In 2012, as a “blog entrepreneur,” I was very much intrigued by the launch of Polygon. I’m not into video games really at all, but Polygon - a new editorial website by the crew that had already launched The Verge - was launching. Not only was it launching, the team behind it was publishing a documentary-style video series about its launch. It was really awesome.
To be in this space was incredibly exciting. Gone were the barriers of old publication houses. Entrepreneurs were building new, digital first brands, leaning into the habits and new capabilities of online content consumption - speed, sharing, viral content, etc. In some ways, brands like The Verge and Polygon were the pinnacle of this time. Backed by real funding, these teams were creative, tech savvy and ambitious.
This summer, Vox Media sold off its remaining assets including The Verge, SB Nation and other brands. Vox had already sold off Polygon to Valnet the previous year. This marked the end of what I see as the peak blog era. If the blog era was something like 2005 to 2025, you might say that 2008-2016 was its peak.
At one point, Vox Media was valued at $1.2 billion in 2015. BuzzFeed reached a $1.7 billion valuation in 2016 (while BuzzFeed technically still exists, its news division shuttered in 2023 and its relevance is mostly gone).
Gawker
If 2010-2018 was the pinnacle of the prestige blog era, you’ve got to go further back to Nick Denton’s Gawker Media group to find the origins of prestige blogging. Gawker, in many ways, started it all. And they were excellent.
Note: From the very beginning I found myself at odds with the worldview and content of pretty much all Gawker Media properties, but the business and strategy very much had my respect. This is not an endorsement of Nick Denton the person, or the content of these former properties.
In the early 2000s, the world wide web was exploding. Much of our interaction were around things like Google search, but also the big websites of household brands that were moving online. I watched SportsCenter, so it was only natural that I’d make espn.com a daily visit.
Nick Denton was busy building and launching what many consider the first network of high quality, digital first editorial brands. These brands were thrilling, they were centered around various verticals and they employed a new style of writing - blogging - that in many ways represented the next generation of content consumption that the web enabled.
Lifehacker (tech, productivity) and Deadspin (sports) were properties I marvel at (while wearing my entrepreneur hat). These brands were great, the writing was sharp, the community even sharper. The content was irreverent, timely, and didn’t fit the mold of any previous format.
I read everything I could about Nick Denton’s business. The way they had an open air office where everyone pounded away at their keyboard. The way that they had live metrics (a scoreboard of sorts) in the office. The fact that they emphasized new visitors, not just visitors as a traffic KPI.
If Bill Simmons inspired a generation of sports writers, undoubtedly Gawker inspired a generation of writers and even entrepreneurs (including yours truly).
Denton and Gawker Media also made some very interesting strategic moves. For example, it invested in its publishing and commenting platform technology called Kinja (Vox followed suit of course similarly with cool branded names for its proprietary content management system and other elements). A deeper look into these moves will have to wait for another day.
While most would assume Gawker’s death came from the bizarre Hulk Hogan lawsuit fiasco, the reality is that the business likely would have been under pressure similar to Vox and others. The company would likely still exist, since it was quite profitable and substantial and largely avoided venture capital), but its pinnacle status undoubtedly would be a thing of the past.
Gawker essentially showed the world what internet publications could be. Places like Vox took these concepts, professionalized it and built strong brands with venture backing. Ultimately, they ended similarly.
The digital revolution didn’t stop
What did these companies in? Why couldn’t they live up to the promise of peak venture capital valuations? The reality is that the digital revolution didn’t stop.
The digital revolution disrupted the barriers of print publications and shifted everyone’s attention online. Entrepreneurs could seize the opportunity and get in front of eye balls without needing the capital required to print publications and get them physically in the hands of readers.
Like any era of disruption, new entrepreneurs can move faster and can build without the constraints of legacy costs. Denton and his brands such as Lifehacker and Deadspin could move fast, dial into online KPIs much faster than PC Magazine and Sports Illustrated.
And if the digital revolution stopped in 2008, it’s possible that these brands would be the kings of the world.
Instead, Google and Facebook not only became the front door of the internet - and bending every publication to their will in the process - but they also began to gobble up all of the digital advertising spend that was growing each year. Advertisers not only don’t need publications to reach its readers, in many ways they don’t want to use the publication. It’s easier and more effective to target users across all publications using the innovative ad tech of Google and Facebook.
Barriers continued to break down and not just from the physical distribution of old media. With the rise of social media and iphone cameras, every consumer also became a content producer. A random guy’s fitness videos aren’t technically a competitor to a prestige publication of the likes of Vox, but in reality it kinda is.
Prestige publications often have the highest overhead. High end content requires expensive writers.
