Funny Black Guy Video on Thechive

Boob job: how The Chive built an empire out of bro-bait

The website defined frat culture in 2010, but tin can information technology survive a decade afterward?

By Apr 28, 2020, nine:00am EDT

Photo illustration past Alex Castro | Photography by Julia Robinson for The Verge

Boobs are back. They probably never left. At The Chive, a website dedicated to "humor, hotness, and humanity," they are everywhere: billowy in slideshows on the company's homepage, spilling out of models' button-up bras. The Chive asks you to reconsider what you know most cultural progress. Here, racy photos are always empowering. Lewd comments are downright benevolent.

Chivers (men who read The Chive) are quick to emphasize that the website is about more than than hot women. It's a community of people who prioritize friendship and clemency higher up all else — except, perhaps, having a good fourth dimension. Chivers are veterans, commencement responders, Midwesterners. They might exist Republicans, but you tin can't say for sure because The Chive never talks about politics.

The apolitical, tit-centric aesthetic makes looking at The Chive feel similar fourth dimension-traveling to the early 2000s: pre-cancel civilization, pre-#MeToo, pre-President Trump. Women (chosen "Chivettes") submit seductive photos of themselves in the hopes of existence featured in a reoccurring slideshow titled "FLBP" for "future lower back problems." The Chive says this is "an outlet for bonny ladies from around the earth to strut their stuff." It's a mission that sounds about humanitarian.

In its prime, circa 2015, The Chive was the go-to destination for college-historic period men who wanted to look at something awesome on the internet. The content was as well raunchy for a mainstream audition but non raunchy enough to be porn. It looked similar Tucker Max'due south brain on steroids. Bloomberg called it a "crowdsourced, Cyberspace version of a lad magazine—the Maxim of the 21st century." And according to the founders, it got well-nigh one meg unique page views a day. Today, the company is focused on maintaining its core audience and betting on new business concern ventures like a streaming Goggle box service for bars and restaurants. Boobs are the concern model, and they scale.

When I visit The Chive's headquarters in Austin, Texas, it'southward the calendar week of S by Southwest — or it would have been the week of South by Southwest had the novel coronavirus not ripped across the world, shuttering businesses and canceling conferences. While other companies banned in-person interviews and told employees to bump elbows, Chive executives shook hands and encouraged people to effort to stay positive. "The greatest disease ever spread is fearfulness," I hear John Resig, The Chive's co-founder and president, tell his staff.

The receptionist, who helps run the company's TikTok account, is immature and bubbly, one of the few people of color present in the function. I realize I've seen a photo of her in a bikini. It was posted on one of the editors' Instagram accounts. A comment read "John's angels?"

John walks over to collect me but is interrupted by an enthusiastic Chiver. "Are you John?" the portly centre-aged man asks. He is wearing an "original chronic" T-shirt, with a photo of George Washington on the front. "Yeah, man," John says, sticking out his hand. The company is also named John. "I drove all the way from San Antonio to run into you." He seems nervous, even giddy. "Can you take a photograph of us?" he asks the receptionist.

John Resig is unfazed, but I'1000 having roughly the same reaction as John 2. It crosses my mind that he might be a paid actor, but when I ask John 1, he just laughs. Information technology'south the first of many times throughout my week when I tin't tell if I'thou existence paranoid or if I'm being lied to. John says readers show upwardly regularly. "It happens all the fourth dimension," he adds, while giving me a tour of the part. "It's like mecca to them."

Brothers John (left) and Leo (right) Resig founded sense of humor website TheChive.com in 2008. This room was re-created from a Chive marketing epitome, complete with a bearskin made just for them. "We accidentally ordered a hit on the acquit, just mitt on heart we didn't know," said John.

The Chive headquarters in Austin has a decorating scheme somewhere between "Playboy Mansion" and "Southern frat house" — copper bar, bearskin carpet, decorative AK-47s. Nearly 100 immature workers busily type at computers. Information technology looks like a typical tech company, save for the images of lube and semi-naked women on peoples' screens.

