I thought at first that I was going to pick a paperback book that I read many times growing up, but then I realized that I was more curious about a digital publication that I fell in love with over ten years ago so I changed my plan. I also think that looking into something that I’m not currently able to explain (as of January 21st, when I’m starting to think about this draft) will be a useful way of showing you all how this research process can work. I’m excited to share with all of you some of the complexities of publishing as I figure them out myself.
My Experience of The Toast
I’m not sure exactly when I first started reading The Toast. Looking back now, I’m guessing it was just as others were also finding it amazing (the website was very successful, launching the careers of its co-creators). Through an interview with one of the creators, I learned that the co-creators met in the comments section of a different humor website, The Hairpin*) (Ortberg n.p.).
The Toast still exists today even though there hasn’t been new content since 2016; I’m guessing I started reading it right as I was finishing my dissertation and starting to teach here as an English professor. I’m pretty sure I found it because a friend shared a link on Facebook. So, I kind of think I discovered it through a social-media enabled friend recommendation. When I was on Facebook, I was friends with lots of people I met in graduate school and at conferences—we had a shared set of interests (literature and art history—much nerdier than mainstream) and The Toast created content that played around with those interests. The writers on the site liked thinking about the authors I most admired and they showed their enthusiasm by making loving parodies of their well-known works.
I was often smiling and occasionally laughing out loud when reading. I remember wanting to share posts with my friends who I knew would be delighted as well. I could spend hours on the site scrolling through posts and feel better about life when I was done. If I’m honest, a bit of the experience was also the pleasure of “getting it.” I think the emotion associated with “getting it” might be confidence. I was aware that I knew things about literary history that not everyone knew and there was something satisfying about being in on the joke. I think that’s pretty common when people form communities around specific areas of interest.
Financial Structure
Who invested in the creation of this publication? Was it an investment of money or labor? If labor, what kind of labor? (physical typesetting, digital programming/encoding, creation of ideas/story to be published, etc.). How were each of these investors compensated?
-Prompt for Assignment 1
When I got to this question about the financial structure, I realized that I really didn’t know how The Toast made money. I thought for a minute, “were there ads all over that website?” and thought if there were, I must have missed them because I never felt annoyed by ads on the site. And so I visited the site and realized that 1) there are no ads and 2) there is now a page called “Legal.” Was this page always there? A week after I started writing this post, I tried to visit the website and got a weird error message so I had to use the Wayback Machine to view what it says on the “Legal” page. While I was in the sleuthing mood, I also checked out what it said on the Legal page back when the site first started. A snapshot of the homepage of the site from August 5, 2013 confirms that there was indeed a Facebook group that I’m sure I belonged to and there was a legal page that said then pretty much the same thing it says now. I don’t know how I never realized that a feminist website would generate revenue the same way Barstool Sports generates revenue (see their privacy page).
So I started researching how publishers monetize the data they collect about visitors to their sites and my brain is still exploding. The best information I’ve found so far is a website that is offering to help publishers sell the data they collect about site visitors. Ivan Federov explains that “of every $100 spent by an advertiser, on average, $12 goes to data for audience targeting. Meanwhile, data makes up to 20% of the total publisher’s revenue.” But this info is from a simple Internet search. I’m doing more research in this area and will share more in my revised post.
I hear constantly about data monetization, but I didn’t realize how exactly it was working. The way The Toast is set up now (many years after the last new content was added), someone is making money by selling data about visitor behavior to advertisers. I’m not sure who that someone is because I’m not sure who the publisher of the site is. In 2015, Andrew Lipstein interviewed one of the creators, who explained how the publication worked:
We have a publisher that we work with that handles ad revenue. We’re aware of it but don’t have to run it ourselves, which is great. I think we’re more interested in slow and sustainable growth than in becoming really big. I’d love to be able to hire like, 2-3 people in the next year or two and get a health insurance plan rather than try to get 30 million pageviews a month or something.
–0s&1s
So I looked up who the publisher is and I think it was Mandeley LLC. I can’t find much about that publisher, so that’s something I want to research more for the revised version of this post. I actually think I want to reach out to Danny Lavery (co-creator of The Toast) and ask how he found the publisher (I subscribe to his Substack called The Chatner, where he publishes the same kind of humor writing that I loved at The Toast and promotes his actual books because he’s got an agent and book deals and the whole shebang now).
