Happy birthday, Garbage Day

My researcher Adam Bumas keeps pushing me to celebrate Garbage Day’s anniversary every year and I have come around to the opinion that he’s right. We should. Yesterday, Garbage Day turned seven years old. What started a weekly roundup of weird stories my editors weren’t interested in has turned into a media company that now employs half a dozen people. Also, fun fact: I started Garbage Day after my former coworker Cates Holderness was laid off at BuzzFeed and I was kind of bored and lonely at work. The posts I was putting in those early emails were basically just the kind of stuff we’d usually share with each other throughout the day. And now she’s my managing editor! That’s crazy!

There’s a lot going on right now behind the scenes, so I’d love to pull the curtain back a bit and share what we’ve been up to.

The top line news here is that Garbage Media (the real actual name of our company lol) is growing, healthy, and profitable. I have serious PTSD from working in the viral content mines in the 2010s, where everyone’s eggs were in the Facebook basket, so we don’t rely on any one single form of revenue (or traffic) and that’s worked pretty well for us! A combination of paid subscribers, advertisements, live events, editorial partnerships, and, most recently, consulting, means our finances are pretty stable month to month. We’re in spitting distance of $1 million in revenue this year and even if we don’t make it, we’re still doing just fine.

On the newsletter front, we had a pretty crazy 2025. Our Charlie Kirk and Jeffrey Epstein coverage pushed us over 100,000 readers and, honestly, probably gave us a bit of an identity crisis lol. Sorry if we, uh, did do too much political coverage or, uh, not enough. We keep turning a big dial that says "Journalism" on it and constantly looking back at our audience for approval like a contestant on The Price Is Right. Our open rates took a bit of a dip last quarter thanks to a new change Gmail apparently made, but they still hover around 40% and we have a plan to clean up our list a bit. And thanks to free trials and partial paywalls, we have well over 5% of our audience converted to paid. Not too shabby. We also have a paid churn rate of basically zero. You guys seem very content lol.

Our podcast Panic World won two Signal Awards last year, which is very cool. And it’s currently getting around 100,000-200,000 monthly downloads, which is also very cool. But I think what I’m proudest of is the fact Courier, our partner on the show, was able to send my producer Grant Irving and I to Minneapolis back in January and record an episode on the ground during the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities. Felt like a real Growing Up moment for us.

Here’s one last data point that I find interesting: Panic World has a Patreon for bonus content and while it’s about half as big as Garbage Day’s paid audience, it’s growing at nearly double the speed. Which has raised some interesting questions. Is Panic World’s audience just more parasocial and engaged? Are podcasts simply better at converting a paying audience? Is it something to do with Patreon’s ecosystem? We can’t figure it out, but have theories we’ll be continuing to test. Let me know if you have any.

Garbage Day Live is probably the thing I’m most excited about right now. We think that we’ve got something really special that sets us apart from other indie media companies and also my stage manager Alex Petros and I just really enjoy putting on a show lol. We’re wrapping up a three-month run at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn next week. Our last show features podcaster PJ Vogt and comedian Wyatt Cenac. We sold out last month and we’re on track to do so again next week.

We’ve been talking a lot about what the future of Garbage Day Live is and the original plan was to tour it, but with gas prices surging, we’re currently leaning more towards making it a monthly show here in New York and coming up with recording and clipping strategy. Though we aren’t saying no to the right opportunities to travel with it. They just have to make sense. I’d love to take it to comedy or musical festivals. The goal, no matter what we do next, though, remains the same: Entertain people, connect with our audience beyond the screen, and, have fun.

While Garbage Day Live is what I’m, personally, having the most fun with right now, GDMI, our consulting group, is probably actually the most exciting thing happening at Garbage Media right now. We’ve had a ton of requests from our readers and it’s already become a massive revenue driver for us. In the last quarter it’s generated about a fifth of our total revenue across all of 2025. Wow! Perhaps selfishly, however, I just think the work is really interesting. The research projects we’re getting from clients are taking our team down internet rabbit holes that we would never normally explore. If you or your company want to work with our research team, you can email GDMI’s director, Lester Feder, at [email protected] and if you hit “yes” on the survey below, you’ll be added to a spin-off list we’re building for readers who are interested in receiving updates about GDMI.

As you all have probably noticed already, we’re trying to figure out video, both for Garbage Day and for our podcast Panic World. I’ve basically given up on short-form video as a concept lol. We’ll still be posting them, but we’ve had a lot more luck just really focusing on YouTube. Panic World just rolled over 10,000 subscribers over there and now we’re building up the Garbage Day channel with our new video editor Dan Méth, as well. I tend to see YouTube as more of a real estate play than anything else. It’s just TV now. And while I don’t love investing in an audience we can’t directly reach, like with email and RSS, we’re going to keep chipping away there. Our newest video dropped this morning.

Last but not least, though probably the most inside baseball of all of this, is our advertising business. Which I stuck down here because I assume the average person loathes digital advertising and never wants to ever hear about it, but maybe some industry folks are curious. We’ve been selling ads in our free issues for a flat rate of around $1,000-$2,000 and that has worked decently well so far. (I hate CPM deals.) Our ad calendar is mostly full for the next quarter. But my ad manager Josh Fjelstad and I have been trying to figure out something more interesting. Ads are kind of boring and we’ve been designing on a new sponsorship plan that we think could be more interesting for both readers and advertisers. Here’s what that looks like if you’re interested. And if you’re interested in any kind of advertising, feel free to email Josh at [email protected].

Things are pretty exciting around Garbage HQ these days. I continually have to tell myself that the “problems” that we run up against aren’t real problems. Not really. We’re paying the rent and having a lot of fun, which is an extreme privilege these days. And I never really thought we’d get this big. Like My Chemical Romance after the release of The Black Parade, I am spending a lot of time now trying to figure out what’s next and what’s possible. What does our Fabulous Killjoys era look like? Etc.

Well, I’ll end here by trying to answer that question. I think companies like Dropout and Nebula have already given us a glimpse of where digital media is headed. If the creator economy used to be parasocial TV shows and personal brands, the future is parasocial TV channels and studios. Bundled newsletters, podcast networks, Patreon-supported content ecosystems that fans pay a single price to access. This is happening both because indie media has gotten good enough to make it interesting for audiences and, also, I think, because it offers people a moat for all the garbage on their feeds. I used to think of a paid subscription as the digital equivalent of an NPR tote bag. In a world of slop, I think the closest comparison would be fresh produce in a food desert.

We plan to invest more there this year, while, obviously, explaining all the garbage you’re seeing, as well. Thanks for all your support. We couldn’t have gotten here without our amazing community. Long live, Garbage Day.

P.S. here’s an incredible breakfast sandwich.

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