Defector has officially been publishing blogs for five years. Allow me to regale you with some of our accomplishments:
- As of today, Defector has published 12,468 blogs
- Over the last five years we have brought in over $20 million in revenue, 87 percent of which came directly from our subscribers
- We currently have over 42,000 subscribers, around 20,000 of which have been with us for all five years
- We have published around 750 articles by 250 freelance writers, who have invoiced us for roughly $500,000
- The size of our full-time staff has expanded from 19 to 27
- Defector is now home to six podcasts, including Normal Gossip, which is in pre-production on its ninth season and has had its episodes downloaded 55 million times
- We’ve been publishing a weekly crossword puzzle for 99 weeks, and have featured puzzles by over 50 constructors
- We have hired and mentored five interns
- We have yet to collect the $500,000 that is owed to us by that big-time shit boy Jason Calacanis, who still deserves to be spit on
As I sit here now and think about what it means to make it to our fifth birthday, I’m struck by how perfunctory it all feels. That’s not to say that I don’t feel immense pride and gratitude toward my colleagues for what we’ve built here, or that I don’t rate our accomplishment as impressive—running a successful media company for half a decade, in the age of Quibi and The Messenger, is worthy of hanging a banner. It’s just that even though this anniversary is an objectively important milestone, it feels much more like a beginning than an ending.
When we started Defector, we set out to make a sustainable business out of providing people things to read during their workday. Thanks to the efforts of my colleagues and the support of our subscribers, we have achieved that goal. It didn’t even take that long to find ourselves standing on solid ground. Within a year, it was clear this was going to work—we would write blogs intended to entertain, inform, clarify and challenge, and people would pay us a few bucks a month to read them. The simplicity of all this has had something of a deprogramming effect on me. I got into this business during the hothouse days of the 2010s, when it was taken for granted that the true purpose of every media company was to achieve a nine-figure valuation. The collapse of that industry demanded a new way of thinking about what a media company can and should be, and my hope is that Defector has provided a useful example of just one way of doing things.
I often tell people that I think about being a co-owner of Defector the same way I would think about being the co-owner of a bar. Nobody opens a bar because they are hoping that one day Viacom will come along and try to purchase it for $250 million, and no bar becomes a fun place to hang out by hiring bartenders who for some reason won’t stop telling customers that starvation is no big deal when it happens to sick kids. Part of what makes Defector work is that it aims to accomplish much of what a good bar aims to accomplish: It welcomes patrons into a place where they might have a few laughs, learn a few things, and pass the time a little more pleasantly than they otherwise would.
This isn’t to say that Defector harbors no ambition. One often overlooked aspect of the media industry of yore is how it was built to drain itself. It was simply understood that as bigger audiences were courted and larger valuations were achieved, the more degraded and compromised the actual editorial product would become. It was like having a vampire in your own company, feeding itself on the very thing that originally provided any life or value to the enterprise. By contrast, these years spent working at Defector are the first in my career in which the future is not something I feel bearing down on me, but rather something to be chased after. We’ve already grown a lot as a company, and I want us to continue to grow, but not recklessly. If you’ll allow me to return to the bar analogy: I don't want Jon Taffer coming in here and turning the place into a 9/11-themed sports bar with fire truck alarms above all the urinals. I just want more and different customers, so that we can offer a more adventurous drink menu and, I don’t know, turn the back room into a music venue. OK, that’s it for the bar analogy.
So how do we grow? This is sort of a “good news, bad news” situation. The reason why I'm so optimistic about Defector’s future is because the spirit of degradation that helped destroy the media industry of the 2010s has not only remained in place, but taken on other forms in this decade. It can be found in sports media, where the kind of writing that once turned the term “sportswriter” from a joke into a vocation basically does not exist anymore. It has been replaced by insiders who only report what an agent tells them, legions of writers and editors who don't understand how metaphors work, athletes who realize they can get all the exposure they need from social media, and an entire industry that has willingly been captured by casinos. The guy currently doing the most interesting investigative journalism in sports publishes it via podcast.
The written word isn’t having a better time outside of sports, either. Articles are increasingly discussed and disseminated via TikToks in which the too-close forehead of a yapping zoomer—or worse, a New York Times columnist—floats in front of a screenshot of a headline. The few remaining major newspapers are too fixated on culture wars or genocide apologia to remember how to publish writing that feels like it came from an actual human. Everyone is constantly posting their thoughts in 280-character snippets that don’t make any sense. More and more of your friends and relatives are asking chatbots to summarize things for them instead of reading.
Maybe this all sounds like bad news for a business that relies on people reading things, but I don’t think so. My hunch is that as this process of degradation continues, a significant number of people—far more than the number of people who already subscribe to Defector—will become thirsty for a kind of casual, straightforward style of writing that is enriched by the humanity of its author. That, to me, has always been Defector’s biggest selling point: This is a website run by people who want to speak—plainly, honestly, passionately—to an audience that we acknowledge as people rather than metrics. My hope is that as everything gets more strange and stultifying around them, more of these wayward readers will take Defector up on our sales pitch.
As for those of you who are already with us, I want to sincerely thank you for making these last five years possible. We hope you’ll stick with us for the next five years, and the five years after that, and share us with the people in your life who might appreciate what we have to offer. That's how I envision Defector's growth and sustainability: not as the consequence of the right number of blogs falling into the right algorithmic slipstream, but as the result of people discovering and sharing it amongst themselves.
Onward.
