I recall reading somewhere that the high-quality Onion videos of a decade-plus ago (I loved Today Now and Sex House) cost a lot of money but simply didn't make much money. Which I guess is obvious if a for-profit company stopped making them, but still, it is a shame quality wasn't rewarded.

They're merely adapting their product to the unforgiving dramatic shifts in the market's consumption model. Those that don't (like College Humor), die.

They’ve been funded my whoever pay their bills. For ONN/Today Now, that was paid for by IFC, a TV network. Their Onion Digital years (Sex House, Onion Talks) were basically ads for them as a creative agency (aka Onion Labs, which was shut down in late 2015). Since then, they were sold to G/O Media, and have been basically been gutted.

There’s more than one series which was funded by a streaming platform that has since shut down, and is basically lost media at this point.

My impression (as an American abroad with no longer any dog in the partisan political fight) is that The Onion has come to feature a lot more (and a lot more acrid) political satire than in the late 1990s or early 2000s. That would only be expected, because even real newspapers have found that increasing coverage of hot-button politics or other culture wars can boost ad impressions.

me reading 89th "attack helicopter" joke in a row: WHEEZE

A shocking amount of Babylon Bee articles have predicted the future too.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2022/05/30/babyl...

Reality has really started to make satirists jobs difficult.

Hard disagree. The Babylon Bee is wildly unfunny, incapable of even the most basic principles of humor most of the time. Half of it is the same few jokes repeated over and over again.