How to build your own media company - without VCs or billionaires
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Yes, the thing you're listening to right now. Well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital firms, investment funds, and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.

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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. One of 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 at

And since I often say this at the end of the show, if you like this show to send me a note or a tax 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 site. It's called 404 Media. They're making good journalism and good money. No VCs required, no benevolent billionaire either.

How 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 Kepler.

I'm here with Jason Kevler. 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, Jason. 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, like the stuff you're doing at 404. And I like the story at 404. And one of the things we're interested in this podcast is

How do you put a media organization together? How do you keep one afloat? And are there new business models under the sun? And you are one of the several people we've had on who've done the, we're going to 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. And,

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 Gawker 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 let's, 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, uh, says that you and three coworkers each kicked in a grand total of a

thousand dollars each to get this thing up and running that you determine how much you're paying yourself 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. One of the things that... 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 turn 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 like launch and you know, 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 let's keep going on the on the dollars and cents. So can you tell us how many subscribers you have? So we have 7120 paid subscribers right now. That's what 10 bucks a month. It's 10 bucks a month, $100 a year.

And then we have like a super fan tier for people who are well off. And that's $1,000 a year. So we have like 40 of those, which is great. And then we have 77,000 free...

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'd 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 that's the do that. Yeah. And then it's also just like, we have expenses of course. And so a really big one for us is 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 real reporting and probably will upset some people. So we have a lawyer and we have litigation insurance and we have hosting fees and stuff like that. Jason, 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 insurance 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's funding you, whoever's, whoever's insuring you is charging more than I'm paying. I don't know what you're paying. But, but, but the point is like, you've got meaningful costs plus a retainer, a lawyer on retainer. So overall, give me a ballpark for your overhead non-salary costs. You know what? I wish, I wish I had that in front of me. I think, I think it's like, we're spending a, like,

$10,000 a month ballpark on...

just like making sure the website is up and 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 sub stack for ghosts. We have, that's the platform you're using to, that's the platform we're using, which is like, it's an open source nonprofit, which is kind of cool, but it's, it's our newsletter sending infrastructure, but then it's also our website and,

We also have this service called Outposts, which is a plug in 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, etc.,

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 had no ability to... It's going better than I could have ever imagined, basically, because yes, we are able to pay ourselves 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, like lots of people complaining about the audio quality and the levels and things like that. And like, 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. Sort of 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 of 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 $1,000. 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, 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 also doesn't mean it's going to 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 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 going to quit because Vice was like falling apart. They're like, 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 said 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 each of us. - At the moment it's egalitarian. You guys are all equal. 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 complimentary personalities and styles and so on and so forth. It's like Emmanuel is very organized and Joseph is very, we're all buttoned up and good journalists, but like he's,

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, et cetera, et cetera. 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 throw down 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 like, don't do it. I don't think I can work with more than four people, but, uh, well, I think that's the thing is like, 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 ScoopStrive 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. Yeah.

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 honestly, a lot of our growth has been word of mouth. 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 huge.

you know, a few people a day. And as more people subscribe to us, that network effect of people like telling their friends about us gets gets a lot larger. And all that said, it's like we are on every social platform. We're putting our stuff out everywhere. And we've also been kind of like railing against the fracturing of the Internet, especially as driven by, you know, 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 indies and I'm supporting indies in part because they're indies. Yeah. 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. And so- 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. Right.

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. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe.

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Hey, it's Liam from Decoder with Nilay Patel. We spent a lot of time talking about some of the most important people in tech and business, about what they're putting resources to and why they think it's so critical for the future. That's why we're doing this special series, diving into some of the most unique ways companies are spending money today. For instance, what does it mean to start buying and using AI at work? How much is that costing companies? What products are they buying? And most importantly, what are they doing with it? And of course, podcasting.

Yes, the thing you're listening to right now. Well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital firms, investment funds, and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.

And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the AI space? Why are so many big players in tech deciding not to acquire and instead license tech and hire away co-founders? The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than it seems. You'll hear all that and more this month on Decoder with Nilay Patel, presented by Stripe. You can listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home.

