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So Cracked got gutted of all their talent

TheChuggernaut

TheChuggernaut

Member
Oct 25, 2017
18,734
https://splinternews.com/cracked-lays-off-25-as-the-great-digital-media-purge-co-1821055164

So, Cracked ended up letting go about 25 this week, and the people they let go are pretty much the people who made Cracked, Cracked. Not to mention they pretty much ended their video content.

Among others the list includes:
Cody Johnston (The host of the extreamly good Some News series.)
Robert Evans (Dude who did all of their personal experience articles.)
Daniel O'Brien
John Cheese
Katy Stoll

I discovered the site when I was still in high school, and the articles I read there were very important to me in those years, and they were basically why my political leaning moved to the left instead of the right like my parents.

I had mostly stopped reading the site because the ads they had on the site was terrible, but I still kept up with their Youtube content because they had a lot of talent over there, not to mention a truly great series once and a while like People Watching and Some News.

While it's not dead, the people who were employed were the reason I still tried to keep up with the site, and now there's only like 1 or 2 people there I still follow. It's a shame watching something that was so important at one point just up and basically die so quickly.
 
jwk94

jwk94

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,130
Wait, where's the rest of the crew from that diner segment? They only let go DOB?
 

Mr.LightMan

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
313
Yeah heard the news as it was happening. They let all? Of there video team go, that sucks. Swain goes into some detail about what happened in his YouTube channel.
 
AYF 001

AYF 001

Member
Oct 28, 2017
803
If any of them are looking for a new home, I hear there's a great site where they could settle down...
 
Zubz

Zubz

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,565
no
I wonder why they got rid of so many people? And I'm assuming it's a "no," but I take it Seanbaby's no longer there?
 
Oligarchenemy

Oligarchenemy

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,316
Cracked is the latest media brand to feel the pain of diminishing ad dollars in a world controlled by tech giants. The “pivot to video” many publishers have pursued to jumpstart growth in that environment has largely failed to deliver at a sustainable scale.
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It's amazing to think that all these businesses are that used YouTube as a host are all crashing thanks to PewDiePie. The guy fucked everyone on the platform.
 

Deleted member 19844

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 28, 2017
3,500
United States
I was really bummed about this when I heard. I listened to a stream by Michael Swaim where he went into the reasons why he left a while back (partly because he learned of the upcoming layoffs), and the direction the company is taking. It's a more fiscally conservative company now and that meant getting rid of the video content because that's so much more expensive to produce than the freelance articles they curate for the site.

For me, I've purely been about their video content for the past year, and I enjoyed series like OPCD, After Hours, Some News, If Commercials Were Honest, and even some of the more random edutainment videos. It's a shame and I hope all of them land on their feet in a better job / project.

Oh, and add Katie Willert to the list of folks that'll be missed.
 
Pein

Pein

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,408
NYC
I forgot about cracked, buzzfeed dominated the list article thing now I’m guessing
 
Alwayscrazybacon

Alwayscrazybacon

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
5,159
China
I read the site daily and it's one of my favorites. However I only ever watched a few of their videos as the text humor did not really translate well to that media. So I guess that's the right decision to cut back on that. I have not seen John Cheese write any articles for a long long time. His ones covering poverty, alcoholism and an abusive father were really interesting.
 
Beartruck

Beartruck

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
4,939
Wow, thats more than a normal loss of talent. Thats an exodus. There's basically no reason for me to ever go there now.
 
HardTimesFamilyPride

HardTimesFamilyPride

Member
Oct 26, 2017
6,623
Appalachia
Holy shit, all the people I enjoyed and all the people there that my friend in the industry knows

what is going on

TheChuggernaut said:
I had mostly stopped reading the site because the ads they had on the site was terrible, but I still kept up with their Youtube content because they had a lot of talent over there, not to mention a truly great series once and a while like People Watching and Some News.
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It's really fucking weird to me because aforementioned friend was talking to me about her conversations with the Cracked people and the whole idea they were pursuing was that the site wasn't working financially so they were going to lean hard on video content.... this is so outta left field in my eyes

EDIT: Gattsu25 that makes sense, thanks for the explanation!
 
