In the headwinds of today’s online economy, digital media companies are feeling the pinch of shrinking viewership, saturated markets, and debt-heavy, bloated parent companies. In this era of uncertainty, we believe the market is ripe for a disruptive media group that asks: What if there was a company that did more of the same, but more so? A company that doesn’t dwell on the baggage of past lessons, and stares straight into the blinding light of the future. It’s time to meet a new kind of digital media startup.
We call ourselves YouthBlade Media. We decided this is a name that strikes the perfect balance of rebellious excitement and inoffensive vagueness that will help us reward our shareholders before this rocket ship goes Columbia, if you know what we mean. But if you think our media disruptiveness ends at our name, then you’re in for a rude surprise.
We’re hiring and firing writers at an incredibly disruptive rate. We feel this better positions us to compete with the generation of writers whose careers we’ve kneecapped.
We’ve spared no expense recruiting prestige essayists from the New York Times, The Washington Post, and, due to a miscommunication with our recruiter, Allrecipes.com. These writers will help us establish a name and reputation, and, until we figure out a site they can write on, we say their $400,000-a-year salaries are well worth the investment.
As for the rest of our writers, we’re cutting back on the needless excesses that hobble larger, more successful companies. Our average staffers, or ‘pawns’ as we affectionately like to call them, will earn a competitive-but-sensible annual salary of $18,000, plus generous health benefits composed of one lime per week to prevent scurvy.
Certainly, some writers may balk at being required to commute from a homeless camp to our offices in the New York Financial District, but they’re only showing how uncommitted they are to our revolutionary mission.
What is our mission? Our mission draws from a range of inspirations: South American Air Traffic Control, The Tower of Babel, even Vice. In short, our mission is to unite a diverse group of readership under an umbrella of groundbreaking websites to stake a cultural claim in the digital age.
Wow, that actually sounded pretty good! We should really write that down somewhere.
We’re in debt, and expanding rapidly: We may be 200 billion dollars in the hole on this thing, but assuming we reach our modest goal of becoming the largest media company on earth, we should be profitable as early as 2044.
Our incoming class of interns is the coolest, most well-qualified1 and diverse2 group of our executives’ nephews our company has ever seen.
Every day that passes, we only become more disruptive!
Our average reader is an 18-24-year-old Russian hacker making over $200,000 a year that we pay him to boost our traffic numbers!
Our web properties are incredibly woke, but also unafraid of being politically incorrect!
Our clickbait sites are expanding into hard-hitting news! Our respected news teams will write lists of skateboarding fails!
We’re going to kill God and write a blog about it!
Ultimately, we’re a simple startup, with a revolutionarily simple business model: Borrow, spend, and pray. And if that doesn’t sound rebellious enough to pique your interest, we hope the slogan we spent millions of dollars on focus-grouping will:
We’re YouthBlade Media. Check Us Out.©
1 As our first group of interns, they are also our least qualified, if you want to be a drag about it.
2 See above.