The highs and lows of building a venture-backed media brand
Notes on a wild ride through late-stage media.
Welcome to Embedded, the new newsletter from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci. If you're reading this in your inbox, you were probably signed up for our old website-turned-email, nofilter. Embedded will take you even deeper into creator culture, highlighting the best and most fascinating of what's new online every day, Monday through Friday.
POV: Discerning Fan
What is Embedded? Join me on a brief journey to pre-pandemic times ...
By Nick Catucci
To properly introduce Embedded, I need to take you back to March 2020. The pandemic isn't officially a pandemic. The great social-media skirmishes of the year—Trump vs. TikTok, Gen Z vs. skinny jeans, tech bros vs. journalists—are still on the horizon, and Clubhouse, NFTs, and LinkedIn Stories are just glimmers in the eyes of the dunkerati. As for me, I've just started a job as Editor In Chief at influence.co, a professional networking site for influencers, and I'm excited to help pioneer a new model for funding media, like Mel or Medium (lol, foreshadowing).
I propose a publication about creators and influencers using The Cut, Gen, Rest of World and other sites I like as examples. A small team of very capable engineers and a designer quickly build me a site and a CMS, and I'm given a budget that I use to hire freelance writers and begin publishing monthly "issues" of eight to 10 articles. We name it nofilter. In the first issue, Sophie Ross expands on a viral Twitter thread about Arielle Charnas; in the second, Carla Lalli Music talks to Brooke Mazurek about men who have issues with (literally, but also figuratively) women's voices online, and Sesali Bowen writes a terrific essay about body positivity, recommending an illustrator, CozCon, who creates this to accompany it.
I'm proud of those stories, and they perform well, mainly because the people who wrote or were interviewed in them share them with their Twitter followers. In June, I'm cleared to hire one person full-time. Luckily, Kate Lindsay agrees to come over from Refinery29 to become nofilter's News Editor. On July 8, her third day, she publishes an interview with the two young women behind the Instagram tea account TikTok Room, which sees a surge of readers when the women add the link to their bio. It remains our most popular article for months.
Kate publishes two or three posts everyday, often interviewing creators and highlighting trends before anyone else. By the end of July, we start seeing the first trickle of traffic from Google; in December, we beat our traffic goal by 75 percent.
As the "flywheel" begins to turn, many "learnings" are had. Big news sites outrank us on Google, so we largely ignore the day-to-day stories everyone else is covering (though we happily make an exception when the FBI raids Jake Paul's house). Instead, we focus on new trends (like Instagram dumps in August 2020 and voice notes in March 2021), niche news stories (Instagram influencer Jen Hatmaker's divorce, YouTube yoga instructor Lesley Fightmaster's unexpected death, donations to Trump by parenting guru Cara Dumaplin and TikTok "aunt" AmandaLee Fago), emerging creators (Nat and Elasia of TikTok Room, Halle Burns, this crew), and people who are generally beloved on the internet (Carla Lalli Music, Hunter Harris, Mina Kimes). Our "hits" also include a spicy column by Sophie Ross, reported features, hilarious personal essays, bespoke memes, a live blog, and what media people call service journalism and tentpole franchises.
In short, we try a bunch of stuff, and it is working. We launch a site devoted to creators just as a once-in-a-century pandemic pours fuel on an exploding industry, minting countless new stars on an array of rapidly innovating platforms! We establish a foothold in what's surely the most massive media opportunity of the decade! The Atlantic and The New Yorker link to our articles, not to mention Vogue, Vox, and Vulture! Let's get it!
Alas, we are also ahead of the curve in another aspect of media: sobering reminders that pioneering new models for funding media is hard. A week or so after we officially part ways with influence.co, Mel shuts down and Medium dissolves its publications. Now Kate and I are our "own bosses," publishing on Substack, a platform that we definitely did not join at the exact moment that it became a flashpoint in a heated and entirely justified debate about the role of technology companies in media, the amplification of intolerant voices, and the growing class divide between celebrity writers and professional journalists.
But this entire post is a digression.
What is Embedded? Like nofilter, it will be one of the few publications, I think, covering creators from the point of view of a discerning fan: Celebrating new talent and investigating trends, and unbothered by grifters hawking stolen creative work or venture-backed fantasies of the full-time workforce displaced by a rictus-grinned hustle-army.
But see for yourself. We'll be back in your inbox tomorrow!
Nick
The Fine Print
Thanks to everyone for reading and sharing our work over the last year, and our more successful friends, friends-of-friends, and people we cold-DMed for letting us interview you. “Get Embedded” with us on Twitter and Instagram. If you discover a new model for funding journalism, reply to this email with your learnings!