Aftermath is now claiming they have 30,000 registered users, with 5400 of them being paid subscribers. There's no reason to doubt those numbers, but its obvious that the majority of the paid subscribers are only doing it because They're Good F*cking People and don't really care about the content. Aftermath's engagement across all platforms is pitiful. Anything on the site that's not a hot-button issue (mostly kvetching about AI) or a deliberately acerbic headline struggles to get into double-digit comments. Their Instagram and TikTok both hover around 1,300 followers. Their Bluesky seems impressive at 120,000 followers until you start looking at posts. There isn't anything from the past month that could crack 1,000 updoots. Less than 1% of their followers can be bothered to leave a like. But at least they're putting out quality content, right?
So I decided I want to do the math.
Aftermath has three subscription tiers: a $5 tier, a $7 tier, and a $99 dollar “benefactor” tier. Each price listed above is the monthly rate; you can also get a yearly rate for $50, $70 and $999 respectively. The $99 dollar tier has one of its prizes being
a listing on the Thanks page, so we know that there’s 18 of them as of time of writing. That leaves 5382 as the number of paid subscribers in either the 5- or 7-dollar tier.
For the best case scenario, assuming everyone is paying a monthly rate and all their paid non-whale subscribers got at least a $7 subscription, aftermath is getting $39,456 a month, equating to $473,742 per year. In the worst case, where everyone is paying a yearly rate, and their subscribers are paying a $50 subscription, Aftermath is getting $287,082 a year, equating to 23923.50 a month.
It’s worth noting that 5400 is likely a rounded number, so there is very likely to be slightly more than 5382 normal subscribers. It’s also just as possible that the subscriber count is slightly below 5400 but rounded up for marketing purposes. It's unlikely that the actual value even with these extra or missing contributors is above or below the previously-estimated limits, but it is still possible. There is also some amount of money coming from merch and donations; considering that the website has chronically small engagement, this is unlikely to be very significant. And keep in mind this is before things like general site upkeep. For now, we'll assume everything else cancels out, but we'll include a super=best case where the net value of these other runs make the revenue round up to 500k a year.
So how do they stack up?
There are a total of 9 staff members listed at Aftermath: 5 Founders (pictured in the quoted post), 3 Contributors, and a columnist. In the best case scenario, only the 5 founders are paid; in the worst, all 9 are paid (and equally, at that - though i suspect the columnist gets less due to be a columnist only).
Now, if all founders are the only ones being paid, that's between $57416.40 and $94748.40 a year each, with the super best case being 100k. In the upper range? That's very viable of being a living wage - provided you live within your means and take advantage of being an online-only site to move somewhere more quiet. In the lower range, though, that's getting very tight. And those best case scenarios require people to be spending quite a lot of money they could easily avoid by subscribing yearly instead of monthly.
If all eight founders and contributors are being paid, those numbers become $35885.25, $59217.75 and super best case of $62500. With the columnist counted too, that's $31898, $52638, and super best case $55555.55 (apparently 5382 is a multiple of 9, who knew?). IN all these cases, it rapidly becomes unsustainable to all but the most frugal living. And lets face it, this is the laptop caste, they are
not being frugal if they can at all help it. TL
R, I highly doubt that the website's breaking even for anyone with that many contributors.
Most likely, the revenue is somewhere in the middle of these projections. If it's on the high end and only founders, it's probably roughly comparable to a well-paying desk job. But we have no reason to believe either is the case, so I hope their parents are fine with funding these socialite screed blogs.