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And we're back. I've been doing this whole interview backwards because we're starting 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. I talk about 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 like Walgreens to Walgreens, taking these things home and hacking into them and like using them to dispense their own DVDs in their house. And

And one thing that they're doing is they're sharing information on this discord about how to convince Walgreens to give you a red box machine, how to hack into it, like how to sort of like reverse engineer it, so on and so forth. And 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, um, you know, technology for humans by humans. I mean, I think that AI is changing everything, um, which is maybe the most bland, um,

description of all time, but it's like, how is AI impacting workers? 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 like

humans and the user versus like 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 bent. 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,

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 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. And 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 one going for a big audience, would put together? I'm assuming that's intentional on your part. Yeah, it's mostly intentional. The Pokemon Go one is interesting because we had like, 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 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 their head is thinking about this stuff all the time.

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. Like, yeah.

uh we write a lot about like the open source community and like open source governance and like beefs within this tool that you've that i've never heard of until i saw that there was a beef about it and like uh how that ladders up into some product that facebook has made for example and and that's like a hypothetical situation but basically like our working theory is that uh

If you write about the people who are making technology and who are using it, whether that's like an Amazon warehouse worker or delivery person or a software engineer 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's, I get it. But at the same time, we're able to get big scoops about big tech because we're

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 if there's 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 dumb things down or speak down to our audience. But at the same time, I think we need to do a better job about the sort of entry point, like where are you

Where are you entering the story and making it easier for people to come to these kind of like heavy and often...

heavy, heady, and sometimes 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 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. It 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 details correctly. And basically you went and found FOIA through FOIA with 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. And 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. 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. No, it's all good. No, I think the point is taken though. It's like,

We are four people, 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 something.

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 beat 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. Yeah.

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. That's wrong. Yeah.

Editing your copy for you. 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 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. And as it should. Yeah, as it should. I mean, shrimp cheese is a great, great image. But there's been like this very 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. And

This was like a meme on mostly not on Facebook, like on Twitter and elsewhere where people 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. And so there's all these guides that are like in Hindi, in Filipino, in, you know, it's in Vietnamese. And

and these guides and all these prompts that are like AI generated 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 of 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 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 sounds 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. Yeah.

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 in an automated fashion. And so they're getting a huge boost in the algorithm to start with. And so...

You know, 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 around.

We'll be right back with Jason Kebler. But first, a word from a sponsor. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe.

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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 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 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. Mastodon to me seems like the most 404 media platform there is. But it's also why like I don't use it. Like I can barely figure out how to get on to Mastodon. And it seems like it's way too difficult for a normal person to.

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 posts to, you know, phone polls if I have to, just to get people to read my stuff. But my, my,

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 software engineers, open source people, privacy experts, hackers, that sort of thing. And so going to 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 their sort of like the way that it's built is,

is decentralized enough that I don't feel like I'm just going to get rug pulled in three months. So I don't know. 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 against that, too.

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 trained 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 I don't feel like learning a new thing. And it's like, anyone can feel that way. If you don't want to use another social media network... 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 uh 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 if 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 out.

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, he's been on the show a bunch, made a reference to, well, I heard from a benevolent billionaire earlier.

who might want to buy MSNBC. And I thought the idea of describing really anyone as benevolent, let alone a billionaire, is a choice. 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 kind of journalism 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 I have watched many. I've watched Vice die. I've watched BuzzFeed die. I've watched 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 companies.

With that model of we're going to grow really fast, hire a lot of people, and then 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. And-

So this sort of like subscription, you know, independent model works for us. We've created four journalism jobs and it's like other independent media companies have created a few dozen more, but it's still like a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. I think that a lot of people are making money on Substack these days, but like, I don't know what the, 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 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,

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 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 problem. 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... You're not doing a substash, I'm not going to call what you're doing niche, you built a real business, God bless you. At the scale you're doing, what are kinds of stories and projects you can't do because you don't have...

staff, whatever you would need to do X, Y, or Z.

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's the, 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. Yeah.

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 are breaking stories like we are telling stories that you can't find elsewhere. And then hopefully the newsletter writers will include us. And

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. And I know you didn't ask me to solve 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 will take the, you know, forgive me, but like glorified sub stack route, 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 100 more.

Yeah, I think a lot about sort of where doesn't this work? 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. Support for the show comes from AT&T.

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