The office is most well-known for having a wooden slide that looks similar it could break a tailbone, sloping from the 2nd floor to the showtime. A camera positioned at the lesser is ready to capture any major wipeouts. (When I mention that this seems unsafe, John happily slides down.)

I enquire John if I tin nourish an editorial meeting. "Certain," he says. "We can practice 1 on what nosotros're going to do for April Fools'." I say that I don't want them to do a meeting for me; I just want to go to i if it happens to be scheduled. He assures me that information technology is. Over again, I don't experience that reassured.

"Hey, editors," John calls out when information technology'south time. "April Fools' Day coming together. Should but take 15 or 20 minutes." The editors — 12 people in full, 3 of them women — shuffle into a glass briefing room.

Apr Fools' Twenty-four hour period is a big bargain for The Chive. Last year, it pretended to launch Fyre Fest 2. The yr earlier, information technology became a North Korean news station. ("People were pissed," John says.) This year, information technology's either going to pretend that information technology's been bought out past BuzzFeed, say that rogue AI has taken over the site and is trying to masquerade as a human, or become with a medieval theme.

John's cousin, Bob, (whose nickname on the website is "The Bitch") instantly vetoes the BuzzFeed idea. "I don't know if nosotros want to pick a fight with them," he says. "I mean, fuck them, but…"

The squad discusses various column ideas that a rogue AI might generate — pickup lines in binary, a slideshow of dogs titled "We don't deserve dogs! Just please enjoy these photos of biological canines" — but they decide people probably won't become the joke. "Reddit would love this, but our audience isn't a techie oversupply," John says.

They're left with the medieval theme. A young editor suggests they do a post titled "body positivity win: maiden barely shows off tan, fit body," which gets appreciative chuckles all effectually. Taylor Wood — a marketing director who has been with the company for six years — reminds them that they did chair jousting a couple of years back, and someone got "really hurt." "We demand to be careful," she says.

"This might be too dark, but could we have someone salting outside with like a bird beak mask, like the plague, asking people to bring out their dead?" a male editor suggests. "Or selling leeches to prevent coronavirus?" John shakes his caput. "We're cartoon a hard line at 'bring out your dead.' The plague is off-white game, but non coronavirus."

The editors don't seem to be listening. "Should we throw salt at random drunk girls and scream PLAGUE?" i asks. Others laugh. "Okay," John says. "All in favor of medieval times of The Chive?" Everyone raises their hand. "Huzzah!" he shouts, and the editors chime in.

The Chive Media Grouping offers role tours at its headquarters in Austin, Texas. Later on the tours became distractingly popular with Chive fans, the founders limited who could attend to veterans, first responders, and people with rare medical weather condition. The Austin Business organization Journal crowned Chive equally the coolest office in Austin in 2018.

The Chive prides itself on staying out of politics. It won't comment on Trump's response to the coronavirus or weigh in on the presidential ballot. John and his brother Leo don't even collect political data on their audience, and they bristle at the proffer that their readers might lean Republican. "We've never posted a Pelosi Parody or a Trump Joke… and our audience wouldn't want to see either," John says. "However, they don't listen being reminded that it's okay to be an American. I empathize that can exist a bit of a tightrope walk betwixt being pro-military and apolitical, but it works for us."

In 2016, when Trump got elected, cousin Bob sent out an e-mail to the editorial staff reminding them to "keep politics out of content." John responded with his own rallying cry. "Nosotros're in a great position this morning because we doubled down on the average american over the past years, I could even say middle america, and our military," he wrote. "We won by non being snarky or talking downwards to our audience. At present it's time to claim our prize bc it turns out it's finally ok to be an average american again. So feel complimentary to mail service something if it's heartfelt and american. This is how we're going to accept our audience back in the coming months." It sounded like it was ripped from Trump'southward playbook.

