The Onion's big plans for InfoWars

When Ben Collins took over as CEO of The Onion, the satirical institution was making under $2 million a year almost entirely from chumbox advertising — the junk ads at the bottom of web pages that nobody clicks on purpose. He turned that off within three months. The business model was going to collapse in six months anyway. Collins replaced it with a subscription newspaper, bespoke ad partnerships, and a copywriting agency. The Onion now has 80,000 subscribers at $75 a year. The pivot was not just financial. It was a bet that people wanted something physical, manual, and obviously human-made in an era of algorithmic slop.

The real-world bet

Collins's operating principle is that corporations have abandoned physical spaces, leaving them wide open for smaller, nimbler operators. The Onion prints a newspaper and ships it in vanilla envelopes using a custom-built robot arm and dryer sheets to reduce friction. They do not care about Google search traffic. Their most viral story of the year — "I work very hard and I would like to try a cake" by a horse — spread through screenshots in text messages and across LinkedIn. Collins measures success in "vibes." The assumption is that good vibes equal subscriptions, which equal a sustainable business. He argues that if you want to reach actual human beings, you have to go where they are physically, because the internet's massive numbers