In the early 2010s when we were building Saturday Down South, I remember a rival publication hired a very well known sports journalist who was on TV often and had a long, prestigious career of writing for various outlets. He was good and he was expensive. He would write a column or two a week for the website (a cadence we often joked about - those old school journalists!). Each time he wrote something interesting, our news team would write something about what this person said over at that website. We would then get 10x the traffic that they got for that writer’s original content while they were the company paying his salary. We would credit the publication and the author and link to their story. Everything was by the book, and we weren’t unique in doing this. “Content aggregation” is not new. But this obviously was untenable for the rival publication. The setup didn’t last.
Original reporting is expensive and the economics are challenging in an advertising-supported context.
Success stories?
A few successful pivots have occurred, on the back of the Substack platform which attempted to end the advertising dependence and put reader-supported content creation front and center. Bari Weis’s “The Free Press” was a successful launch on Substack reporting 170,000 paid subscribers. Paramount/CBS acquired it in 2025 for $150 million. While this certainly should placed in the “success” bucket, it’s worth noting $150 million is a far cry from the valuations that new media was receiving in the mid 2010s.
The Dispatch, a conservative leaning political news and commentary site attempted a similar feat with a notable Substack launch. Reports say that The Dispatch had roughly 45,000 paid subs in 2025 and approximately $5-10 million in revenue. Surviving, yes. $5 million revenue puts it firmly in a small business category.
Bill Simmons’ The Ringer has been a success, but it made an early pivot emphasizing the audio podcast format. It’s online written content serves mostly to direct users to podcasts. Bill Simmons, a pioneer of irreverent blog-style sports writing in the 2000s, has joked often over the last decade about how his “fingers no longer work.” He only podcasts, and it was the right business decision. Spotify acquired the company of course in 2020 for something in the range of $200 million.
One more note from The Ringerverse: one of its biggest non-Simmons voices, Sean Fennessey, recently launched a substack (unclear if its owned by him or The Ringer). He’s a great writer and a respected thought leader in the film niche. Substack makes sense for this format. But again, it’s worth noting that this content is not making its way to The Ringer website.
Defector is a writer-owned sports publication from former Gawker/Deadspin writers. By all accounts, it’s a success in the sense that it has accomplished what it set out to do. Provide a living for its writers, and be in control of the outcome of the business. Revenue is reported to be approximately $4.5 million. Again, a small business. A viable one, but a small business.
What wins in the future?
Small business publications can exist. Places like Dispatch and Defector are examples of this. But the days of raising capital for the purposes of building a large online editorial brand seem behind us.
Clay Travis recently launched a new online brand after his time with Outkick ran out. His example is illustrative and one I want to spend a deeper dive on in the future. I believe Travis is over-emphasizing the website property component of what he’s building, but he’s exactly the type that will likely win in the future.
Individual creators with a degree of fame and existing distribution hold the cards for the foreseeable future. How they cash in and monetize this position will vary from person to person. But Travis is approaching it well, even if I disagree on the value of web editorial content in the future. He’s monetizing his personal brand across many platforms, and I like that he plans to only monetize his content and footprint with brands that he owns. Relying on advertising and sponsorship will only get you so far. You need a real business model. You need to sell something.
Is there a future in great online writing? Yes, but it will be niche and live in places like Substack. For most people, general sports writing likely not a viable career option moving forward. The AI is too good. The Instagram reels are too good. The economics don’t work.
Scaling publications seems over as well. Media has always been a “sexy” business for some, so I’m sure some will still attempt it when the loose capital flows, but venture funding editorial or even video content companies is likely mostly over.
Individual creators will continue, but only a few will capture the value of this ecosystem. There will be a long tail of average, and that long tail will increasingly include AI content.
Niche publications and niche communities will maintain value. An individual writer who can command a small critical mass of paying customers will be ahead of the vast majority of content creators. Substack will remain a viable option for this.
As our home screen shifted from paper newspapers that somebody literally tossed onto our porches to website home pages to social feeds, expect the shift to continue. The obvious bet is that the personal AI agent becomes our home screen. Meta’s Muse product - just launched in September 2026 - is a possible candidate here.
There won’t be much value in content creation that is optimized for discovery (which happens to be the vast majority of all content created over the last 15 years). Algorithms have been good at serving users the content they want, but they will look awful compared to how good the AI is at telling us exactly what we want to know and only what we want to know. This means that referral traffic goes to zero.
The AI interface will abstract away most content creators. You won’t matter. AI discovery will not be a new version of SEO even if AI Overviews in Google have marks that resemble traditional SEO in 2026.
Instead, your content will have to be good enough for a user to come directly to it. And, unfortunately for most of us, our content isn’t that good.