It’s a scary yet hopeful time for web media. As it must periodically, the hard fist of capitalism has let a number of very talented individuals slip out of its grip, and they’ve started their own little ramshackle internet presences to try to slice themselves out a sliver of the money pie.
Here I present six such groups. Some you’ve probably heard of, some you may not have. I am essentially on their side, but I also have to be on my own side, which is frankly impoverished. There is no way I can subscribe to all of them simultaneously. I figure, few of you can either. Maybe, by explaining their offerings and what they’re about, I can help you to come to a better decision. Maybe by doing so, I can help myself too.
Of course it doesn’t take much for a small group of hopefuls to stake out a tiny claim on the digital frontier, and I’m only covering the names I know of personally here. Hence the word “partial” in the title. If you know of some other small, worthy group that the world should know about, please leave a comment on this post! No spamming please. Speak personally and sincerely, and I may check them out and report back later. (No promises. My project list is long.)
Note 1: I try to report when these places have homepages, Youtube accounts, Patreon pages and Bluesky accounts. Many of them have Twitter accounts too. Will I tell you about them? NO.
Note 2: I performed a test with all these sites. I logged out, deleted site cookies, turned on a VPN, disabled my ad blocker and checked how obtrusive were a site’s paywall to a new user. The results are part of the notes below.
Note 3: I do complain about paywalls below. I have a very limited income, I can’t afford to subscribe to every place, and paywalls make sections of the web basically inaccessible to people like me. If I am to be honest about my perspective in my writing, I must complain about paywalls. I try to be as understanding as I can, and I do subscribe to some of these sites (currently Aftermath, Second Wind, and a trial for Defector). It used to be viewing ads could help out a person like me, but as ad partners have sought to extract more and more profit with autoplaying videos, maddening overlays, invasive user tracking, and sometimes outright introducing insecurities into page loads, blockers have become essential kit to the serious web user.
(There used to be a site, Project Wonderful, that was run by Dinosaur Comics creator Ryan North, and prided itself of serving useful, unobtrusive and safe ads. It was a personal project of his and eventually he had to shut it down. I think it’s still a niche that needs filling.)
DEFECTOR
When? – Founded September 2020
Who? – Webugees from Deadspin
What? – Sports reporting and general culture.
Cost for full basic access – $8/month, $79/year. $12/month or $119/year also gets you a daily newsletter with “exclusive content,” and access to extra episodes of the podcast Normal Gossip. There’s also a Richie Rich tier at $1,000/year. (Let’s band together and make calling silver spoon levels Richie Rich tiers. Well, I’m going to do it anyway.)
Notes: The Defector is the oldest of the new indie media groups listed here, getting well ahead of the curve by getting fired from Deadspin in 2020.
I want to like Defector, a great deal. Wait I introduced this the wrong way: I do like them! They’re the ones on this list with the most buzz and good will behind them, from the virtue of their quality and their writing. Sadly, their main bailiwick is sports reporting, and I bounce hard off of that. They have other content too, and that content is one of the reasons they’re no longer with Deadspin. I still tend to subscribe to them if they have a free or low-cost trial going (which is the case at this moment). But it’s a plain fact that the major part of their output is sport-related.
Lots of people like sports, and a lot of sports people liked Deadspin before the exodus, so I think they won’t have trouble keeping the lights. Completely logged out and IP-masked, the paywall kicked in after the fourth article read, I assume in the month. That seems fair to me, although if I link a page from them on social media, it means some people won’t be able to read it.
Defector has a website, podcasts, a Bluesky account, and a great little addition, a weekly crossword puzzle, although I haven’t done any due to the fact that the worst clues in any crossword puzzle are those involving sport. Defector also has a Youtube channel, but it hasn’t had many posts in the past year. Maybe they’ve ceded that space to Secret Base (see below).
AFTERMATH
When? – Founded November 2023
Who? – Webugees from Kotaku
What? – Culture and review, mostly of video games but other things too.
Cost for full basic access (read all articles, all podcast episodes) – $7/month, $70/year. They have a $10/$100 tier for commenting privileges—a lot of these sites hide commenting or Discord access behind a higher-level tier. There’s a Richie Rich tier at $999.
Notes: Aftermath has the star power of nearly everyone who used to be popular at Kotaku behind them, and seems to subsist on their name recognition. Those names are: Luke Plunkett, Nathan Grayson, Riley MacLeod, Gita Jackson and Chris Person. Aftermath has generally good gaming and related topic content, and harbors an affection for the oldweb, which endears them to me, despite the thing I’m about to mention. Ahem.
Aftermath appears to paywall all of their articles with no freebies, which is annoying, even to people who subscribe (like me!), because it makes sharing links from them hard. Aftermath has a website, podcasts, an RSS feed, and is on Bluesky.
