
Cards Against Humanity buys Clickhole, turning it into an employee-owned company - coloneltcb
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/cards-against-humanity-buys-clickhole
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ehsankia
> The Onion, which created Click Hole, will remain a part of G/O Media.

It's a little strange. The Onion created Click Hole, but now click hole is
safe but The Onion itself is still under G/O media. How did the employee split
happen? Were they fully separate?

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forgotmypw
I think the big picture is that The Onion has reached peak brand value, and
its most profitable exploitation mode is to gradually lower content
expenditures while maximizing revenue through ad-plastering.

I hope I'm wrong, but that's a general trend I've observed.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
I got the feeling that The Onion had peaked and waned already a few years ago
once they no longer produced steady video content. "Today Now", the coverage
of the 2012 US presidential election and "Sex House" were brilliant, high-
quality productions, but if the company couldn't keep it up that augurs badly
for its business.

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plorg
My goodness, I had completely forgotten about Sex House.

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bluedays
So... Feel like I am asking the obvious here but is Cards Against Humanity
also employee owned?

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criddell
No.

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mcv
So how can a company that's not employee-owned become employee-owned by
getting bought by another company that's not employee-owned? The only way that
makes sense is if Card Against Humanity was owned by the employees of
Clickhole.

~~~
Latty
Could also just be a philanthropic act for the media attention. CaH have done
a lot of advertising through weird (mostly positive) means, it wouldn't
surprise me if this was just another example.

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roland35
Employee owned sounded good when I joined my last company, but there was one
downside that led to it's demise! The founders were both in their 80s and
their estate was going to sell their shares (plus a lot of early employees
with many shares were retiring). Unfortunately the company could not get
enough cash to buy the hundreds of millions needed for this - so the company
was sold at a discount to a larger competitor.

~~~
jawns
This seems strange.

Surely with the popularity of employee ownership (here's a list of some of the
biggest employee-owned companies [https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-
ownership-100](https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100) ) that
aspect of it must have been figured out by now.

~~~
roland35
This specifically was an ESOP which as I understood it was more popular in the
1970s when the company was started. You are probably right, there could be
improved corporate structures now!

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dragonwriter
I'm pretty sure labor coops, which don't have this problem, are much older
than ESOPs (maybe a century older.)

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bearcobra
Fingers crossed some of the other sites can be saved from G/O management

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cardosof
I've read the comments to this news and I must ask: what's the matter with G/O
Media?

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cagenut
there are about a hundred layers to that onion

short version: they're a pirate-ship/skeleton-crew management team sent in to
do a "turnaround" (or flip) on the former gawker media by a private equity
firm.

the way a friend put it is that they adopted a rescue pit bull that has
already bitten its last two owners and they started slapping it. absolutely
breathtaking in terms of how they loaded the gun, carefully took aim at their
foot, and pulled the trigger 3 - 5 times.

you can point to any one fight they got in and think it seems like the staff
are pushing their luck, but the pattern of over and over again proving mgmt
had _no_ idea what they bought and have _no_ idea how to handle it just serves
as a shining case study in what bullshit artists most of these "turnaround
management consultant private equity" firms are.

~~~
plorg
So, to be clear, it went something like:

* The Onion existed and spun out AV Club and ClickHole, all were great for awhile but there senior staff began a mass exodus in 2012-2013.

* The above were bought by Univision. I believe by this point most of their senior staff had departed.

* Univision acquires Gawker Media in a fire sale and folds it and The Onion properties into Gizmodo Media Group. The Onion properties are migrated to Kinja, a move the Gizmodo project manager described as being about integrating e-commerce tools (chiefly Amazon referral links) into the site content.[1] At some point in this phase the last of the old timers left.

* Great Hill Partners bought Gizmodo Media Group and turned it into G/O Media

[1] [https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2017/kinja-the-
publishing...](https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2017/kinja-the-publishing-
system-at-the-heart-of-gawker-lives-on-under-univision-update/)

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lwb
I am probably misunderstanding something here, but what's the point of buying
a company without owning the whole thing? What are they actually "buying"
here? I assume Temkin/CAH owns some significant portion of Clickhole so it's
not 100% employee owned? Else why would they do it?

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tomnipotent
> I assume Temkin/CAH owns some significant portion of Clickhole

Yes, 60% because they gave the other 40% to the existing employees.
Considering it has 5 FT employees, that sounds like a pretty good deal and a
great incentive to keep existing staff.

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vonmoltke
> Yes, 60% because they gave the other 40% to the existing employees.

The article mentions no numbers, buy it does specifically say the current
employees have a combined majority stake. Where did you get these numbers
from?

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skinnymuch
This was bothering me too. I couldn’t find numbers anywhere. Even though no
one is likely to see this as the post didn’t get big and this is over a day
old. Parent comment was continuing the hypothetical 40% CAH ownership of
grandparent.

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WilliamEdward
More employee owned companies please.

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wyxuan
surprised it went for only 1 mil

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donohoe
Very likely less then that.

