An update from your friendly neighborhood garbage man

Many years ago, there was a yearly internet-themed Halloween costume contest in New York City called Hallowmeme. And then, when the world needed it most, it vanished. Our next live show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn on October 27th is NOT Hallowmeme. But it is a tribute. It’s a night of comedy, music, some journalism, special guests, and, of course, a costume contest. Whoever shows up in the most brainrotted outfit wins a big prize. Click the big button below to pick up tickets before they sell out.

It’s been a big summer for Garbage Media and I think it’s time for a check in. Back in June, we hired Lisa Tozzi as our COO and the bulk of the conversations we’ve had since then have been about future-proofing our business. Or future-proofing an internet business as best as you can. Weirdly, none of these conversations have been about AI! I can happily say it really hasn’t factored into our business at all. In the last three months, ChatGPT has sent us about 40 subscribers.

We’ve largely been talking about subscriptions. How to best serve our subscribers. How to best connect the pieces of our operation. How to emulate companies like Nebula and Dropout, which are morphing into Netflix-like content hubs and full-blown production studios. We’ve also spent a lot of time talking about video.

I went into the summer believing that we needed to completely overhaul our operation. That becoming a video production company was an existential imperative. I, for a brief moment, feared that the age of newsletters and podcasts was over and that the future of digital media would only be found in what I’ve been referring to as the “decentralized Jimmy Fallon industrial complex.” The kids aren’t reading! So we have to build a studio and feed celebrities chicken wings in it if we want to survive. The internet is TV now and every show on the feed is a different game show host playing freshman year dorm room ice breaker games with a famous person, apparently.

Thankfully, I no longer believe that. I’ve met people working in the new world of “internet TV” and I just think it’s a terrible business. One supported by shady payola deals (ask yourself who’s paying for those celebrities to eat chicken wings and why), algorithmic inflation from platforms putting their thumbs on the scale (who will assuredly stop supporting those shows one day), and secret day jobs. Dig hard enough into the teams behind the “viral” clips on your feed and you’ll almost always find a branded content studio propping that “show” up as a loss leader.

I typically say that Garbage Day and the larger media company I inadvertently built around it over the last six years has never had much of a strategy. But that’s not really true. The main thing I cared about building was an alternative to the viral content mines I worked in during the 2010s. I wanted to own my distribution, to be free of algorithmic platform capture, and actually connect with an audience of real people. And I’m happy to say we’ve actually done that! And pivoting to video (groan) would mean burning a ton of cash building an entirely new business alongside the one I currently have or, worse, throwing away what we have to become a digital sharecropper on big platforms.

So here we are, barreling into 2027 with a new plan that we’re feeling good about. Here’s what what’s changing and here’s what’s staying the same.

This is the big one. I know you’re all probably very concerned about this, but I promise you it won’t hurt too bad. I’ve tried to keep prices for Garbage Day low because I believe that your price determines your audience and I don’t want to write for a bunch of rich people. That’s AI’s job! But we haven’t raised our prices basically since Garbage Day launched and we’ve grown into a much larger operation since then.

We hired Managing Editor Cates Holderness last June and we’ve expanded our consulting arm, GDMI, as well. We’ve put more of our content behind a paywall and expanded our research and reporting capabilities, led by Adam Bumas, across the entire Garbage Media organization. We hope you’ve seen the impact — deeper dives, more thorough insights, and a fresh influx of weird stuff in the P.S.’s. 

So the price of a Premium subscription to Garbage Day will be increasing from $5 a month or $45 annually to $6.66 a month or $69 annually. Those prices are, frankly, too funny to resist. This change will go into effect next Wednesday for both Garbage Day and Panic World. But we’ll remind you next week before the change happens. If you want to lock in on the lower annual rate, now’s the time!

For the last year, Panic World has been a part of Courier News. They’ve been fantastic partners and I want to thank them immensely for supporting us. Starting this week, however, we are officially independent.

