ClickHole Is Back: Beloved Comedy Site Has Officially Returned
It took five months, but we finally have the first good news of 2020: ClickHole, the comedy site that brilliantly satirizes the worst of internet “journalism,” is finally back. It relaunched today with a full slate of new content to ease our pandemic era pain, and yes, it’s working. Sometimes the internet is… good?
It’s been a weird run for ClickHole. The former sister site to The Onion launched to instant acclaim in 2014, immediately establishing its own voice by doing to clickbait sites what The Onion did to newspapers. Due to the constant turmoil of the digital publishing business, though, it’s changed ownership multiple times in its six years of life, with that extended hiatus resulting from the most recent purchase. ClickHole was one of many great websites impacted by Hulk Hogan’s Peter Thiel-funded lawsuit against Gawker; The Onion and ClickHole were bought by Univision in early 2016, and that parent company bought the former Gawker family of blogs later that year, after Gawker was bankrupted by the lawsuit. In 2018 Univision announced they were looking to sell both The Onion family of sites and the former Gawker blogs, which had been renamed Gizmodo Media Group. They were eventually sold to the private equity firm Great Hill Partners in 2019, who combined them all under the new name of G/O Media, and almost immediately starting dismantling beloved websites like Deadspin. In February 2020, ClickHole was purchased by Cards Against Humanity, the makers of the card game, and went offline—until today.
As part of the Cards Against Humanity deal, the employees of ClickHole are now the majority owners of the site. According to Cards Against Humanity cofounder Max Temkin, the site would also be able to add to its small staff of five full-timers. Based on the amount of new posts that went up today, and their quality, it’s clear that the ClickHole writers have been putting in the work during this hiatus, and this whole thing is fantastic news for all the rest of us. The world might be falling apart in triple speed this year but at least we’ll be laughing hard as it happens.
Here’s another link to ClickHole, if somehow typing those nine letters into your browser bar was too much for you.