Passersby were amazed at the unusually large amounts of synergy
April 25, 2024 6:59 PM   Subscribe

G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™

Turns out the evil shell corporation is an inside joke sponsored by Twilio founder Jeff Lawson, who set up the purchase along with reporter Ben Collins and friends for the express purpose of retaining all union employees, reviving the Onion News Network video project, and basically letting the staff do "whatever they want."

Sometimes good things do happen in the world of digital media! (But only if you donate a dollar today.)
posted by Rhaomi (47 comments total) 45 users marked this as a favorite
 
What hapened before I bothered looking below the fold:

Me before looking up Global Tetrahedron: Uh-oh...

Me after looking up Global Tetrahedron: *assumes extremely goofy pose and facial expression* UH-OH!
posted by BiggerJ at 7:09 PM on April 25 [15 favorites]


Retaining all union employees? Holy smokes, did the good guys win one?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:11 PM on April 25 [33 favorites]


Seeing Oxford commas on Global Tetrahedron's About page in between all the bits about bloodthirstiness and embezzlement warms my heart.

I love it when fans have the money to do this sort of thing.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:13 PM on April 25 [12 favorites]


I do often find the price of Oxford commas oppressive in my own life, so yes.
posted by hippybear at 7:15 PM on April 25


This feels like the best media news I've heard in years. Hard to believe it's for real.
posted by cosmic owl at 7:18 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]


Also please bring AV Club back to the Onion.

I enjoyed Clickhole, but CATH can have it.

My roomie was like "Guess who bought The Onion"... (Collins, she wouldn't know Twilio from a hole in the ground).
I was like wtf? But I guess for all the people who could buy it, I'm ok with this.
Better than Univision or GO Media.
posted by symbioid at 7:37 PM on April 25 [5 favorites]


I will only be happy with this if this means the reappearance of Jim Anchower and Smoove B. Otherwise, it's just a waste of time and they will never reclaim the throne from The Hard Times.
posted by NoMich at 8:27 PM on April 25 [15 favorites]


AV Club ending up under Paste is probably the best possible outcome for it.
posted by Candleman at 8:30 PM on April 25


oh okay I recently was reminded of the existence of Clickhole, by a particularly sweaty joke attempt that had so little faith in itself that it went on to explain its punchline twice, so it makes sense that they are now owned by Cards Against Humanity now that they have gone from sharp parody of Content Slop to just actual Content Slop

the "donate a dollar to The Onion" thing feels perfectly in-character in the way it's handled, and also it's like "hey yay The Onion now has a business model at last"
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:37 PM on April 25 [6 favorites]


I mean, I appreciate some of the philosophical approach to existing that the Cards Against Humanity people have exhibited in the universe, but I had to abandon their game after playing it for maybe six months because it is, truly, against humanity, and it was tearing apart groups I was in that were playing it with each other.

At this point I don't know anyone who is playing it? So... I guess it's a virus that burns itself out after a while.

I only ever read maybe 5 articles from Clickhole, so I guess whatever they were offering I wasn't biting at.
posted by hippybear at 8:41 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]


I think I've been very happy to see what happened to College Humor (dba Dropout)after IAC sold it to Sam Reich, along a similar vein.

One podcast I listen to frequently riffs on being called niche. Ultimately I think niche just means being small enough to avoid being ruined by investment capitol. Bully for those writers, I still follow some people Jalopnik, hope they end up in a good space as well.
posted by midmarch snowman at 8:44 PM on April 25 [2 favorites]


One podcast I listen to frequently riffs on being called niche. Ultimately I think niche just means being small enough to avoid being ruined by investment capitol.

Too Beautiful To Live is a podcast that I think ended up saved when it got scooped up into a public radio umbrella. They are entirely, truly niche, but the passion of their decades-long, continuing fan base cannot be denied. But could they continue without that deeper support??? I'm truly not sure.

I haven't listened in years, but I listened to years before I wasn't driving all the time anymore, and they saved my life and sanity many times.
posted by hippybear at 8:48 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]


You can't fool me. I know that T. Herman Zweibel is behind all of this.
posted by mr_roboto at 9:01 PM on April 25 [22 favorites]


I just kinda miss the pseudo-Olden Times when you got The Onion out of a vandalized newsbox next to the bus stop…

(which sometimes had a baggie of crack but god only knows if you can steal it, probably better just ignore it, wait maybe I could take it? no better not just let it be it’s not my thing anyway)

…and read it on the way to work because wtf was that guy doing with his scarf is nobody else seeing this???

