuff (for print) or youtube. it really fucking sucks, but even big dailies barely survived (and some didn't) the corporate vampirism phenomenon. for you journalism types, remember the decade of "how to monetize journalism" in the aughts? that's a forerunner of all this.

i think the reason is that these types of sites, for lack of a better term, punched above their weight. AV club was so well known for such a small operation. same could be said for the village voice or the la weekly. they were tiny operations that felt like mid-size ones in terms of their cultural clout. but they never had the $$ power or popular base raw numbers, so once the vampires see them, they don't think "let's keep this going," they think "hmm.. how can we squeeze more juice out of this cultural fruit?" and then they leave it for dead because it didn't have its own economic legs to begin with. depressing.
posted by wibari at 11:35 PM on January 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

I imagine that with no COLA, they couldn't afford to live in Silver Lake either.
posted by atrazine at 1:04 AM on January 20, 2022

Yah, this is sad. I've been following the AVClub for a long time. Even through multiple past shake ups, I think the quality still stayed pretty high, but I've noticed recently that I'm not paying much attention anymore, and I suspect "it's them, not me". I feel sorry for the Chicago staffers being pushed out, and I wish the best of luck to the new generation. For now though I'm unsubscribing.
posted by Alex404 at 1:04 AM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

RE: office location. Downtown Culver City would be great (walkable, transit accessible, gentrified but not totally dead). But this office isn't technically in Culver at all. It's in the Howard Hughes Center: a Cursed Mall in a sliver of the Nothing that is sandwiched between the freeway, and those weird empty areas around the airport. The whole vibe of the HHC is, charitably, off. It's an "outdoor mall" mixed with offices, yet there's little human activity. This is partly because most people are just there for a movie, or maybe a sit-down meal; after all, half the storefronts are empty, and the businesses that do exist feel entirely random. Then there's the architectural flow of the space itself. It's not only unintuitive, it feels somehow hostile to the human spirit. In short, this is not a good place to hang out, window shop, people watch, get snacks, take a work break, or do much of anything. The natural question, upon arrival, is just why. Why am I here, why was this built, why is it under construction yet again?

Meanwhile, the surrounding "neighborhood" amounts to a sunblasted thoroughfare lined with bleak offices and parking structures. There's nothing to see, do, or walk to. There's really no transit; you'll have to drive in. Where do you live? Nearby, you're probably looking at the very unaffordable Westside, or else you're gentrifying South L.A. (itself increasingly unaffordable). If you live farther out, that will likely entail driving on the 405 or the 10. The former sucks. The latter constitutes one of the worst daily traffic jams in the country.

This would be a terrible place to work if you're moving here on Chicago pay, are used to trains/walking, and dislike spaces that are alien to human beings. Which I assume is the point.
posted by desert outpost at 1:57 AM on January 20, 2022 [37 favorites]

I have no way of knowing but there's a good chance that some of the Chicago people don't currently own cars.
posted by octothorpe at 3:51 AM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Howard Hughes Center is a weird place. The shoe store only carries empty tissue boxes and the public toilets are closets with milk jugs in them.
posted by dr_dank at 5:24 AM on January 20, 2022 [9 favorites]

I miss Topless Robot and Cracked
posted by Jacen at 6:36 AM on January 20, 2022

I don't really understand the point of G/O Media buying all those properties and then gutting them.

Given that the first thing they did was shut down the politics section, that probably was the point.

Also, private equity culture in general is psychopathic. Destroying properties/local industries is a matter of course, a performative cliche. I imagine a zombie performing a mating ritual, ululating about how much he's earning for his shareholders.
posted by ishmael at 6:59 AM on January 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Destroying properties/local industries is a matter of course, a performative cliche.

I think you're giving them too much credit. These are people who have control of large piles of money which grows, as large piles of money are wont to do. They have thus come to the mistaken conclusion that they are in some way responsible for this growth and so have convinced themselves that they're smart.

To be sure, there are smart people involved. Large piles of money attract them and they can use it to chew off pieces of the things it buys.

So the fund dumps a bunch of piranhas into the pool and laments that the new asset wasn't strong enough to survive in the real world despite all the help these Smart People gave it. But hey, at least we made a bunch of money off it.
posted by suetanvil at 8:14 AM on January 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Destroying properties/local industries is a matter of course, a performative cliche.

The quote that comes first to me is don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.
The only hope in this is that these idiots get to lose their money repeatedly over and over. But what a freakin' heavy cost on the rest of us.
posted by storybored at 8:16 AM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Private equity mostly exists to do massively evil things around debt and 'valuation' where they break up portions of the company that are obviously profitable and sell those and then load up the remaining parts with debt and through some 'clever' financial structuring leave someone else holding the bag.

