Videogum

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

~ the obituary ~

A recap blog only works if you read it the morning after the episode, and that morning was an american morning. Videogum ran recaps of Lost and Mad Men while those shows were airing on US cable, and in turkey you got to an episode whenever you got to it. by the time i would have had anything to say, the thread had been closed for a week.

Scott Lapatine started it in april 2008 as the pop-culture sister to Stereogum, his music site, under Buzz Media. The staffing was thin on purpose: a senior editor with a voice and a posting rhythm of maybe a dozen items a day. Gabe Delahaye was that senior editor and he is the reason anybody remembers the name.

The recurring features are what it built. The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All Time ran as a long bracket where readers nominated films and the site worked through them with a seriousness the subject did not deserve. Monsters' Ball was a weekly roundup of the best comments, which tells you where the writing energy actually lived. look, the comment section was not a feature of Videogum. it was Videogum.

Delahaye quit in 2013 and the site did not survive it. 7 february 2014 was the last day of normal operations, and Lapatine said at the time that he was assessing options for keeping it online in some form. That is the phrasing you use when there is no plan.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

Videogum was doing the thing every media company spent the next ten years trying to buy. It had a small readership that showed up daily and knew each other in the comments well enough to treat the site as a place rather than a feed. That is community, and community was supposed to be the defensible asset.

It did not save the site, because none of it was worth much to the owner. Buzz Media was running a portfolio of ad-supported blogs against display rates that fell every quarter, and a loyal audience of the size Videogum had was a rounding error in that math. The thing that made it good was invisible on the media kit.

~ the postmortem ~

There was no acquisition and no scandal. One writer left, and a site whose entire proposition was that writer's voice had nothing left to sell. The archive stayed reachable under Stereogum, which is more than most blogs of that era got.

Stereogum itself outlived it by a decade and is still publishing, having gone independent through a reader-funded buyout in 2020. The music side had an audience that would pay. The comedy blog next door never had that option, because nobody in 2013 was asking readers for money and expecting to get it.

~ the inheritance ~

The writers scattered into places that paid better. Kelly Conaboy went on to write for a long list of magazines and Delahaye largely stopped being a public writer on the internet. that pattern held across the whole blog generation.

What Videogum was doing, a funny person watching television in public with a crowd, did not go away. it moved into podcasts and then into group chats and posting apps. The daily-blog container is the part that died. The behavior found somewhere else to live inside about two years.

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