Cards Against Humanity is one of the better known adult/humour card games, and with that fame they’ve been able to spend money on some truly random stuff over the years. Pieces of the US/Mexico border (plus lawyers) to try and fight Trump’s border wall, an island in Maine that was renamed ‘Hawaii 2’, and so on. And now it’s gone and bought Clickhole, a satirical news website that was founded to be The Onion’s take on clickbait-centric websites.
The difference now, though, is that CAH seems to have purchased the site with its own money, rather than crowdfunding.
Here’s where the story gets a bit complicated. Up until this sale, Clickhole was part of G/O Media, the news organisation formed when Univision sold the Gizmodo Media Group to private equity firm Great Hill Partners. Yes, that means they’re the company that owns Gizmodo US, and whose management has been the source of great controversy. (I should add that Gizmodo UK is run by Future, who generally leaves us to do whatever the hell we like.)
Stateside it’s got to the point where the GMG Union, which represents the staff at G/O Media, have delivered a vote of no confidence in CEO Jim Spanfeller over his management. Management that, among other things, led to a mass resignation of Deadspin staff after the firing of interim Editor in Chief Barry Petchesky for not “sticking to sports”.
Now, though, Clickhole is away from all that as part of Cards Against Humanity. Sort of, anyway, because it’s been confirmed that not only will Clickhole and CAH be independent of one another (with no writing crossovers), it will also be majority owned by its staff. CAH co-founder Max Temkin said:
“We’re giving them funding, and if they ask us, we’ll be an advisor. WWe just want to give them a chance to do their thing. They’re really capable ” really smart and innovative. And I don’t know if they’ve had that opportunity before to try all these creative [ideas for the site].”
Steve Etheridge, editor-in-chief of ClickHole, told BuzzFeed News:
“We’re leaving a place with a very robust editorial infrastructure to essentially go build a new digital media company from scratch. Cards is giving us total freedom to do our thing, but that freedom comes with a lot of new responsibility, and we really just want to get it right. Our goal is to make ClickHole better than ever before.”
Later adding:
“We will be sad to leave all our friends at The Onion except for this one guy Nick, who sucks. The good news is that security at The Onion office is very poor, so we can break in and visit our friends any time we want.”
The Onion and its other associated sites will remain part of G/O Media, as will everything else. Presumably until the owners get good enough offers to sell the brands off. [Buzzfeed News]
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo UK, which is gobbling up the news in a different timezone.