It's all transparently evil and they don't care that all they are destroying employee's lives to make a quick buck.

I really don't understand why the institutions that are often left holding the bag keep going along with the scam.
posted by cirhosis at 8:33 AM on January 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

I really don't understand why the institutions that are often left holding the bag keep going along with the scam.

To quote (supposedly) J. Paul Getty; "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
posted by soundguy99 at 9:20 AM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I really don't understand why the institutions that are often left holding the bag keep going along with the scam.

What bag? Who loses anything besides the invisible employees? If it was a negative for any institution it would affect the rich guy's cost of credit in doing future deals, lowering their ROI or ability to do larger takeovers. No, these people wrote the rules, render unto Caesar.
posted by rhizome at 11:22 AM on January 20, 2022

Private equity trades only work if the target’s EBITDA increases enough to flip the company at a profit or support enough debt to finance massive dividends. So you have to shake things up in an effort to increase EBITDA. It works a lot more than it doesn’t or private equity wouldn’t be in its fifth decade as a highly attractive alternative investment strategy. If you have a pension or work for an institution with an endowment, private equity is paying your way in no small part.

People outside finance only hear about the failed trades, or the trades like this one that may or may not be failing but have shake-up ways and means that are conspicuously unpopular. But that doesn’t make them the rule not the exception.
posted by MattD at 11:25 AM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

time spent on the site is increasingly thought to be a more valuable metric

As someone who reads and takes in text waaaay too speedily, I guess I am giving sites less data to work with.

I am fine with this.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:15 PM on January 20, 2022

The quote that comes first to me is don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.

I wouldn't say they have malice per se, more like a complete lack of empathy for their fellow human beings. And that is seen as a mark of a good businessman. And so people in these firms constantly come up with new and creative ways to show that lack of empathy off.
posted by ishmael at 12:49 PM on January 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm still looking for a replacement for io9.

Does the resulting fall out mean that there's never, ever, ever going to be another Valleywag?
posted by Selena777 at 8:37 AM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

The quote that comes first to me is don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.

It comes down to what you think of as malice, yeah? Because, sure, on some level a lot of these people think they can flip the Optimizer switches and make a shitload of money and a better business, but the reason they think that is because they have utter contempt for everyone with lived experience of that business, refuse to engage with people they can afford to fire, and aren't remotely concerned with the consequences—which to them are "lose some money" and to the workers is "lose an entire livelihood."

It's hard to explain just how facile most business theories are, in part because the theory is just a sausage wrapper whose real meat is "act viciously and with impunity, squeeze out anything remotely close to looking like competition, and bully the market into choosing you." To name the guy who started AV Club's descent into hell, that's literally Peter Thiel's theory: that nothing matters but monopolies, and that real vision means eliminating every possible player in a market but your own, because then you make a billion dollars and not a million (at which point you can afford to try repeating this trick, oh, a thousand more times).

"Optimize" means "pivot aggressively to a strategy so one-dimensional it just might become a new universally-relevant product." All room for nuance and subtlety is lost: that builds you loyal readers, but the Disruption lot don't want loyalty. Loyalty is niche. All they care for is inevitability—the way that Facebook got more and more popular the worse of an app it got, because its function stopped being "facilitate certain modes of connection" and started being "force entire communities through a hosepipe." They want to find the rare product that's capable of getting a billion users, and they'll destroy any and every business if it means pushing a little closer to that goal.

It's not just finance bros. Witness Yahoo, and the way it spent decades trying to push its way out of deserved irrelevance by buying, and then destroying, several of the best community platforms on the Internet. It's not that they didn't know what they were doing. It's that each of those acquisitions was a means to an end, and that end involved destroying what was already there.

It's contempt. And it's not as dumb as it looks, either: it works, it just doesn't work for the people who think, post-acquisition, that this product still exists for their sake.
posted by rorgy at 12:03 PM on January 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

octothorpe: "G/O Media — the parent company that runs 11 websites"

...I honestly read that as "ruins" 11 websites

This sucks. Especially coupled with the exodus from The Root. As a white guy I felt like reading The Root was an important component of Trying Not to be Part of the Problem. Plus, there was some seriously good reading there. I hadn't realized how many people across the board had jumped ship from the entire G/O media pile; I've had the A/V Club bookmarked for a long time but it is looking like I need to move on to less shitty pastures.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:34 PM on January 27, 2022