Cards Against Humanity rescues ClickHole from its private equity owners
Cards Against Humanity has purchased parody website ClickHole from digital media company G/O Media in an all-cash deal with and will make it a majority-employee-owned company, BuzzFeed News reported today.
Cards Against Humanity is allowing ClickHole to operate as an independent organization and giving it financial support, which essentially means that the makers of one of the funniest card games out there have bought a website that specializes in regularly mocking the clickbait-iest things on the internet. Oh, and Cards Against Humanity is basically giving ClickHole free reign to write whatever they want. It’s the perfect match.
“We just want to give [ClickHole] a chance to do their thing,” Cards Against Humanity co-creator Max Temkin told BuzzFeed News. “Our goal is to take some of the pressure off of them so they can shake some of these managerial shakes ups they’ve had and just focus on making amazing comedy,” Temkin told BuzzFeed News.
The purchase means that ClickHole should be free from the shackles of G/O Media, a company so plagued by mismanagement that the entire staff of sports website Deadspin quit at the end of October of last year. ClickHole was originally part of comedy publication The Onion, which was bought by Univision in 2016 and later sold (along with other sites like Jezebel and Deadspin) to a private equity firm under the brand G/O Media. The Onion will remain with G/O Media, BuzzFeed News reports.
Earlier this month, the union representing editorial workers of G/O Media delivered a vote of no-confidence in the company’s CEO, Jim Spenfeller, and has asked the company’s owners, private equity firm Great Hill Partners, to remove him.
Cards Against Humanity, which launched in 2012 thanks to a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, has evolved into a proper business, and that success has allowed the company formed by Temkin and his collaborators to pull off all sorts of stunts that often toy with the absurdities of capitalism. The latest is apparently on the level of buying an entire media brand.
Last November, the company had its human joke writers compete with an AI to see who could write the funniest jokes and threatened to fire all of the humans if the internet voted for the AI, for example. (The humans won.) The company also once purchased an entire island in Maine that it dubbed Hawaii 2.
Cards Against Humanity has purchased parody website ClickHole from digital media company G/O Media in an all-cash deal with and will make it a majority-employee-owned company, BuzzFeed News reported today. Cards Against Humanity is allowing ClickHole to operate as an independent organization and giving it financial support, which essentially means…
