A Plus

» see aplus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A Plus belongs to the short window when a celebrity could look at Upworthy's numbers and decide to build one. Ashton Kutcher had met Evan Beard through Y Combinator, Beard knew Kendall Dabaghi from Duke, and the three of them turned a 2013 product-discovery experiment into a media company. It moved from a living room in Los Angeles to New York in the summer of 2014 and launched officially on 27 January 2015, with an editorial staff pulled out of the Huffington Post and Business Insider.

The pitch was positive journalism. Nothing that would leave a reader worse off than they arrived, distributed through the social accounts of famous people. Nicki Minaj and Britney Spears were among the names announced as partners who would share the content, though the site's own following stayed small next to the borrowed reach. By early 2015 it claimed fifty million unique visitors a month and around a hundred million page views, and Quantcast put it in the American top fifty.

Whether those numbers meant anything is the question the whole era never answered. Fifty million people passing through a page on their way back to Facebook is a real measurement of something, but it is not an audience in the sense a newspaper would recognize, and the moment the platforms changed how they weighted links the number was gone. Most of the class went the same way. A Plus was simply better funded and more famous than the rest of them while it lasted.

~ the dossier ~

~ the borrowed posts ~

In August 2014, before the official launch, the Daily Dot went through A Plus and found it reposting material from BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, sometimes without attribution, along with Instagram photographs used without permission. Business Insider ran a longer piece the following February under a headline about a viral empire nobody knew existed. Cracked wrote its own list about it. The Hollywood Reporter covered the accusations as a story in their own right.

The site survived all of it, which is its own small comment on 2015. Aggregation at that scale was close to standard practice, and the reputational cost of being caught was smaller than the traffic being caught cost you.

~ fifteen million dollars ~

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment took a majority stake in September 2016 and bought the rest in January 2019, valuing aplus.com at fifteen million in cash and stock. Kutcher sold out his remaining shares in that deal. For a company whose main business was licensing an inspirational book brand into film and streaming, a website that published only uplifting stories was an obvious fit on paper.

It was also the beginning of the end, because Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment spent the next five years buying things it could not pay for. It lost $636.6 million in 2023 alone and went into Chapter 11 in July 2024, then into Chapter 7 liquidation, taking Crackle and Screen Media down with it.

~ the page that is still up ~

A Plus did not make it to the bankruptcy. The Wayback Machine has a full working homepage on 10 July 2023, article URLs redirecting away from their own content by 24 July, and by 22 August the domain answers with eleven lines of HTML holding a single image inside a table, under an empty title tag. No farewell post. No redirect to the parent, and no archive of anything that had been published there.

That file has not changed in three years. Somebody deliberately replaced a site that claimed fifty million readers with a picture of its logo on a white background, and then walked away, and apparently kept renewing the domain anyway. Eight and a half years of publishing ended with a logo left hanging on an empty wall, and whoever hung it there has been paying the registrar ever since.

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