Game company Cards Against Humanity has purchased ClickHole — a parody website established by The Onion that satirizes virality-obsessed sites and listicle publishers like BuzzFeed and Upworthy.
Cards purchased ClickHole from current owner G/O Media in an all cash deal reportedly worth less than $1 million, according to BuzzFeed News. In the wake of the acquisition, ClickHole’s employees — it currently counts five full-time staffers — will become majority owners of the site. The Onion, however, will continue to be owned by G/O Media.
Cards co-founder Max Temkin told BuzzFeed News that it will fund the hiring of additional ClickHole staffers amid the site’s exploration of new revenue streams. Though Cards Against Humanity and ClickHole are both based in Chicago — and their staffs have known one another from the local comedy scene for years — ClickHole will continue to operate as an independent entity and won’t be involved in Cards Against Humanity content creation.
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“We’re leaving a place with a very robust editorial infrastructure to essentially go build a new digital media company from scratch,” ClickHole editor-in-chief Steve Etheridge told BuzzFeed News. “Cards is giving us total freedom to do our thing, but that freedom comes with a lot of new responsibility, and we really just want to get it right. Our goal is to make ClickHole better than ever before.”
Founded in 2014, ClickHole’s parent company Onion Inc. was purchased by Univision in 2016, which it later sold to Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm that then formed a media company called G/O Media with The Onion as well as other properties it had purchased, including Jezebel, Deadspin, and The Root. BuzzFeed notes that there has been a lot of friction between G/O and its editorial properties, including the shuttering of political site Splinter, and a mass exodus of the entire staff at Deadspin following a conflict over editorial independence.
