If you have not been keeping up with media industry news--and God bless you and your mental health if you don't--you might not know that news website The Messenger, a bad idea funded by dumb people that you may never have even heard of, is on the brink of winding up having blown through $50 million in funding in just a matter of months.
How did this happen? I just said it: The Messenger (an aggregation-heavy news site supported by ad dollars) was a bad idea funded by dumb people (anyone who would invest money in such a bad idea). Its collapse is defined by the hubris of the rich and stupid, but it also has a sad and very human cost, as these collapses usually do: the 20-odd employees laid off this week, and the hundreds of journalists still employed at the site who might soon be looking for new jobs in a disintegrating media landscape, something we here are all familiar with and which is not a fun place to be.
As someone with a vested interest in the funding of media companies, though, I'm also fascinated by that $50 million investment total, and the speed with which the company burned through it, to the extent that they're now trying to secure another $20 million just to keep the lights on. And it got me thinking: to put that investment into perspective, what could $50 million have done if it had been invested in, say, an independent video game and internet culture website?
There are five of us here. It could have paid each of us $100,000 a year for 100 years. Or, modifying the same math, we could have doubled our staff--increasing it to 10 employees, which would hopefully include someone who knows how to run a business, and who would remind me we also have business expenses on top of salaries--and pay us all for 50 years.
Both of those sums are academic, though; none of us are still going to be writing on the internet in 50 years’ time. We probably won't even want to be alive by then, what with the Water Wars and melted icecaps and all. So let's increase that to 20 staff, and we're still going to run for 25 years. 25 years! I'll be 68! Time to retire like I'd had an actual career at an actual job.
Even then we wouldn't just be able to pay everyone, we'd be able to do baller shit like host reader parties, spend a month in Japan interviewing developers about our favourite old Neo Geo games, or publish lavish print magazine versions of our favourite articles. We could, more sensibly, invest in other organisations and outlets doing good work, from The Video Game History Foundation to 404 Media, and ensure that it's not just us making a stable and secure living, it's others as well.
Most importantly, it would give us the freedom to almost indefinitely support the two things we care most about: serious reporting and quality criticism. Pay us to be able to keep working without constantly looking over our shoulders at the spectre of looming layoffs. Pay freelancers to do good work for decades to come. Create a space where, if the rest of the internet is going to shit, we can at least say there's somewhere to read good stuff about the things you care about.
All of which might sound equal parts vain and academic, but it would have been something, and that's the thing about the collapse of The Messenger, and is the most frustrating thing about it: it was all for nothing. The website, and that $50 million, contributed nothing. Nobody has ever said "wow did you see that piece on The Messenger", or "check out that reporting on The Messenger". It was born of misguided and/or cowardly principles of objectivity and centrism, it almost instantly devolved into a 2012-era clickbait farm and when the lights inevitably do go out it will have done nothing except create a temporary respite from job searches for a few hundred journalists.
Yet they got $50 million for it! And blew it! The economics of the internet as it exists today are built on rotten wood and are only a few years/months away from coming down entirely, and the only people who can attract that kind of money are the last people on Earth who should be entrusted with it. It sucks, and I hate it, and I wish the world and media landscape were different, but they’re not. All we can do, then, is sit back in our chairs, daydream about how things could be, what we'd have done with all that money and, wherever possible, support everyone still stupid enough to be trying to write for a living.
UPDATE January 31, 2024: The Messenger has shut down, laying off its entire workforce.
