What They Did
The Messenger was a digital news startup founded by Jimmy Finkelstein, a media veteran and former part-owner of The Hill and the Hollywood Reporter. It launched in May 2023 with $50 million in funding and approximately 300 employees, covering politics, business, tech, entertainment, and sports. It bet on the legacy digital media model: massive scale, social/search-driven traffic, and programmatic advertising revenue.
How LLMs Killed Them
The Messenger launched into a media landscape being actively dismantled by AI. Google was rolling out AI Overviews that kept users on search instead of clicking through to publishers. Facebook had stopped promoting news articles. AI-generated content was flooding the web, diluting ad CPMs. The ad-supported, traffic-dependent model The Messenger was built on was already collapsing. It brought in only $3 million in revenue against a $100 million projection.
Timeline
- May 2023: Launched with $50M in funding and ~300 employees.
- 2023: Projected $100 million in revenue for 2024.
- January 31, 2024: Shut down without warning. Staff learned from The New York Times, then were locked out of Slack.
- February 2024: Class action lawsuit filed by former employees for WARN Act violations (no severance, no advance notice).
By the Numbers
- $50 million in funding burned in 8 months
- Only $3 million in actual revenue vs $100 million projected
- ~300 employees terminated without severance
- Called "one of the biggest media failures of the internet era" by Axios
- Website fully wiped the day of shutdown