SECOND WIND
When? – Founded November 2023
Who? – Webugees from The Escapist
What? – Video game culture and review
Cost for full basic access (all posts readable) – Through Patreon, $5/month or $54/year. This means all premium videos. Higher tiers are $25/month (gets you a digital artwork each month) and $50/month (hang out with the Second Wind folk in a monthly Discord meeting).
Notes: A lot of these new wave pop media groups have a somewhat fuzzy focus, but Second Wind sticks pretty closely to video games. This is where Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw went, leaving his long-time series Zero Punctuation to make a close copy of it called Fully Ramblomatic.
The story of the internet is that it’s really hard for an independent content creator to make a go of it without a leg up from someone, somehow. Yahtzee’s was nominally from The Escapist, but truly he hit it big back in the days of Big Blog, from several high-profile links including from Boing Boing. Second Wind has, in turn, gotten a lot of juice from Crowshaw’s star power, but they have other things to offer too.
A weird thing about Second Wind is that they don’t have a website of their own, but they are on Youtube and Twitch, they have a Patreon, and they’re on Discord. That seems to be it; if they have other avenues of output, their lack of a home site makes it difficult to find them. Hey! SW people! It’s not hard to make a basic website! Consider it! RSS would also be good! They are on Bluesky at least. They have “podcasts,” but only distributed as part of their Youtube channel, which is not what a podcast is.
404 MEDIA
When? – Founded August 2023
Who? – Webugees from Motherboard
What? – Reporting and commentary on technology and the internet in general
Cost for full basic access (all posts readable) – $10/month, $100/year. That’s high, comparatively. There’s also a Richie Rich tier at $1,000/year.
Notes: 404 Media lists their people at Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox. As purveyors of general tech writing, they have a pretty broad remit. Judging by their headlines they have been fervent crusaders against the “AI” slop industry.
404 Media engages in paywalling and modal subscription ad overlays, but doesn’t paywall as much as Aftermath does. If you go to their site to see what they’re about without a subscription, depending on the article, you might be allowed to read the whole thing, or you might be cut off after two paragraphs, or it might just be denied entirely. I never got ads, even with my ad blocker off, despite a tiny link marked “advertisement” in some empty spots on pages. (I’d consider adding an ad blocker exception for 404 Media, but it doesn’t seem to matter either way.) 404 has a website, an RSS feed for paid subscribers (info here), and an ad-supported podcast with a paid version with more content.
SECRET BASE
When? – The SB Nation Youtube channel was renamed to Secret Base in August 2020, but content that would be part of this was made as far back as 2017 and earlier.
Who? – A portion of the people at SBNation, particularly Jon Bois
What? – Articles and videos, 90% related to sports
Cost for full basic access – Through Patreon, $5/month, that gets you early access to their wonderful videos. A $10/month tier gets you some unnecessary niceties. If you can’t afford it, their videos appear on Youtube eventually, months later.
Notes: Secret Base is legendary* for making sports videos of interest to non-sport enthusiasts, a trick they picked up from probably their most prominent creator, Jon Bois. Secret Base has a Patreon and a Bluesky account. They take the monetization tack of releasing their videos on Patreon months before Youtube. I figure that’s not a bad strategy in this difficult era. Secret Base’s Youtube videos are highlights, not just of Secret Base but of all of Youtube, including Dorktown, Pretty Good, Weird Rules, Chart Party and Fumble Dimension. Secret Base doesn’t have a top-level domain site, but they do have a sizable subsite at SBNation and that terrific Youtube channel.
* What do I count as legendary? What I hear a lot about them from other places, notably social media and Metafilter.
DUMB INDUSTRIES
When? – Signs suggest that it began to offer content apart from the Maximum Fun network in 2020
Who? – Teevee-ugees from Mystery Science Theater 3000 and some others
What? – Comedy videos and livestreams
Cost for full basic access: They offer five memberships to different products. Three of them are free for basic access, but all have at least one paid tier. For the free products, throwing them $2/month gets you access to archives. The paid-only memberships are $5/month (Mary Jo Clubhouse) and $15/month (Jackey Neiman Jones’ Art Lessons). Subscribing their Twitch stream to remove ads is $7.99/month Canadian, which as of this writing is $5.83 US. (With an Amazon Prime subscription you get one free Twitch subscription; even though it’s part of “Prime Gaming,” Dumb Industries only streams games once in a while.)
Notes: I’ve followed Dumb Industries for awhile and I think it’s worth including them. They show a number of comedic segments: movie and shorts riffing from Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu, 70s video streaming and commentary from Mary Jo Pehl, art lessons from Jackey Neyman Jones, a new riffing show, Movies Are Dumb, with Chris Gersbeck, and a variety of things under “Odds & Ends,” which are offered with any membership. They have a website, sell videos for stream and download from Vimeo, and have both a Twitch and a Youtube channel. Note that a portion of their gig is selling videos, which are not available on demand unless purchased.
