One Year of 404 Media

Hey there, Joseph (well actually all of us) here. Today marks the one year anniversary of 404 Media! Below we wanted to reflect on the past year, explain what we learned, and show that there is a sustainable business model for impactful journalism. Thank you for reading.

A year ago today, we published a blog post called “Welcome to 404 Media.” In that post, we explained that the four of us quit our jobs to start something new, and set some goals for ourselves. 

“We aspire to do society-shifting technology journalism, and to create a sustainable, responsible, reader-supported media business around it,” we wrote. “We will report and publish stories that you will not find anywhere else, that we believe only we can do. We hope these stories will take over the internet, impact public policy, and expose bad actors. We will point out the absurd. We will be irreverent and have fun. We will also do very serious work.” 

For years before launching 404 Media, we watched new media companies become obsessed with wild growth and huge valuations only to crash and burn because of mismanagement, venture capital investment, private equity debt taken at terrible rates, bloated executive pay, big tech algorithm changes, ad market crashes, fancy offices in expensive neighborhoods, and bring in revolving casts of clowns to supposedly clean up the mess. 

“We propose a simple alternative,” in launching 404 Media, we wrote. “Pay journalists to do journalism. We believe it is possible to create a sustainable, profitable media company simply by doing good work, making common-sense decisions about costs, and asking our readers to support us.”

Here we are a year later, and we are very proud and humbled to report that, because of your support, 404 Media is working. Our business is sustainable, we are happy, and we aren’t going anywhere. 

In our first year, we have exposed how fraudsters can make realistic photos of fake identity documents in seconds, how hackers in the digital underground attack one another, how multi-billion and trillion-dollar companies gobble up the internet to train AI, and exposed dangerous working conditions in the country’s biggest medical lab. We explained how big tech companies favor AI slop over human-made content, got to the bottom of Facebook’s Shrimp Jesus AI spam situation, have demystified how the ticket scalper industry works, and uncovered thousands of pages of documents via public records requests. Our work led to Google cutting off a sketchy surveillance company; curtailed abuse of VC-backed artificial intelligence company Civitai; forced Microsoft to stop people making explicit AI-images of Taylor Swift using its tools; triggered a lawsuit against Nvidia for scraping YouTube, and much more.

The four of us and Jules (our first 404 Media fellow) have published hundreds of articles and 53 weekly podcast episodes, as well as four FOIA Forum sessions that have already led to our own readers filing for and obtaining important government documents. We have, with varying levels of success and activity, kept up a presence on YouTube, TikTok, Mastodon, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  

We hope to be here for much longer than one year, and we are not taking a single year of success as a promise that this will work indefinitely. We promise to continue hustling and working to publish journalism that is worth supporting. But we and our colleagues at other journalist-owned publications like Defector, Hell Gate, Racked, Remap, Aftermath, and others have shown that small businesses owned by the people doing the work can be successful not just editorially, but can also be financially sustainable. 

We have learned that there is an audience that is happy to pay for fearless journalism and fun blogs that are written by real human journalists who prioritize the interests of their readers, not search algorithms and AI bots. And we have learned that a small team can hold companies that are worth trillions of dollars to account if the investigations are good enough. 

Last year when we quit our jobs to go out alone, we each invested around $1,000 each to get our domain, set up email accounts, pay for our content management system (CMS), and a few other things. We lived off our personal savings. We were barebones then and continue to be lean, but we are actively reinvesting our subscribers’ money back into the business. We recently hired an audio engineer to produce our weekly podcast. We paid for the development of a full-text RSS feed, which others who use Ghost (the CMS we use) can now implement as well. We spent money on some tech gear to make our podcasts more engaging for video as well, a process we’re still ironing out. Joseph was able to fly to Las Vegas to cover the DEF CON hacking conference thanks to our subscribers. We regularly have expenses directly related to specific investigations, such as testing out a sketchy AI-image service and then reporting on it. 

We don’t have any major second-year plans to announce just yet in part because we’ve been heads down working on some of the investigations and scoops you’ve seen in recent days, but we are having a party to thank our subscribers on September 5 at The Woods (entry is free for paying subscribers and $30 for other attendees; tickets will sell out soon, get them here. Paying subscribers: go here for the 100% discount code). We will also be recording a longer bonus episode for our subscribers about how things are going that will come out early next week. But we can promise you this: The next year holds more scoops, more investigations, more silly blogs, more experiments, more impact, and more articles that hold powerful companies and people to account. We remain ambitious and are thinking about how to best cover more topics and to give you more 404 Media without spreading ourselves too thin. 

“We have learned that there is an audience that is happy to pay for fearless journalism and fun blogs that are written by real human journalists.”

In the last year, we learned that the technical infrastructure exists now for even non-technical journalists to build a sustainable site that can receive money from subscribers. That may sound obvious on the surface, but when you run a site for investigations, and multiple podcast feeds, and send different types of newsletters to different segments of your audience throughout the week, there are several moving parts you and the tools you buy need to link together. If you are a journalist reading this thinking about going out on their own: the tech is there for you to do so with very little know-how needed, and we are happy to talk you through any questions you might have.

On that note, when we launched this company we knew a lot about journalism but very little about how to run a business. We have been overwhelmed not just by the support of our readers but by the generosity of our colleagues in the industry and people who have come out of the woodwork to help us solve small problems, launch new features, or bounce ideas off of. This is not an exhaustive list, but people like Aaron Shapiro who designed the site; Rachel Strom for providing legal counsel; Jasper Wang and Sean Kuhn at Defector for discussing business ideas with; Maxime Valette from Feedpress who built the RSS feed; Ryan Singel from Outpost (an awesome add-on for Ghost) who not only makes a great product but who handled custom work for us; BuySellAds and Big Little Media which act as a crucial bridge between us and advertisers; Jon Henshaw of Coywolf who helped us with some Google indexing problems we were having; Seamus Hughes at Court Watch who has partnered with us editorially; and so many others who have helped with things big and small over the months. 

Over the last year, so many people have asked us what they can do to help support us and our work. The answer to that question is simple. If you are a subscriber, keep your subscription active. And if you’re not a subscriber and are financially able, buy a subscription. The other thing you can do is tell your friends about us. The biggest challenge that we face is discoverability. To the extent possible, we don’t want to have to rely on social media algorithms, search engines that don’t index us properly and which are increasingly shoving AI answers into their homepages, and an internet ecosystem that is increasingly polluted by low-quality AI spam. 

We are so happy you’re here, and so thankful for your support.