Earlier starting The Chive in 2008, Leo and John Resig — brothers from Fort Wayne, Indiana — were famous for pioneering misinformation. In 2007, the pair published a hoax of Donald Trump leaving a $ten,000 tip for a waiter at The Buffalo Club in Santa Monica. It went viral, getting picked upwards past mainstream press. "How ironic is that," muses Leo. "We created fake news."

John wasn't a tech guy, but he understood what made the internet tick. Later his first castor with viral fame, he paid an engineer to reverse-engineer the algorithm of Digg, a wildly popular news aggregator. Rather than directing traffic for his own content, he sent viewers to bigger magazines. "I'd show upward at The Hollywood Reporter and be similar 'I spiked your traffic, that was me. I can do information technology again.' It was a handshake deal and a lot of cash being bandied effectually," he says.

When John and Leo started The Chive, their goal was to create a curated website for viral content that they could eventually sell to The Onion. (They tried, too, offer themselves up for $300,000. The Onion flatly refused.)

This origin story differs from the i that'due south in the employee handbook and the one they told Bloomberg in 2013. There, they said that The Chive came from combining the messages of the city where they each lived: Chicago and Venice Embankment. When I ask them about this version of the story, they laugh. "This is a lie," Leo says. "It was just almost getting The Onion'south attention."

From the beginning, the brothers understood that surviving in the media manufacture meant getting lots of traffic. More than posts meant more eyeballs; more than eyeballs meant more money. They went from publishing 10 slideshows a twenty-four hours to posting upwards of 40, with a special eye toward funny home videos, epic fails, absurd tricks, and, of class, hot women. "What guys recall is entertaining is the lowest common denominator," Leo explains. "Girls like to share gossip more ... guys are like, 'Dude, grab your beer. Bank check this out.'" The phrase "catch your beer, and check this out" became an early visitor mantra.

A pivotal moment arrived in 2009 when Leo decided to pour all of their money into creating a mobile app. John didn't like the idea — he told me, one-half-joking, that he wanted to spend the money on a truck — but Leo insisted. It would plough out to be a fortuitous moment for the visitor.

This was before the App Store was flooded with applications — the Gilded Age when people posted hostage statuses on Facebook and believed Twitter could spark a revolution. When The Chive's app launched, it immediately became one of the first things people saw when they went to the entertainment section of the App Store. It got xvi million downloads in the first year.

John Resig, co-possessor and president of Chive, shops for new Pura Vida bracelets in his office at Chive Media Grouping headquarters in Austin, Texas. "This coral seahorse amuse got me good," he said.

In 2010, John and Leo realized they needed The Chive to make more than money. Advertisers weren't e'er comfy putting ads next to risqué content, and college students weren't going to pay subscription fees. So the brothers started selling T-shirts.

The early designs were a black shirt that but said "The Chive," and a dark-green shirt that said "Keep Calm and Chive On." John tells me they were ane of the first companies to bring this motto to the Usa, which seems dubious, but I decide to go with it.

The shirt strategy was an immediate success. Each new blueprint sold out within a few hours, and considering The Chive hadn't taken on outside funding, John and Leo were able to pocket all the funds. Since 2008, Leo claims they've made over $350 one thousand thousand in sales of T-shirts and other Chive-branded objects.

When I asked why Chivers were so ready to decorate themselves in Chive apparel, Leo says information technology's considering they care for the audience like real people, responding to their comments and inviting them to come up to live events. "We've always let people behind the wall," he says. "They're more than connected with the brand because they've experienced it with usa." For a while, and so many Chivers were coming to the part to see Chive HQ that they had to limit role tours to veterans and first responders. John 2 just got to come across the lobby.

The limited supply of T-shirts besides fabricated having ane a status symbol. "As a Chiver, if you walked down the street and you lot saw a vivid light-green T-shirt, you'd speed up and see if it had a KCCO on it considering yous knew the hustle it took to get that shirt," says Jen Holub, a founding fellow member of The Chive's Chicago chapter.