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Deleted member 3058

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Oct 25, 2017
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ZackieChan said:
Can you explain this?
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This is all from memory but:
He released a video where he paid people to say death to the jews which resulted in Disney dropping him, this was big news.
Other advertisers and the media then started looking at what videos ads were airing under and they found a lot of foul shit (isis videos, pedo videos, etc).
This got advertisers extremely upset and, despite being a problem for years, was the first time they were made aware of the issue.
Before this point, YouTube would distribute ads as they saw fit and the advertisers videos would appear over relevant demographic segments automatically (the way youtube has operated for years) but now the advertisers wanted fine-tuned control over where their ads aired and they wanted that control down to the individual channel (which would be the instant death knell of every single small-medium sized youtube channel).
A workaround was found where youtube would demonetize videos that advertisers found objectionable which had unintended affects like demonetizing just about every single pro-lgbt video on the platform.
So further revisions were made.
Each major wave of changes had the end result of dramatically reducing the ad revenue that youtube channels receive which they started calling the "adpocalypse".
The assertion there is that Cracked likely fell as a result of losing out on the ad revenue that kept the company sustainable.
No one is happy with the current situation.
Youtube has pledged to hire 10,000 people to manually check out videos/comments to screen them for objectionable content.


Edit: typos
 
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FootChar

FootChar

Member
Oct 25, 2017
53
I'm really going to miss Some News. Hopefully some of them can pivot into their own thing, like Easy Allies.
 

Randomly Generated

Member
Oct 27, 2017
15,928
People saying this is because of YouTube's changes, isn't it also true that video ads in general haven't turned out to be the savior of online content as much as people thought? I know a lot of newspapers tried to transition to video content (often annoyingly embedded and auto-playing in articles) and I don't think it's done much to turn around their sliding revenues, has it? Just seems like in general it's hard to make money online these days.
 
DeadPhoenix

DeadPhoenix

Member
Oct 25, 2017
404
FootChar said:
I'm really going to miss Some News. Hopefully some of them can pivot into their own thing, like Easy Allies.
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Some of them are already doing this, I watched a video the other night where one of the guys from After Hours(i forget the name... the big guy who is not DOB or Soren) talks about what happened and what he is working on. He mentions multiple podcasts and some other stuff.
 
Aprikurt

Aprikurt

Nintendo Die-rect
Member
Oct 29, 2017
13,783
Oh well, at least they have “Photoplasty” contests where people describe the “funniest” thing that ever happened to them in Word Art.

Jesus that site took a dive.
 
The Almighty Tria

The Almighty Tria

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
6,411
This site has become so bad for a variety of reasons that it doesn't surprise me. The content especially had become clickbait garbage and went away from what made Cracked so good in the first place.
 
Nairume

Nairume

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,480
ScreenSplitter said:
Oh well, at least they have “Photoplasty” contests where people describe the “funniest” thing that ever happened to them in Word Art.

Jesus that site took a dive.
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Today was outright "Top popular things I don't like"

It's a shame they dumped all the actual talent, because I've honestly been getting turned off due to all the low quality freelance stuff they've been going with lately.
 
HardTimesFamilyPride

HardTimesFamilyPride

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Oct 26, 2017
6,623
Appalachia
DeadPhoenix said:
Some of them are already doing this, I watched a video the other night where one of the guys from After Hours(i forget the name... the big guy who is not DOB or Soren) talks about what happened and what he is working on. He mentions multiple podcasts and some other stuff.
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Damn beat me to it.

I hit up my friend who knows a few of them and she sent me that vid and this pic (I can verify to the mods if need be):
 
Codeblue

Codeblue

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,653
I stopped visiting Cracked when Wong had a meltdown that destroyed their forums, but I still watched After Hours and Cody Johnston on Youtube. Looking at that list though, that's essentially everyone I recognize from the site. That's insane.
 
Vermillion

Vermillion

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,717
This actually makes me so sad. There's very little these days that makes me laugh to the point that I'm crying. I remember reading prime Cracked when I was in college, waiting for class to start. It was really hard not to just start laughing loudly in the hallway. Louis CK is a sexual predator... Chapelle's humor is dated...

I have nothing :(
 
EMM

EMM

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
180
To me, Cracked was a magazine and I still have a lot of those issues on storage lol

It died long ago.
 

Mr.LightMan

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
313
Well at least Cody Johnson said he's looking into a patreon. Hope he continues doing some news cause that was amazing. Also, DOB is tops.
 
eKongDiddy

eKongDiddy

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 31, 2017
2,389
Beach City
I also found Cracked when I was in Highschool. They didn’t affect my political views, though. I went there for the hilarious articles, news, and stories that I otherwise wouldn’t hear about. I actually stopped going because the community started becoming toxic and the articles focused way too much on politics instead of the old style of articles and what not. I loved those photoshop contests, unknown fact articles, and “so you’ve ended up here stories” . I entered into a few myself. Haven’t been on there in a while.

The site has been going down hill for a while.
 
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