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A comment on Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lays off staff.

Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by AlexandrB on Thursday November 09, 2023 @01:44PM (#38209088)
I think the writing has been on the wall since the Deadspin debacle[1]. G/O media seems to have little appetite for political commentary, so I'm surprised Jezebel lasted this long.

I didn't realize they owned The Onion though. Probably doesn't bode well for that publication either.

[1] https://deadspin.com/the-adults-in-the-room-1837487584

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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by damagednoob on Thursday November 09, 2023 @02:04PM (#38209386)
What I can't understand is that The Onion's YouTube channel[1] has 2.5 million subscribers and a billion views. You'd think they be able to do something with that amount of eyeballs.

[1]: https://youtube.com/@TheOnion?si=WyE-hvhrR6cRpFFT

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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by shortrounddev2 on Thursday November 09, 2023 @02:40PM (#38209982)
The onion's most viewed videos are from over a decade ago when they put actual effort into their content. Now their most recent videos get a few thousand views whereas their older content used to get a few million.

The quality of their content has really fallen off a cliff and their sarcastic political takes are usually pretty dumb now.

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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by mortenjorck on Thursday November 09, 2023 @03:03PM (#38210365)
The Onion circa 2012 was a trip. It's wild, given how much streaming video has grown in the decade since, just how much they left on the table abandoning such gems as Today Now, ONN News, Onion Talks (their devastating spoof of TED), and more.

And then there's OH1, with perhaps the most brilliantly surreal pop-culture satire of this century, Sex House.

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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by TMWNN on Thursday November 09, 2023 @04:18PM (#38211473)
>Today Now

The actress who played one of the two morning-show anchors went back to her original career as a pilot, presumably because it's a more reliable paycheck. I presume that she wouldn't have done that had The Onion continued with its videos, which indeed were amazing a decade ago.

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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by formerly_proven on Thursday November 09, 2023 @06:06PM (#38212675)
Didn't the onion videos die because of inflated view counts reported by Facebook Videos? IIRC there were some fairly expensive settlements around that.
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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by TMWNN on Thursday November 09, 2023 @08:24PM (#38213848)
Is that what happened? I wonder if the same thing happened to CollegeHumor: Like The Onion, very popular YouTube videos (as measured by views) a decade ago, then suddenly disappearing (again as measured by views).
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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by drewcoo on Thursday November 09, 2023 @02:14PM (#38209534)
G/O has a history of hostile relations with a number of its sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media

It probably all makes some kind of private equity "sense."

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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by pbj1968 on Thursday November 09, 2023 @01:48PM (#38209137)
And the Deadspin offshoot Defector is bleeding money, too.
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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by JStanton617 on Thursday November 09, 2023 @02:06PM (#38209413)
I don't think that's correct. Their 2022 annual report shows them as profitable. https://defector.com/defector-annual-report-year-two

Maybe took a major downturn in the past year, but I haven't seen any evidence of that

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Re:Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lay... by x0x0 on Thursday November 09, 2023 @03:23PM (#38210687)
Since they didn't take external investment, that's impossible.
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