My intrepid producer Grant Irving and I are a little nervous about this! But we’re also excited. We’re back to our regular weekly schedule starting next week. And we’ve got some big guests lined up for you and some great topics. We’ve also got a holiday live show coming later this year. Expect more details on that very soon.

Panic World will continue to be available on all platforms in audio and video, but we want to better integrate Panic World into what we do. Expect a regular widget for episodes in the newsletter every week and more bonus content for paying subscribers.

Speaking of bonus content…

You guys have been asking for more than a year that we bundle Panic World and Garbage Day together. For reasons both technical and financial, Garbage Day subscriptions have run on Beehiiv and Panic World have run on Patreon. That’s continuing, but we’re bundling them up finally, as well.

Starting very soon you will be able to subscribe to Panic World’s feed of ad-free episodes and bonus content on Beehiiv. There will be a discounted rate for those of you who want both the newsletter and the podcast all in one place. But we’re also unbundling!

Dropout, Nebula, and the other digital media companies building walled gardens have invested a lot of time in doing so. It seems to be working for them, but we just don’t have the resources to build — and populate — a Garbage Netflix yet. So, starting very soon, you will not only be able to buy a premium subscription to Panic World on Patreon and Beehiiv, but also Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and any another platform you have your credit card info loaded into. We’ve been calling this Project Reverse Dropout. We pride ourselves on being as open and accessible as we can be and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to, uh, give us money.

For the last year our advertising programs for Garbage Day and Panic World have been totally siloed. That ends today. You want to advertise with us? We’re now offering everything from ad placements within the newsletter to more integrated sponsorships, as well as audio/video ads on Panic World, and bundles that bring them all together.

We have over 100,000 newsletter readers, we average 250,000 downloads a month on our podcast, we’re regularly in Apple’s top 10 podcast list, and we have nearly 100,000 combined followers on social platforms. All of those channels are at your disposal to advertise on now. We want to work with brands looking to get in front of a passionate, digitally savvy audience in an authentic and memorable way. If you’re interested, please email [email protected].

We’re also looking for sponsors and partners for our live events. We're bringing Garbage Day Live to DC for the first time for a very special post-midterm show in mid-November! We'll be partnering with Run For Something, which has helped over 1,000 young progressives get elected across the country, for tales of how internet garbage shaped the campaign and how the internet can be fun and hopeful again. More details on this soon! We're looking for partners to sponsor the event. If your organization wants to be part of this, please email [email protected].

I’ll end here, back at the question of video. We spent the summer building out a new studio space in Brooklyn and building up our social accounts. Not because we have to, but because we want to. Our fabulous and genius social media intern Selia Hooten is staying on with us and will continue her deranged posting spree on our Instagram and, soon, across all our other social channels. She’s more than doubled our audience on Instagram since she joined and we’re so excited to see what new horrors she unearths.

Panic World will also continue to have video episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Patreon, soon here on Beehiiv, and, increasingly, those will be shot in our new studio. Which is just more fun than Riverside calls. But we’re also going to just keep throwing stuff at the wall when it comes to video. We’ll be messing around with livestreams and YouTube essays and social clips and, just like we did with the newsletter and podcast, eventually land on something that we like that you also like.

Every platform right now wants always-on TV-level productions and will thoughtlessly punish anyone who can’t post a 30-minute episode of television every week forever and 90-second clips every three hours on top of that. And, of course, they don’t provide the financial resources to make any of that sustainable. I think I’m just over that. It’s a scam and one that we — and you! — don’t have to buy into. Instead, we’re just going to do what we’ve always done: Have fun online.

None of this would be possible without you, our readers and listeners. We have the best damn audience in the world. Talking to you guys over email, in the Discord, or at live shows rocks and I wouldn’t ever trade that for millions of Meta views on a clip of me asking Timothée Chalamet about his Letterboxd or whatever.

P.S. here’s a really good video about garlic bread.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***