hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

shocked the 69$/yr tier isn't called "nice"

if I were in their shoes I might consider one lower tier for just pod content or something. 6 bucks a month may not seem like a lot but they're not the only patron funded game in town

a $1.50 tier that gives you access to a page with nothing on it but a link to deadspin.com

the premium commenting feature is a good way to weed out trolls (from barstool)

I listened to the Magary/Roth pod quite a lot but honestly it was only OK. then again, I'm not sure I would pay for even the pods I like better, almost all of them are just a few people bullshitting for an hour about subjects I just happen to find interesting.

looking forward to the eventual retrospective book, Gawker Dudes: What the Fuck Was Wrong With You?

they should charge extra to hide the comments

sure I'm going to be called a humorless neoliberal feminist or whatever for this but at some point they could consider changing the name of the "funbag" thing because it's fucking gross

nah i think that's a perfectly good idea, it's a holdover from cruder days that Magary has otherwise largely renounced and I doubt he has any real deep attachment to the name, so hopefully they will drop it with Defector.

it's in their site copy so doesn't look like it

what is the funbag thing? like a mailbag segment? and now we'll dive into the....funbag? that doesn't even make sense

that's what it is

one cool thing about the funbag is that no one knows exactly what's in there, it could be anything

heading to the post office. anyone need boobs?

hold on, let me check the funbag just in case

nope, no boobs in the funbag, go ahead and pick up some please!

Just one giant funbag, centered

$69 is a hard sell when the Athletic is only $50ish (or free with my T-Mobile account)

I think they're doing pretty different things, and even though I've never subscribed to The Athletic so I can't say 100% for sure, I think Deadspin/Defector has better writers, unless you're just strictly looking for reporting from your sportswriting.

There's a fair bit of overlap in the way they cover sports, the columnists and non-sports stuff seemed like a Deadspin bonus

i pay $1.25 a month for the athletic, which employs like a million writers

i don't think they have comparable business models at all, i doubt defector is going to get a lot of outside funding. they're just relying on having enough old deadspin fans with money to throw around.

but the athletic is relying on venture capitalists not getting bored so...

the athletic is modeled off your local sports page, deadspin always branded itself as the anti-sports page

oh i don't assume that either model is in any way stable xp

if all the contributors on that masthead become full-time employees they need like 13,000 annual subscribers at $69 a year to pay them all $50,000 a year, plus a bunch more to pay for the CMS and so on. That'd be a very high conversion rate of the erstwhile pre-ratfucking deadspin audience, but it's also not an objectively large number of customers. Your Kickstarter Sucks, a podcast which I suspect is a more niche taste than "posts about sports", has 3,000+ Patreon subscribers.

maybe the premium-subscriber model isn't stable but at least if that money dries up or doesn't pan out at least it's not because some jowly moron in a bad suit thinks he knows your business

alternatively, they need to convince just one or two megarich deadspin fans to give them 25k per year

maybe chris berman will throw them a bone

why does every site on the internet have to be about sports

shut up nerd

wow harsh dude

alternatively, they need to convince just one or two megarich deadspin fans to give them 25k per year

Each. It can be a “sponsor a Deadspin writer” program.

I do my part by buying Magary’s novels (which are surprisingly good)

That’s ... not enough money
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, July 28, 2020 6:53 PM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

was not being serious

they do offer the option for you to pay 25k per year tho, if you're so inclined

Ha ah xp

Over 10,000 people subscribed to https://t.co/kJAyviyXwV on Day One, but billions more have the opportunity to join on Day Two

— Defector (@DefectorMedia) July 29, 2020

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

well, there you are.

Pretty soon you’re talking about real money

More https://t.co/0l7gHBl75N style guide pic.twitter.com/P1LZCDQwLC

— Barry Petchesky (@barry) September 9, 2020

First one there should be federal law IMO

feel like in about fifteen years or so, that style guide is going to read as "so 2020's"

lots of ppl itt were needlessly mean to mordy back in october when he suggested they do exactly what they ended up doing

I remember that

Tbh I hope Petchesky gets hit by a bus and everything he touches fails, but perhaps that's just my long memory here.

idk what his personal failings are but I'm rooting for this sort of funding model to succeed on a whole-publication scale cause there may not be many, or any, remaining viable alternatives very soon

if it were not primarily a sports publication (zzz) I would def throw some $$ at it

This has probably been gone over here, but here's a little refresher:
https://www.barstoolsports.com/blog/1100855/the-hypocrites-at-deadspin-in-full-spin-zone-mode-as-many-of-their-staffers-sexist-and-homophobic-comments-come-to-light

"It's not rape. It's surprise sex"- Barry Petchesky

I hope they fail miserably. Fuck them.

shitty 10+ year old comments that have been apologized for don't really rate murder by bus or the ruination of dozens of non-assholes in my book but I am aware that mileages vary

Idk what’s worse, citing 14 year old tweets or using an article from the cess pit that is barstool to make your point