As the shirts sold, Chivers began forming Facebook groups to meet other fans in their area. Holub was part of the grouping that formed in Chicago, and she helped throw the very outset upshot. "That was the first opportunity for people to come together with probable nothing much in common except you were there to take a expert time," she says. "It was a room full of 600 strangers who left friends."

This momentum might have eventually fizzled had The Chive not launched a charity arm in 2012 with a focus on veterans, starting time responders, and people with rare medical conditions. If The Chive heard well-nigh a family who needed an accessible vehicle to send their kid with special needs, Chive Charities fundraised to become the car. "We're like the Oprah Winfrey of ADA accessible vehicles," says John. (Holub now works with Chive Charities.)

Philanthropy took off within the local Chive communities, as it has in fraternities across the Usa. Information technology gave the groups a shared sense of purpose and provided a smokescreen for their less noble activities, like binge drinking. The meetups still more often than not took place at bars, but now all of the money went to charity. Chivers phone call this "partying with a purpose."

Chivers also started leaving notes and money on random cars if they noticed a Chive sticker on the bumper. "Next round's on me," they would say, in a bro-y class of pay-information technology-frontwards. "You lot have members who are strippers and surgeons and everybody in betwixt," explains Holub. "We're all here for the same purpose: to have a swell fourth dimension and take a positive bear on on the earth."

Leo Resig, CEO and co-founder, takes calls in his corner office at Chive Media Grouping headquarters in Austin, Texas. The brothers say they did a money toss to determine who would be president and who would exist CEO.

For early Chive staff, the mission wasn't always so noble. Many of them were just out of college and liked that the office felt like a party. If they as well happened to raise money for charity, that was prissy, but information technology wasn't exactly the point.

Two former employees say John would often get on the loudspeaker in the belatedly afternoon and announce it was time to start drinking. They besides say he had a policy that if an employee got laid by telling someone they worked at The Chive, they owed him a bottle of whiskey. A table in John's part is covered in bottles of whiskey. (In response to the loudspeaker anecdote, John has a confused response: "Yep, but I will add together to that is completely inaccurate, actually. It was fourth dimension to first drinking, only I've never announced it without saying that 'do not feel whatever force per unit area to drink any.'" When asked near the whiskey policy, he calls information technology an "urban legend.")

Most of the time, the declared antics were fun. Merely occasionally, they crossed a line. In 2015, John called an all-hands coming together to denote he was dating his banana. When the pair broke up, the tension spilled over into the workplace. (Leo denied that a meeting was called, but John admitted it, saying: "I chosen an all-hands coming together to announce I was dating my assistant because that'due south the right affair to exercise, hiding an office human relationship from employees would have been poor form.")

"There were no boundaries betwixt work and life," a former male employee explains. "It was all only one big political party all the fourth dimension. For me personally, I was single and 25 and I didn't know any amend. I thought information technology was a groovy place to work. I slowly realized how toxic it was."

In one case, on an email chain asking employees to "ascertain douchebag" (presumably for editorial purposes), the banana sent a reply-all that read "an unappreciative, narcissistic homo child that craves attention and demands praise :)". John then responded with his own definition. "A sill blond who is secretly a brunette and dies her hair every 2 weeks (bank check the roots) and is secretly fond to painkillers and crystal meth." In case there were any doubts most who he was talking near, he added "aaaand at present that everybody knows Jessie wasn't talking about me but simply answering a question, you can all stop gossiping. Prissy i, Jessie :)"

In 2017, while much of the land was reckoning with the #MeToo movement, The Chive continued with business as usual. Women still sent in photos, and The Chive encouraged men to exist respectful in the comments.

Taylor Wood, a marketing director, says she stopped being suspicious of the images when she learned women were sending pictures themselves. "I was like, 'If they're submitting their own photos and they want to be on the site, who am I to estimate?'"