…haha, Jim Anchower!
posted by aramaic at 9:14 PM on April 25 [19 favorites]


I looked up Global Tetrahedron (thinking it was some TimeCube-related thing) and I started to like the cut of their jib, kind of in the way you start to like some SCP's.

The I saw the bit about the wild gorilla.

Oh, hell yeah. Where do I sign up?

MAGA better look out. GTet is about to show you how a real conspiracy is done..

Or are they?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:17 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]


oh separately congrats on an extremely good post title
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:15 PM on April 25 [16 favorites]


I'll stand up for ClickHole, not to say they land every joke or that I always think what they're going for is particularly funny, but I've admired their willingness to stick by their brand of vaguely anti-comedy weirdness even after being consumed by a soulless capitalistic money-printing machine. I think they excel at creating weird little surrealist scenarios like this one. Maybe they'll be able to afford bylines now.

I'm excited about the AV Club under its new ownership too, because it was one of my favorite sites for pop-culture stuff and it was really a shell of its former self under G/O Media, especially after they laid off most writers not willing to relocate to LA. In the past week or so it's seemed... vaguely better? A bit? And I find Paste's little blurb about the acquisition encouraging.
posted by whir at 10:20 PM on April 25 [4 favorites]


Global Tetrahedron's logo actually being dodecahedral is nicely on brand (now with 200% more synergy!)
posted by flabdablet at 1:02 AM on April 26 [12 favorites]


Bakery Produces Oblong Cake to Commerate Acquisition of Online Service by Global Tetrahedron
posted by Smart Dalek at 3:40 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]


I want the stories of Herbert Kornfeld's shortie, who doubtless works for them muthafuckas in Payabo by now.
posted by humbug at 5:21 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]


I haven't paid much attention to Clickhole over the last several years, but in the mid 2010's, their quizzes were incredible and live rent free in my brain. My wife still sometimes refers to me as "a little jazz boy" because of those quizzes.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 6:00 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]


Paid my dollar ($1.40 Canadian.) I like The Onion and I like Ben Collins. I’m glad this is happening.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 6:18 AM on April 26


I appreciate Clickhole's commitment to taking complete brainfarts and just running with them, which is probably why one of the stories on the front page right now is "Finally: The Eiffel Tower Is Getting Skin".
posted by phooky at 6:19 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]


I hope the AV Club Undercover music series makes a comeback.
posted by dr_dank at 7:17 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]


I kinda wish The Onion and Clickhole would merge, if only in spirit. In its first couple of decades, the Onion had a real whimsical streak in its satire, even sentimental, which started to fade out after Clickhole was spun off.
posted by Kattullus at 7:25 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]


Likewise a little surprised that Clickhole still exists. It was a perfect sendup of Upworthy, et al, when those were the dominant force in social media, but when those dropped away, I thought Clickhole ended. Seeing something like the Boo Berry piece linked above, it feels like ClickHole is doing great shifting their satire toward something like hot Substack takes, though they're still continuing with parodies of BuzzFeed quizzes and other lost internet forms.

Very excited at the return of the Onion News Network. I never watched the IFC show, but the shorts I caught on the website or youtube were often so good, in a way that only the Onion can reliably manage. Sometimes just silly (Ninja parade!), sometimes cutting deeply to the bone. One thing I always appreciated is that the Onion News Network's parodies never wavered from making fun of the form of American television journalism, whereas others that started that way (The Daily Show and its descendants, for instance) generally strayed from that premise, with exceptions, to shift their humor more directly to what the news is about rather than the news itself. Both have a place, but as a (non-tv) journalist myself, I've always appreciated the commitment to laughing at journalism.

Some favorites, just looking through the youtube "most popular" sorting of the The Onion's videos: There's another one I remember, but can't find now, about how every single moment of a college party was reconstructed in video from multiple angles by grabbing still photos from attendees' social media.

There were always ridiculous jokes in the chyrons at the bottom of the screen. Just saw these while grabbing links for this: "Mitt Romney's mother having trouble connecting with Mitt Romney," and "Obama gains support of the lazy after vowing not to create more jobs," and "New gadget threatens to make 'bloop' a word everyone has to use now."

