by Stephen Green, PJ Media:
There’s an old joke I’ve heard told about just about every industry in the world, but today I’ll tell the version about the internet news business.
“How do you make a small fortune providing news on the internet?”
“Start with a large fortune.”
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
That old joke has maybe never been truer than it is this week, when The Messenger news site went dark after blowing through $50 million in startup funds — and hadn’t even been in business for a year. CEO and founder Jimmy Finkelstein promised investors that The Messenger’s appeal to “a big, generic news audience,” as Axios described it, would generate $100 million in the first year alone.
From when the site went live in May to its demise on Wednesday, it brought in somewhat less than $100 million. The Messenger earned maybe $3 million, according to various sources.
Missed it by that much, as Maxwell Smart used to say.
Axios called it “one of the biggest media failures of the internet era,” but it’s one of two just in the last couple of weeks. In mid-January, Sports Illustrated announced that its entire staff faced being laid off — many immediately, some over the next couple of months while management figured out if there could still be a Sports Illustrated.
The magazine’s publisher, Arena Group, five years ago sold the rights to the SI brand for $110 million to a licensing group called Authentic. In return, Arena would pay Authentic a quarterly fee to keep using the SI brand. They missed their last payment and the agreement was terminated, leaving Arena without a magazine to publish.
