Give A Gift That Doesn’t Suck, Get A Gift That Doesn’t Suck

Big holiday news: If you buy an annual gift subscription to Defector or Normal Gossip before the end of December 2025, we'll comp you a gift subscription to your choice of a participating site on the Lede platform. You can enjoy this second subscription yourself, or you can turn around and re-gift it. Five of our Lede neighbors—Certified Forgotten, The Pickup, PopHeist, Racket, and Sox Machine—have gone in with us on this deal. More on them below.

We’re splitting revenue 50/50 with these sites each time their subscription is chosen, so after you’ve made your purchase on Defector, please log your selection here! Take care to use the same email address you used to make the purchase. In alphabetical order, and in their own words, here are those sites:

1. Certified Forgotten: Certified Forgotten is a writer-owned horror publication that celebrates the little movies that leave a big impression. We hold a light up to film festival favorites and international horror like Infection and Possum.
2. The Pickup: The Pickup is a media company from This Land Press covering Tulsa culture, food, news and local lore with a critical eye and local savvy. Here are a trio of blogs that should give you a taste of our editorial sensibility.
3. Pop Heist: Pop Heist writers cover the pop culture that excites them: comic books, film festivals, new music, retro TV, and more. Check out our retro recaps of Twin Peaks by Sean T. Collins and the team’s 2025 Heistmas Advent Calendar. Get in on the heist!
4. Racket: Racket is a writer-owned, reader-funded website keeping Minnesota’s alt-weekly spirit alive. In addition to our food, music, and arts coverage, you can count on us for stories like "What I Saw at This Weekend’s Minnesota MAHA Fest Scared the Hell out of Me," and "‘Oh Yeah, He’s Real’: My Wild Day at the MN Bigfoot Conference."
5. Sox Machine: Established in 2006, Sox Machine covers the Chicago Blight Sox White Sox and their farm system with in-person reporting home and away, applying clubhouse access to classic blogger curiosity. We do not possess any of Gordon Beckham's shoes.

In the ways that evolution produces crabs and Tech Disruptors reinvent buses, media watchers tend to promote “bundling” as a solution to the industry’s ills. Like crabs and buses, bundling has merit. (“Newspapers” and “magazines” once roamed the earth...)

Bundling confers obvious benefits to readers. Readers are people, and people are typically interested in many different things: sports, horror, sports-horror. But as people, readers face time and budget constraints, which prevent them from discovering, reading, and paying for publications that cover each individual thing they care about. It’s reasonable to believe that stitching together a handful of publications which cover distinct beats might get people to spend more total money on subscriptions, even if you wind up selling at a discount relative to standalone subscription prices.

There are a bunch of mundane operational barriers to bundling independent sites together. Most of these arise out of the fact that the sites’ customer databases aren’t connected: In which systems will customers’ subscriptions, payment methods, and email preferences live? How are renewals handled? 

There are also thornier, strategic questions: Do readers really want this sort of thing, or is it just armchair speculation? If yes, what publications make sense as partners? How should you price the bundle? If a subscriber is already paying full-freight for my site, why would I share that with another publication? 

Working exclusively with Lede sites (for now!) makes the operational stuff easier. And I’m skeptical that you can credibly reason out the strategic stuff from first principles—at some point, you’ve just gotta try something, make mistakes, and revise. So consider this an initial, lo-fi, and low-stakes attempt to grow the overall pie via bundling. If it goes well, we’ll do more of it! Consider taking us up on the offer.

Gifting FAQs

• Can you round up those links for me again? Sure: Here’s the link to buy a Reader or Pal gift subscription, and here is the link to buy a Normal Gossip gift subscription. This is the form where you should log your comped sub selection.
• Does this work with Normal Gossip subscriptions? Yes! See the link above.
• Does this work with monthly gift subscriptions? No, you need to purchase an annual gift subscription to claim the deal. The gift subscription product pages should default to annual, but also have a “Show Annual Subscriptions” toggle on them.
• If I buy a gift subscription to one of these sites, do I get a gift subscription to Defector? No, not this time. Many of the sites we’re working with are doing their own holiday sale stuff, and we didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes.
• How do the subscription tiers work between Defector and the other sites? We offer two tiers of Defector subscriptions: Readers (unlimited blogs, ad-free browsing) and Pals (those benefits plus a bunch of other great stuff). We also offer two tiers of Normal Gossip subscription. In parallel, the sites we’re working with offer two tiers of subscriptions. If you buy a higher-tier gift subscription from us, you’ll get a higher-tier comped subscription over there, too.
• Can I just get an additional Defector gift subscription instead? Yes, sure, you can choose Defector in the post-checkout form. In the event that you are truly indifferent between us and another site, we’d be happy if you chose that other site! We’re trying to grow the pie, not sell extra Defector gift subs at a discount.
• How does timing work for Defector gift subscription notifications? Our system does not currently allow for delayed notifications. That means, upon checking out, your Defector gift subscription recipient will immediately receive an email alerting them to the gifted subscription. The best way to approximate a delayed send (i.e. delivering on Christmas morning) is to set yourself as the gift recipient, and then forward that email to your recipient on the day you’d like. To redeem a subscription, your recipient just needs to click the link in that email—it doesn’t actually matter what email is set as the "recipient." Relatedly: DO NOT click on the link yourself if you're going to wait to forward the link.
• How does timing work for my comped subscription for the other publication? You may need to wait a couple of days to get the comped subscription to the other publication of your choice. (There are some manual steps involved.) From there, it’ll work as described above: If you plan to re-gift that comped sub and want to approximate a delayed send, you should set yourself as the recipient of that comped sub in the form.
• How do renewals work for gift subscriptions on Defector and the other participating sites? When a gift subscription is redeemed, the subscription and subsequent renewal decisions are owned by the redeemer, not the original purchaser. Like any other annual subscription, a gift subscription will come up for renewal one year from the date of redemption. The only ways a renewal can happen are: (a) if the redeemer liked the subscription enough to add their own payment method; or (b) if a second gift subscription to the site in question is purchased, redeemed, and tacked onto their existing term. Sites on the Lede platform also send all annual subscribers a renewal reminder 30 days before their subscription is up to avoid any confusion.
• I have another question! Email us at info@defector.com.