Defector Media started with a bang. It's an uphill climb to keep growing — just like in most of digital media.

• Four years ago, the people who ran Deadspin quit the sports site and launched their own.
• Defector, which relies on subscription revenue, was a hit out of the gate.

Four years ago, Defector Media launched with a great story: It was a punchy, eclectic sports website run — and, crucially, owned — by former employees of sports website Deadspin, who had quit en masse after fighting with their owner.

Defector founders tried selling subscriptions to launch the site, and that worked fabulously well: By the end of the site's first year, it had 36,000 subscribers (I was — and am still — one of them), $3.2 million in revenue, and $200,000 in operating profit.

"This rules — so far," Defector Editor in Chief Tom Ley told me in 2021.

How's it going now?

On the one hand, pretty darn well. Defector's revenue is now up to $4.6 million a year, and it's still profitable.

But on the other hand, it's getting harder. Growth is plateauing, and making a living in digital media isn't getting any easier — whether you're a big, publicly traded publisher like Meredith DotDash or a tiny startup like Defector.

You can see for yourself by looking at Defector's annual report, which gets pretty granular about what's working, what isn't, and what the company might do next.

I highly recommend that you do, since it's a resource most publishers don't provide. But I can also sum it up for you: After signing up tens of thousands of subscribers in their first year, Defector is finding it increasingly hard to sign up new subscribers, and to keep the ones they have.

"We get smarter all the time," says Jasper Wang, who runs Defector's business operations. "But each incremental 1,000 subscribers are way harder to get than the last 1,000."

Over the last year, Defector's subscriber count peaked at 42,500 — just a hair above the previous peak from the year earlier, when it topped out at 42,100.

There are two ways for Defector to try to increase that number: It can work on getting the site and its offerings to more people, in hopes of getting more sign-ups. And it can work on keeping more of the subscribers it does have — to cut down on churn, the bane of any subscription business.

Neither path is easy.

Digital distribution is getting more difficult for every kind of publisher, as everyone from Twitter to Google to Facebook seems more interested in keeping users on their own properties than referring them to other sites. Defector thinks it can combat this with gift links that paying subscribers can pass along to their friends. That's supposed to create what the company calls "high-quality referrals."

Meanwhile, the company is trying to cut down on churn by getting readers to spend more time on the site since the biggest predictor of renewals is the number of articles a subscriber reads. Defector says "onboarding" emails to new subscribers, pointing out articles and coverage they may not know about, has helped reduce churn by up to 10 percentage points.

But no single thing is going to solve any of Defector's issues, which is why it's trying a lot of things. Next up: ads.

Defector has always been just about ad-free, with an occasional ad or sponsorship here and there. In their words: "There are generally two ways to make money publishing words on the internet, and we've largely ignored one of them so far."

But now the site thinks it's ready to try advertising for real and will start showing a regular diet of ads to non-subscribers later this year. It will hopefully be a twofer for the company: more revenue, derived primarily from readers who aren't likely to ever become subscribers, plus a gentle nudge that might prompt some non-subscribers to pay up to have a (mostly) ad-free experience.

In any case: I don't often recommend annual financial reports as pleasure reading. But if you work in media, or are slightly curious about how the stuff on your screen gets to you, I can't recommend it enough.