State of the B(l)og

Hello, readers!

Well, our first six months have sure been a wild ride! Remember when we said “let’s launch a feminist cultural criticism newsletter on Election Day, what could go wrong?”

In all seriousness though, a lot went right. Our subscriber base is growing, we’re publishing some truly amazing content, and we’re thinking ahead about sustainability and our role in the larger independent media ecosphere. We’re proud to be publishing alongside a range of outlets, comrades, and friends such as 404 Media, Defector, Flaming Hydra, and The Handbasket, showing that we can make this whole thing work, build community, and support each other. It’s incredibly exciting to see so many publications taking the plunge and proving that worker-owned independent media that is not beholden to the bosses can work, because you, dear readers, are making it happen. 

Because we Flytrap co-founders are relentlessly optimistic despite < gestures frantically > everything going on, we’ve set an ambitious goal for our six-month anniversary: recruiting 1,000 new paid Flytrap subscribers. Because we’re a worker-owned co-op committed to building a sustainable media company, paying freelancers fair rates, and putting journalistic rigor into everything we publish, we’re relying on paid subscriptions to keep The Flytrap fertilized for another year and beyond. It’s a big goal, and we’re offering 15% off all new subscriptions until May 13th as an incentive to new readers.

Maybe you’re thinking, Gosh, how much could it possibly cost to run a fuckin’ internet blog?

lol. lmao. rofl, even. We had the same thought when we first began putting the team together last year and came up with a wildly optimistic budget because we’re words people, not numbers people. The answer turned out to be: way more than we fucking thought. One thing about the indie media ecosystem that we love, and want to participate in, is transparency.

You should know how much things cost and how we’re doing! In that spirit, both to our Flytrap community and in the hopes of de-obfuscating the business of indie media for other folks thinking about taking the plunge (if that’s you, hit us up: we love supporting comrades in the struggle!), let’s run through the numbers.

Between our launch-the-blog fundraiser on Kickstarter and early subscriptions, we took in about $61,000 in gross income in 2024. Since then, it’s taken nearly $24,000 just to get The Flytrap off the ground (or, perhaps, planted in the bog). That’s:

• $5100 to Kickstarter and Stripe fees

• $4100 to business set-up and licensing expenses (lawyers are expensive!)

• $6000 to tax prep and payments (fuck Donald Trump)

• $5500 to fulfilling Kickstarter perks (our favorite expenditure, as far as that thing goes)

• $3100 to newsletter and site hosting, plus boring-but-necessary software for daily operations

We distributed an additional $15,000, split proportionally between the 10 co-founders, as remuneration for the work we put in together to launch The Flytrap last November. We’ve already published one freelance piece this year, and more are in the queue—at $0.50 a word, an industry-wide fair rate.

But! we haven’t yet paid ourselves in 2025 for our own work this year: the writing, the editing, the fact-checking, the copyediting, the designing, the simple-but-complicated nitty-gritty of simply publishing great stuff. We’ve got about $28,000 in the bank right now and we’ve made a whopping -$7,724.39 in profit in 2025. 

Turns out unfucking your algorithm is fuckin’ expensive!

And look, we brought this on ourselves! We own that, literally. We had an incredible first round of Kickstarter fundraising, but we absolutely have to grow our paid subscriber base to keep this here feminist media boat afloat.

But we can’t dine on subscriptions alone, and because nagging people to subscribe is not a viable business model, we’re diversifying our income streams in ways that we believe will bring real value and joy to the broader Flytrap community while making this work sustainable.

• The Flytrap Merch Store is already a big hit! It’s the destination if you want to get your grabby tendrils on prints of Flytrap Creative Director Rommy Torrico’s illustrations, “fuck the algorithm” and “trans on trains” gear, and Flytrap-branded merch of all kinds. 

• Our sister podcast, Cancel Me, Daddy, is now accepting ads and sponsorships (contact Multitude Productions for details). 

• We’re also taking in-newsletter ads and sponsorship deals for values-aligned folks who want to hype their own stuff in The Flytrap’s virtual pages. Reach out to flyteam @ theflytrapmedia.com or reply to this email for more details!

• Later this year, we’ll also be launching Flytrap Sessions: Workshops and classes that are open to the public, although paid subscribers get discounts and early enrollment. Coming up first, Flytrap co-founder Nicole Froio will give a workshop on how to read media critically and engage with cultural criticism. We’re also lining up workshops on topics of interest to fellow journalists, including pitching sharp feminist cultural criticism to the few outlets still printing it, reporting responsibly on marginalized populations, telling great immigration stories, and writing quality reproductive rights and justice coverage in a Trumpian hellscape.

Many of our business decisions are the direct result of feedback from readers. For example, when readers lobbied us for a monthly subscription tier, we delivered—$6.66 ($5.66, this week only!) opens up the entire Flytrap back catalog, and you can cancel any time! We also heard that some of you want an option to give us MORE MONEY, so we launched a BIG CHUNGUS tier at $1,000, which comes with some fun secret surprises and the pleasure of being a patron of discerning taste. 

We want to keep hearing from you about what you want to see because, as a worker-owned collective, we’re not producing things for suits in a corner office and chasing hockey-stick growth: We’re writing for us and for you! That’s why Residents of the Bog and BIG CHUNGUSes get to join us for a quarterly editorial hangout where we talk all things Flytrap, what you’re liking (and hating) and our collective future; the next one is coming up on May 22. 

If you’ve made it this far, it’s a little late for the tl;dr but the bottom line is this: We need you along with us for this journey, so we’re offering a 15% discount on paid subscriptions until May 13th—and if you’re having any problems paying or upgrading, please reach out to us!

As ever, and forever: fuck the algorithm.

– The Flytrap co-founders

Andrea, Aria, Chrissy, Christine, Evette, Katelyn, Nicole, Rommy, Tina, and s.e.