Defector's Jasper Wang: "You just have to know your audience"
Jasper Wang, co-owner and VP of revenue & operations, talks about the business side of the employee-owned blog.
Updated 3/2/2025. This post was originally featured on The Content Audit (formerly: thecontentaudit.substack.com), a standalone blog project about blogs. It now lives here, at Logan Blog.
Defector is a good blog
Defector is a sports and culture blog that kicked off in 2020. Its tagline: “The last good website.” Its founders: 18 former staffers for Deadspin, the G/O Media-owned sports blog, plus one longtime Deadspin reader with an MBA who left a lucrative consulting job to help them build a blog business. (The Deadspin alums had mass quit a year earlier after their editor was fired for a dumb reason.) Defector is employee-owned (good and important) and in 2023 had $4.5 million in revenue (a lot of money). Most of that—85%— is from reader subscriptions.
Jasper Wang, the guy with the MBA, is Defector’s co-founder and vice president of revenue & operations. We talked about Defector and the blog business.
LOGAN SACHON: When was it clear that Defector would need a business person?
JASPER WANG, DEFECTOR: It was 18 editorial staffers when they started, it was obvious they’d need one. Stuff just has to get done. It’s not, “you need to have an MBA” work, but someone has to process invoices, talk to the developer, answer emails. We now have two full-time business people, me and Sean Kuhn, who has a data science background and came to us from the Athletic. He and I have very complementary skillsets. I spent all my twenties in Excel, but I’m not a “big data” person. He has that training.
You’re up to 25 people in the company now. Do new employees become co-owners?
Yes, new employees have equity that vests after one year with the company. But I should note that traditionally when we talk about "ownership" in a company, we're talking about three things: one, voting rights; two, participation in ongoing profits (e.g., stock dividends), and three, participation if the enterprise gets sold off.
Defector already gives the rights of the first two to all employees. Our operating agreement assigns one vote per employee (not shareholder) to many major company decisions, and all employees (not shareholders) participate in profit share. So the vesting equity is really just to solve for the third thing, which is sort of a moot point in most scenarios, as really we're much more likely to run this company into the ground than sell it.
Can you talk to me about ads? With 85% of your money from subscriptions, it’s not a big part of your revenue model.
When we talk about the Defector model, we’re mostly talking about the ownership structure and the operating structure, but I think sometimes people conflate that with “subscription only.”
The reason we don’t do ads is because we are bad at advertising, not because we are against it. There’s another version of this site where it wasn’t me sitting in the seat, it was someone who had more of a sales mindset, and advertising was a bigger chunk of the revenue pie.
But the ad tech part of it is hard. For big ad sales, you need the splashy home page—our platform, no disrespect, isn’t built for that. And we don’t necessarily want that anyway. We haven’t yet found an ad vendor where it’s like, “We believe you, we don’t think you’ll piss off our readers.”
Defector has three podcasts, which appear to contribute a good chunk to that other 15% of your revenue. Do you think blogs need a podcast arm?
No, I don’t think anyone needs to be in the podcast space. That is a place feeling in crisis, especially middle-class podcasts not getting the Joe Rogan deal. Any ad-supported media, that’s a scale game. If you have a thing and you want to do it, sure, but I don’t think you need to have a chatcast for the sake of having a chatcast.(Ed note, bc I had to clarify later: A chatcast is a podcast where people just …. chat. The “low lift” of podcasts.)
I read that all of your writers/owners are encouraged to do podcast interviews and media interviews. But is it required?
You don’t have to say yes to everything, but we do think of it as part of your job. We get enough downstream responses through reader surveys—“How did you find us?” “We heard you on a podcast, or you were in this newsletter, or this article.” It’s at the margin, but all these things add up.
What about each writer/owner driving subscriptions, is that something you track?
We are very explicitly not tracking that. We know people aren’t subscribing because of one blog. We know we have worn you down over the course of many months, and you finally subscribe. Or we’re giving you a dollar for your first month, and you come in. Even if we wanted to allocate credit, it would be incredibly complicated.
Can you tell me more about how you think about converting readers to subscribers? Does anyone have a background in marketing?
None of our backgrounds are in marketing. But Sean and I bring a sort of analytical rigor to the framework. We make sure our tests and analyses are statistically sound.
The most important thing is our staff has a really good sense of our readers, of who our audience is and what will they bear.
We did this objectively stupid sweepstakes in October 2022, for editor David Roth to deliver a cardboard cutout of himself to the winner. But we ended up raising like $50,000. It sounds insane, but we know our audience—we know they like bits. We know they have disposable income and will spend $20 on a stupid joke. You just have to know your audience. This audience came with years and years of history with our staff. Not everyone is going to have that, but you have to know who you’re writing for, who your audience is, and meet them where they are.
Defector’s blog stack
- Lede, website, paywall integration, commenting (built-in with Coral)
- Stripe, payments
- SendGrid, newsletters & emails
- AmuseLabs, crossword puzzles
Defector’s ops stack
- Your Other Half, HR consulting
- Slack, internal comms
- Insperity, PEO, payroll & benefits
- Alan Lungen, general counsel (In addition to general counsel, Defector also relationships with a first-amendment lawyer, a trademark lawyer, and podcast lawyers.)
- Hotaling Services, insurance broker for media liability, general liability, D&O, and cyber liability insurance
- Bill.com, invoices
Defector deep dives
- Defector Annual Reports: Year One, Year Two, Year Three
- Annual recaps from Defector editor-in-chief Tom Ley: Year One, Year Two, Year Three
- Also in existence: A wonky 17-page process doc detailing how Defector organizes their cooperative, including decision-making frameworks. I can’t post it, but if you’re interested, Jasper invites you to email him at Jasper@defector.com
Thank you, Jasper! Defector is a good blog.