Cards Against Humanity buys Clickhole, turning it into an employee-owned company | Hacker News Reader

Cards Against Humanity buys Clickhole, turning it into an employee-owned company

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312 pointscoloneltcb55 comments

> 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?

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.

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.

My goodness, I had completely forgotten about Sex House.

Just this month they released a Podcast and it's pretty good.

Indeed, I had been under the impression that ClickHole wasn't distinct from The Onion at all. I thought it was just a domain name they used for comedic effect, so that they didn't have to post under theonion.com/clickhole or something.

This, thought its just "The Onion, but Buzzfeed style instead of news site style"

They've been separate entities for years. The Onion under Univision became more of a digital production house. Editorial staff was always distinct. I presume that the handful of people leaving are writers, and they'll need to staff up around operations.

> the deal will allow ClickHole to bring on additional staff — it currently has only five full-time employees

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

No.

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.

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.

I'm a little unclear on the specifics too, even after reading the article. The article says "majority employee-owned company" So Cards Against Humanity still retains some ownership in it I presume.

Here's one possibility: Maybe they bought ClickHole, and gifted over 50% of shares to the employees?

Just a guess: Clickhole the company, owned by the employees, owes CAH $1M.

I thought so.

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.

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 ) that aspect of it must have been figured out by now.

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!

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

Sounds like classic mismanagement to me. Part of being employee owned is that you need to manage the age profile of you're employees and make sure you don't get too much equity build up in any one group. Otherwise greedy idiots end up owning 80% of the company. Then they can't sell it for fair value because there are no buyers when they want to leave...

My father has worked for an employee-owned company for the past few decades; he joined when there were maybe 50 people, and now I think there's maybe on the order of several hundred. He's starting to get close to retirement age now, but sometime back in the late 90s/early 2000s, he had to pick a date in advance for when he'd start selling his stock back to the company because they wouldn't have enough cash to buy it all back at once if they waited until he did retire. That date occurred a few years ago, so he's already sold back most of his stock to the company even though he doesn't plan on retiring for another several years. Obviously this strategy doesn't handle stuff like freak accidents that would have made it impossible for him to continue working, but having the company and employee agree on a date well before the expected age of retirement to start selling the stock back seems like a no-brainer.

That's something am employee owned company plans, yours did not.

I'm surprised how quickly it fell apart too! I joined the company thinking it has had stable growth for decades. Certainly with the founders in their 80s this should not have been a surprise!

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

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

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.

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...

To anyone unfamiliar with G/O Media and Great Hill Partners, look up the phrase "Jim Spanfeller is a Herb." The story of Deadspin's extremely avoidable implosion is a debacle of private-equity mismanagement for the ages.

There's a good overview here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/death...

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?

"ClickHole’s employees will become the majority owners of the site."

Buying something to only own 40% (for example) is fine if the price is good, or you want to keep it safe.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

You're not - there isn't one. "To be nice" isn't a "point" under capitalism, there's less profit to be had with that and is hard to represent on a balance sheet. Thing is, CAH frequently doesn't follow the "point" of capitalism. One year they bought a pointless hole - ie, bought some land, rented a digger, and paid a worker to dig a hole. Another year they took the proceeds from a sale, and just gave the money away.[https://cardsagainsthumanityredistributesyourwealth.com/] Or bought an island to give away.

There is arguably value derived for CAH via these stunts, in the form of marketing and branding and such but it's less direct. In this case, CAH is supporting fellow local artist group Clickhole. Both groups are based in chicago and have know each other of years through the local comedy scene. By buying the site and giving it to the employees - arguably those that would know the best how to run it, CAH is buying it's continued existence with a very hands-off approach. The opposite of helicopter parenting, as it were.

How or what do you know about the two companies knowing one another through the local comedy scene?

After rising from the dead, the media mogul, Hurst, saw what a joke his empire had become - vowing revenge - he has taken to amassing a portfolio of the worlds best parody news and entertainment properties he can get his rotting zombie mitts on.

A source close to the matter was quoted as saying “Holy shit! The onion is finally in some real news!! The end is neigh!”

More employee owned companies please.

surprised it went for only 1 mil

Very likely less then that.

I’m not. Click hole is a funny concept. But it’s not that funny for that long. I love Alan Resnick, who sometimes contributes (or at least used to?). But even his click bait Dadaism grew stale. I’m surprised they have regular visitors.

That being said, Cards Against Humanity is also pretty crap in my opinion. It’s mostly just shock value, which deteriorates greatly after the first session. It’s copy cat games are even worse (e.g. what do you meme?) as they tend to triple down on the shock value and the faux millennial sarcastic celebration of being a total loser...

That’s not to say the game is necessarily bad for being mostly a one time thrill, but man do I hate it when people pull it out at a party

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