So, to wrap this section up with what I know so far, here are my answers about the financial structure of The Toast. My best guess at this point is that the creators of The Toast invested their own creative labor with no initial compensation for that labor. As the site generated revenue, they paid themselves and, when the revenue was sufficient, they got health insurance, paid writers contributing to the site, and hired people to join their team. Their work was displayed on a website that might have been built with WordPress or some other opensource publishing platform that is fairly user friendly for non-techy people, and I think the publisher handled monetizing what they were releasing for free.
Editorial Structure
How was this publication edited? Who were the editors and how did they interact with the author/s?
Prompt for Assignment 1
I think that the two co-creators of the site were the initial editors of content on the site (perhaps they edited each other), but I suspect they eventually brought people on to edit content from their contributing authors. I imagine there would be one or more people deciding if they’d accept new submissions and communicating directly with contributors to suggest revisions or solicit new work. I suspect that people used the back end of the website to compose their work. In fact, I’ve recently learned about a plugin for WordPress that makes managing this sort of workflow much simpler and I’m going to be trying it out for a project I’m working on.
Production Structure
How was this publication made? Is it print, digital, or both? Are these technologies still around today?
-Prompt for Assignment 1
The publication was entirely digital, and the same basic structure is being used at many websites today (especially magazines and newspapers that make their content free for anyone with an Internet connection and haven’t shifted to a paywall model for revenue). I wonder if they paid a designer for their logo and if they hired a web developer to design the look of the website over the years. I’m going to bet that they did.
Marketing Structure
How was this publication marketed to its audience? Who likely read it? Did those readers pay for access? If not, who paid to make it available to them for free?
-Prompt for Assignment 1
I think social media helped The Toast find its audience. I say this because that’s how I found the site. This is a little bit like word of mouth, but I’d also be curious if they every paid to promote what they were doing to certain demographics (I’d speculate that they were relying on the strong enthusiasm from a niche audience). Here’s what one of the co-creators said in the same interview I cited above.
We found an audience that really loves us and we really love them, I think. We’re not enormous, by any stretch of the imagination, but we found a niche that works for us. There are a lot of intellectually lazy people out there who vaguely remember reading Beowulf and just want to make jokes about old English rather than talk about the state of art or poetry or publishing (probably).
–Os&1s
I definitely didn’t pay to read The Toast, though I suspect I might have if it was a reasonable subscription fee. I did pay to read The Chatner because there is some free content and some subscriber only content. And this has me thinking a lot about how authors and audiences can connect more directly. I think my inclination is always to cut the middleman (the publisher) out of the situation, but that is perhaps a little naive. This is something I’m going to be thinking more about all semester.
I want to expand on this section a bit as I revise. I’d like to see if there’s any way to learn more about how word spread about The Toast. Asking Danny Lavery might be a good strategy?
Answers from Danny Lavery!
Did you and Nicole start creating a website and then get a publisher to figure out how to make that website profitable, or did you find the publisher first and then they built the website structure into which you would put your content?
We never got a publisher. Nor, am I sorry to say, was the Toast ever profitable, or at least not for long enough to sustain itself, which is probably why we only lasted three years.
Who was this publisher? (a single person operating as an LLC or an actual multi-person company that published other things?) Do they still earn money from the website? (do you still earn money from the website?)
LOL We did incorporate as an LLC, however. I made a small monthly salary and we had a freelance budget to pay our outside writers, but Nicole for instance never made a salary from the site. She funded it personally, and worked for free.
Did you and Nicole manage your presence on social media (I’m pretty sure I learned about The Toast on Facebook) or was that handled by the publisher?
We managed that ourselves. I think once we hired Nicole Chung she also ran some of our social media, but there were never any other full-time employees.
Did you and/or Nicole design the logo or was a designer hired? I guess most of my questions are about how much of the site creation was handled by the publisher and how in the world you knew to find someone to manage those things early in your career.
We hired an illustrator, although I’m sorry to say the name escapes me at present. It seemed fairly intuitive at the time — we spent a lot of time on Twitter and knew a lot of interesting writers and artists who wanted to contribute, so I don’t remember finding it difficult to manage. It was a one-off expense.
I’m also curious how you managed the editorial workflow. Did the website allow contributors to create inside the website so that someone else could open and review/copyedit?