Sitting in Leo's part, under a painting of Snowfall White holding a handgun, I enquire the brothers if the current cultural moment has made them rethink their past behavior. Former employees had told me rumors about John settling a sexual harassment lawsuit with a former female person employee, which I had been able to verify, and I wanted to enquire how they squared that with how they spoke near treating women with respect.

The chat, which has been jovial upwardly until this point, turns suddenly hostile. "Be very careful with that ane," Leo says, his confront stern. "It'due south not a pattern," John adds. "We try to create a really rubber surroundings here. I think nearly people would agree with that, only never once have nosotros done anything that is sexual harassment at this function in any fashion, myself or my brother."

The chat moves on, and a few minutes afterwards, Leo gets upwards to utilize the restroom. "By the way, I didn't mean to become on you. And my brother is not a mean person," John says. "Do y'all sympathize?" he looks at me pleadingly, and I nod. I understand. I'g merely not sure he does.

Despite remaining largely untouched by the movement, John and Leo were disturbed at how Facebook and Twitter were dealing with content moderation. "They had this very warped mentality... like they're e'er trying to maintain some kind of level of gratis speech," John says. "Whereas nosotros were like, 'Man, this is our website! We know if a line has been crossed or non.'"

In typical Chive fashion, the website has a partly crowdsourced approach to content moderation. If a annotate is flagged plenty times, it'due south automatically taken downwardly. Chive editors also monitor the comments to brand sure at that place'due south nothing inappropriate, banning users who've transgressed too many times. A former editor told me anonymously that when they published images of women of colour, the comments had to be monitored virtually effectually the clock to stop racist remarks from pouring in.

When I asked what types of comments get taken downward on a typical post, John flips around his screen to show me. "Hey you have a great donkey," ane reads. "But sexy equally fuck," says some other. "Hey man, this isn't the identify for you lot," John tells his screen. "Go experience 4chan."

There was something refreshing about John's hardline approach to the comments. In a way, it felt more than honest than Facebook'south hands-off stance pre-coronavirus, which seemed to negate responsibility. When I cheque the comments on a contempo mail service titled "Lovely Latina-lines 'northward sexy hot Curves," however, there are many that seem to break his purported dominion. "Thankyou Latina. In these pandemonious time we are told to blow into our elbow. I blew all over my chest" i reads. Another says: "I've never understood how they can tell if they're Latina but from body pics. I tin can perchance understand if they zoomed in on their taco but........." When I check weeks after, the comments are still there.

Leo Resig, CEO and co-founder, takes the slide to the first flooring of Chive Media Grouping headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Leo and John have no intention of selling The Chive. They tell me they turned down an offer from Playboy in 2015. They accept a photo in the Playboy Mansion to prove it. Leo even pulls up a PDF of the mansion's floor plan, which he has saved on his computer.

If their new venture succeeds — the Tv streaming service chosen Atmosphere — they won't have to sell. Temper is their aureate ticket. They're betting on the fact that well-nigh businesses — restaurants, bars, and doctors' offices — are playing filler content almost of the fourth dimension. Why not get a free Apple TV and effort out Atmosphere's channels? It's non quarantine-proof, only and then long equally the pandemic ends, it makes sense.

Temper has viral videos, true cat videos, Crimson Balderdash videos, and drone videos. It'southward designed to play without audio. And the best part — at least from John and Leo'due south perspective — is that it's ofttimes in front of people who are buying alcohol, which makes information technology an piece of cake advertising platform for liquor companies.

This is The Chive growing up. In the old days, when it found a photo it liked, it just stole it. Now, it pays for licenses and asks influencers if they tin can utilize their content. About of the time, they say yes. Who doesn't want costless publicity?

"Nosotros'll never use the content we don't own or accept the rights to use," says Leo. Peradventure he's forgotten about the quondam days. Or maybe, in one case again, he's rewriting unsavory moments from the by. A few iterations from at present, all that will remain is The Chive's devout, unwavering appreciation of boobs.

joneswoneek.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/28/21238529/the-chive-bro-frat-culture-founders-misogyny