We were able to hire more full-time staff, too! Sabrina Imbler joined us from The New York Times (brag) and created a whole new beat from scratch, blessing our site with their shimmering coverage of creatures, Dan Campbell, and all sorts of important developments in the scientific community. We paid her a decent living wage in exchange for some truly kick-ass blogs, and mostly failed at hiding our bewilderment at how good she was at this job despite being 21 damn years old. We got our first internship program off the ground, which allowed us to add Kathryn Xu to the staff for a few months this summer. When I look at how much more money we spent on the business in Year 2, it just reminds me that a lot of that money went toward making our website bigger and better than it was before. Well, anyway, sorry about the increased expenses.ĭon’t be. Also, did you know that when you run a small business and get your health insurance through a PEO, those fuckers can just decide to increase your rates every year? Sometimes as much as 40 percent? Don’t we all love having the freedom to shop for insurance on the open marketplace? Our access to Getty Images costs more than it did last year, as does our ability to use Mailchimp to send our daily newsletter to Pal and Accomplice subscribers. Our tech costs increased relative to our revenue increase (our partners at Alley, Pico, and Stripe take a percentage off the top of everything we earn), and some other stuff just got more expensive. Though it is the official position of the Defector Editorial Board that Joe Brandon should send us each a check for $25,000, our increased expenses mostly had to do with normal business shit. Inflation, am I right? This damn Joe Brandon has a lot to answer for.

In Year 1 we spent about $3 million running the business, and in Year 2 we spent about $3.7 million keeping the blog mines in operation. Just as our revenue increased in Year 2, so did our operating expenses. Roughly 95 percent of our total revenue came from paid subscribers. We used most of that money to pay for salary and benefits for our 24 full-time employees as well as fees for the 60-plus freelance writers, producers, artists, and designers we worked with over the last 12 months. We brought in about $3.8 million in revenue in Year 2, which was up from $3.2 million in Year 1. As of today, Defector has published 5,316 blogs, which our subscribers have continued to pay us real money for the ability to read.Ģ. How are things going with the business?ġ.

I mean, it was cool when you guys made it through the first year, but do we really need to do this every year? Won’t it get kind of stale? You had a lot of questions last year, and so here I am to answer another round of queries, which I’m sure you have been hard at work preparing. You! I assume we have reconvened here to talk about the fact that Defector has officially made it to its second birthday.

We gotto have moneymoney