The Messenger

[HanSenSE]

The Messenger is shutting down (axios.com)

 

[Readallover]

https://nypost.com/2024/01/31/media/the-messenger-will-shut-down-after-less-than-a-year/

 

[Mr. X]

The Messenger to Close After Less Than a Year (New York Times)

 

[matt_garth]

There’s something fiendishly American about blowing through $50 million in less than a year on a poorly planned, poorly executed enterprise and having no money left for severance.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

Guessing that meeting didn't go well.



FWIW I had thought about applying there way back when but I friend who is well connected in digital circles said they had no plan and it wouldn't last. Was hoping he'd be wrong but figured he'd be right. Unfortunately.

Your friend is a smart guy.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

There’s something fiendishly American about blowing through $50 million in less than a year on a poorly planned, poorly executed enterprise and having no money left for severance.

I certainly don't like this, but the sentiment is spot-on.

I feel bad for everyone there, but I can't think of anyone in my circle of journalism geek friends who ever talked about The Messenger. If your site can't connect with journalists, what hope does it have?

 

[matt_garth]

This, evidently, was the $50 million grand strategy:

 

[FileNotFound]

It’s almost as if …

1/Steal underpants
2/?
3/profit

… is an actual business model.

 

[wicked]

“Aggregation is going to save us! Wait, we gotta repivot to video…”

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

Don't kill The Messenger.

They killed The Messenger.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

They killed The Messenger.

Site has already been wiped clean. What a bunch of ****os.

 

[playthrough]

The NYT story said it was "spending more than $8 million on offices in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York."

They spent 16 percent of their bankroll on offices?!

 

[Octave]

Who was the most prominent casualty?

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

Someone's going to jail over this one. This is more than just business incompetence. Watch.

 

[Small Town Guy]

I worked for Wakeford back in the day and like him but his background for two decades has been in celeb journalism so seemed like odd choice to lead it editorially. Also in The Messenger's early days there was an ad on Linked In for a senior editor for women's sports that paid up to 150k. Which, cool, great for journalists! But also seemed, uh, way too high for what the site was going to be. Also makes it easier to understand how the money went so fast.

 

[Mr. X]

Someone's going to jail over this one. This is more than just business incompetence. Watch.

What do you think the crime or crimes were?

 

[Small Town Guy]

Yeah I don't think it has to be anything criminal about a publication burning through money and closing. It's practically quaint, a publication that people didn't think would ever work longterm proving exactly that. Calls back to the days of The National and Portfolio magazine.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Yeah I don't think it has to be anything criminal about a publication burning through money and closing. It's practically quaint, a publication that people didn't think would ever work longterm proving exactly that. Calls back to the days of The National and Portfolio magazine.

It's been an era in which it's been relatively easy to raise large sums of money. The "capital raise + burn through the cash" thing hasn't just been limited to publishing. The Messenger is a little different, because it came to that party really late. But in order to justify burning through cash when your business isn't becoming profitable, you have needed a really good "story" in order to keep raising more and more cash to burn through.

With investment yields so low in what was a zero interest rate environment for so long, those "stories" could keep valuations of startups rising as money being robbed of yield chased sillier and sillier things. And that has kept that environment going for a long time -- companies were becoming more valuable on paper, which brings more and more money chasing returns and blowing bubbles.

It always seemed to me that the media companies like Buzzfeed, Vice, even the Athletic, were dealing with such a ****ty business tradtionally that selling BS (the story) was a more difficult task than a shared office space company or a ride sharing company or a dating app or a nonsensical idea with AI terminology slapped on top of it.

In the case of the Messenger, Jimmy Finkelstein started raising money in late 2021. By then the punch bowl was already close to empty, but apparently he didn't know the party was ending. The Fed began what has turned into 8 rate hikes in March, 2022. With real yields rising, it has tamped down the desperate money that will buy into any story. And he was pretty much doomed from the get go. You all know the media industry well, he probably was never going to have success that led to profitability. But if he had gotten going earlier in the party -- say in 2016 instead of 2021 -- he might have been able to keep it going longer than less than a year. He would have been able to keep hitting the capital markets or borrowing really cheaply the way scores of other unviable companies did.

 

[wicked]

Site has already been wiped clean. What a bunch of ****os.

**** over reporters who are trying to easily track down work they might need for clips. Archive.org works, but it’s understandably clunky and you have to hope the original URL was crawled.

 

[goalmouth]

Fifty million in 12 months? LOL.

Reminds me of the dot-com merger between Suck and Feed.