No, we’d have contributors send us their work in either Word or Google Doc (depending on who was editing) and we’d upload it into the CMS ourselves. I can’t imagine letting freelancers use the CMS would be worthwhile; there’s too much of a risk someone might make a mistake or accidentally publish something without editorial oversight.
Did you and Nicole meet to decide what submissions would make it in or did you each decide that on the fly?
We always lived in different states so we couldn’t meet up in an office — there was a fair amount of independence, although Nicole handled more of the editing and I handled more of the writing much of the time. We’d text or use gchat if we wanted to consult the other, but more often we’d just go with our own instincts.
Also–and only if you feel comfortable sharing because it’s very intrusive!!!–how much money did The Toast make? I read one interview where you were hoping to make enough for health insurance and to hire some people. I’m just baffled by how this all works (if it’s not already obvious, I’m building this course to meet student interest in the publishing industry, but I have a lot of learning to do in order to teach it well! We read about Pauline Hopkins and the Colored Cooperative Publishing Company last week and this week will be reading about the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press).
No, of course! It is interesting. We never did get me any health insurance, I’m afraid. We usually made enough each month to pay my salary, cover operating costs, and pay our freelancers, but if we didn’t make enough, Nicole would cover it personally. Eventually we were able to hire Nicole Chung as a part-time managing editor, but eventually when Nicole Cliffe was ready to take a step back, the site couldn’t sustain itself without her continued funding, so we decided to stop rather than sell it. I’m afraid we didn’t make a very good example of a profitable editorial venture! But we did have a lot of fun for a while.
So the publisher was the LLC that you and Nicole formed? That means that one of you was then managing the legal page clarifying how data collected on the site could be used? I’ll confess data monetization still eludes me, so if you or Nicole would ever feel comfortable sharing how that part worked, I’d love to learn more.
Partly bootstrapped, and partly because Nicole had the private income to fund it! Without her resources, I don’t think the Toast could have existed as it did. Yes, what happened to the Hairpin was really sad — I believe some of the former Awl/Hairpin contributors are working on a book of some of the best articles that they’re hoping to put out soon, which somewhat eases the sting. We did for some time have a lawyer who worked on the legal page, but Nicole really dealt with that, so I don’t know much beyond that. If memory serves, we made a little money from Google Analytics/basic advertising, but didn’t get much in the way of ad deals. Data monetization has always escaped me entirely, so you’re in good company there.
Works Cited
“Data Monetization for Publishers: How to Collect and Sell Data [Ultimate Guide].” Admixer.Blog, 27 May 2020, https://blog.admixer.com/data-monetization-for-publishers-how-to-collect-and-sell-data/.
Important Legal Things -The Toast. https://web.archive.org/web/20250103175327/https://the-toast.net/legal/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.
Knibbs, Kate. “How Beloved Indie Blog ‘The Hairpin’ Turned Into an AI Clickbait Farm.” Wired. www.wired.com, https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-hairpin-blog-ai-clickbait-farm/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.
Legal – The Toast. 6 Aug. 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20130806002257/http://the-toast.net/legal/.
Ortberg, Mallory. Episode XXX: “I Wouldn’t Want to Reassure My Past Self. ‘Keep Panicking’.” Interview by Andrew Lipstein, 29 Sept. 2015, https://www.0s-1s.com/the-art-of-commerce-xxx.
Privacy Policy | Barstool Sports. https://www.barstoolsports.com/privacy-policy. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.
The Toast – A Willing Foe, and Sea Room.https://web.archive.org/web/20130805185050/http://the-toast.net/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.
Featured Image
Logo for The Toast. Mandeley LLC. All rights reserved.
Notes
*I need to share that in the process of trying to provide a hyperlink to The Hairpin so you all could see how wonderful that site also was, I discovered that it is not at all what it used to be (what is this crazy article about celebrity teeth?). Upon further investigation (reading the Wikipedia article about the website and checking out the sources), I found a fascinating story about the demise of The Hairpin published in Wired. In an effort to read the full article (because it is paywalled and only accessible to Wired subscribers), I put in an Interlibrary Loan Request at the library. The librarian got right back to me to explain that the library does offer access to Wired Magazine, but that this article appeared only in the digital version of Wired (and I found a non-paywalled version of the article at Wired Middle-East?). Oof. Digital publications are confusing!
