• by Ray Schultz , February 12, 2024

404 Media, a tech news startup barely six months old, is already profitable, its founders claim.  

While declining to give numbers, the four journalists behind it have been able to take back the money they put in--$1,000 apiece, NiemanLab reports. 

404 Media’s mission? 

“Our goal is to find niche communities and see what they care about, what they’re happy and excited about, and what they’re really upset about,” cofounder Jason Koebler says, according to Niemanlab. “We want the communities that we’re writing about to read these articles and be like, ‘Okay, they got it right.’ But we don’t want to be so insular that only those people are interested.” 

On the other hand, “We see how Google is degrading in quality,” says cofounder Emanuel Maiberg in an email, NiemanLab continues. “We see how AI content mills are digesting our stories and gaming the system to get more views than our original reporting they’re ripping off.”

Maiberg adds,“It’s important to us, and we think it’s important to our readers to know why we’re doing what we’re doing, but it’s also in the public interest to know what Google, AI, content mills, etc. are doing to the general health of the information environment.”

The full NiemanLab article can be read here.