And while I'm reminiscing, I remember likely from a FPP here, a series of Onion articles that would, at random, either be pretty normal articles, or describe an ongoing zombie apocalypse. You could only see it if their code randomly served it to you, so you had to refresh a bunch to see it, and it was almost a novella's worth of articles on separate pages that showed a gradual descent into madness. Can't find it now in a quick search, and who knows if it even still works as web tech has changed so much...
posted by msbrauer at 8:16 AM on April 26 [14 favorites]


I am hoping that if Paste bought the AV Club, they will bring back more TV recaps. I can think of at least three shows that were a big deal recently that the current iteration of the AV Club only did full season overviews. I suspect in the olden days, they would have been recapped weekly (or however the media dropped).
posted by Kitteh at 8:33 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]


Yes ... ha ha ha ... yes!
posted by RobotHero at 8:59 AM on April 26 [16 favorites]


Coming up on the 25th anniversary of this gem. I say "big ol' bus" to myself a lot.
posted by neuron at 9:11 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]


My vote for their best video: Prague's Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport.
posted by mmascolino at 9:16 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]


I want the stories of Herbert Kornfeld's shortie, who doubtless works for them muthafuckas in Payabo by now.

My husband and I still joke about reeceevin' and Applebeez all these years later.
posted by May Kasahara at 9:41 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]


Lake Dredge Appraisal is without peer.
posted by flabdablet at 9:57 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]


Hippybear, you will be happy to know that Too Beautiful To Live is still going strong, and made the decision last year to leave APM and go independent again but they always raised more than enough money during their annual TBTL-a-thon to pay their salaries and production/distribution costs while at APM.

The listeners, AKA The Tens, are supporting it directly again, and Luke, Andrew, and Jon (their behind-the-scenes guy who came over from APM with them and handles the admin/finance stuff now) are all employees of TBTL.biz, LLC, finally bringing to fruition a long-running joke on the podcast about the low profile of the .biz domain. APM wouldn't let them take their newsletter email list, so they've had to rebuild it-- if you want to get your weekly update from Andrew, sign up for the new newsletter over at TBTL.net
posted by KingEdRa at 10:04 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]


Wait wait wait. Let’s not lose track of what’s really important here: ClickHole has somehow been around for ten Earth years?! But I still think of it as that kinda new thing??

Disgusting conspiracy to make me personally feel old.
posted by Suedeltica at 10:34 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]


My all-time favorite ONN bit is probably 'Just Give Me The Damn Sepak Takraw Ball', which I often think of when a coworker starts getting into the minutiae of football.
posted by whir at 10:51 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]


I want AV Club reviews back, period.

I'm very happy for them.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:53 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]


It seems impossible to me to be talking about Clickhole for this long with no one bringing up Which One Of My Garbage Sons Are You?
posted by mhum at 10:59 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]


I thought the AV Club community had decamped for the-avocado.org anyway.
posted by amk at 11:10 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]


I've never heard of The Avocado until this moment, who from the AVClub line-up is writing there now?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:29 AM on April 26


The Pluto Gangsta: I think just the commenting community moved there after a particular bad update to Kinja or whatever, and they self-organize to post regular threads. I didn't remember that the AV Club featured writers, and thought of it largely as a discussion board.
posted by amk at 12:52 PM on April 26


As a philosophically inclined 14-year-old in a football family the ONN "Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life" clip absolutely imprinted itself on my brain.
posted by cosmic owl at 1:39 PM on April 26


Did the AVClub writers from days gone by gravitate to a website of their own, like how Deadspin did with The Defector?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:33 PM on April 26


They went to The Dissolve, which folded in 2016.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 3:46 PM on April 26


Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps, two film critics from the AV Club's glory days and subsequently The Dissolve, have a joint substack, The Reveal. Much of it is paywalled, but reviews of current movies are generally free, and I find the writing to be generally pretty high-quality.
posted by whir at 7:10 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]


mhum: It seems impossible to me to be talking about Clickhole for this long with no one bringing up Which One Of My Garbage Sons Are You?

I am replacing my entire wardrobe with “Saab Owners Die Angry” t-shirts.
posted by dr_dank at 8:44 PM on April 26 [4 favorites]


I think this may be the only thing tech billionaires have done that I can approve of.
posted by sotonohito at 2:45 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]


Any actual company with a Web site that includes a wild gorilla loose in the office on their 'about' page is fine with me and The Onion is in good hands. Unless this is just the first truly honest corporation ever and the Onion is fucked. I guess we'll know soon enough.
posted by dg at 5:17 PM on April 28


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