The Ankler’s Janice Min Sees a Path to $10m in Revenue

By Jim Edwards March 7, 2024

By: Jim Edwards

For old-school Manhattan media types, the fact that Janice Min has a publication that she thinks could hit $10 million in revenue over the next two years is huge, huge news. That’s down to the way she upended the magazine business 20 years ago.

The backstory: 

When Min arrived as editor-in-chief of Us Weekly in the early 2000s, magazines were a stuffy place for serious, wordy journalism.

In 2003, the celebrity market was dominated by People, which covered politicians and terror attacks as well as celebrity babies and weight-loss regimens. People’s target was middle America. It specialized in the stars of yesteryear, like Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson. People was also respectful: it still does an annual, uncontroversial interview with the president, usually on family issues.

Min had an unremarkable, under-the-radar stint as a junior staffer at People.

Then Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner made Min—largely unknown in the business at the time—the editorial chief at Us.

Us was running a poor second to People. So Min ditched all of Us’s traditional formats—long profiles, softball interviews—and replaced them with photos—lots and lots of photos. Stories became captions. Articles became listicles. “Writers” weren’t really a thing. Min lowered the bar for coverage so that almost anything a celebrity did—wear scruffy jeans, fail to brush their hair—was fair game.

She also expanded the definition of “celebrity”. The media previously regarded reality TV performers as being on the same level as quiz show contestants. Min decided they were stars. If Bill from The Apprentice was dating Jen from The Bachelor, Us Weekly was on it.

Pick up any magazine today, and if there is a photo of a celeb carrying a bag of groceries “just like us,” that’s Min’s influence: It no longer matters whether it’s “news” or not. The Mail Online’s “sidebar of shame” wouldn’t exist without her.

This is normal now, of course. But at the time, it was shocking. People magazine was so threatened it once spent $75,000 to buy up photos of Jennifer Lopez reading Us so that no one else could see them. Us went from selling 300,000 copies a week under its previous editor to 1.9 million in 2009 when Min left.

Min then went to The Hollywood Reporter, made it more glossy and more fun, turned its traffic into revenue, and saved it from a death spiral. Alec Baldwin called her “The Turnaround Artist”.

Now Min is back again with a new venture, The Ankler (the name is a joke reference to slang used by Variety magazine). And this time, she’s an owner. 

Can Min do for her own business what she did for these magazines?

In the same way that Min reimagined magazines as being about pictures, not words, she has an interesting conception of how email works: “For better or worse I think everyone’s inbox kind of becomes like a scroll, it all just flows in. And you open what catches your interest.” 

It’s not obvious that your email inbox is a content “scroll,” the standard discovery mechanism of TikTok, Instagram, and open-web news pages that load endless new items under the post you are currently reading. But this is how Min sees it.

The Ankler is also interesting because of its scale: just seven staff, at the time of writing. It turns out that Min is enjoying the freedom that comes with running a small startup. At Hollywood Reporter, she had to worry about time-consuming chores like booking celebrity photo shoots, staging award-show events, or pushing out SEO-focused stories to get traffic that could be monetized.

Not anymore.

“Every person who’s had the role of editor-in-chief in the last decade has definitely felt frustration over this, the ridiculous things you have to do in the role,” she says. At the Ankler, “We’re just doing old-fashioned curation of what we think is important. This is what we think you should know. And we are not going to pollute you with all the other stuff that you have to do if you have a programmatic-based business.” Min is ignoring “the noise that accompanies all large media” in favor of “really distilling it for a specialized audience into only the things you think matter.”

Min’s other significant innovation is the way she’s using Substack. The platform is designed for individual writers who want to send emails. But The Ankler is using Substack more like a full-scale CMS-plus-website than a subscription email service provider. The Ankler has 15 sections that are branded differently (The Wakeup, Entertainment Strategy Guy, etc.), and each have their own emails. Its authors also maintain their own Substack bylines, with their own personal email businesses—such as The Media Mix by Claire Atkinson.

The results:

  • The Ankler booked more than $1 million in revenue in the first two months of this year, which is (presumably) how she estimates a run-rate of $10 million for all of 2025. 
  • Sixty percent of that revenue is coming from ads, and 40% is coming from subscriptions, she says. 
  • The Ankler has 75,000 subs and it converts 21% of its free readers into paid, Min says. 
  • The churn rate is 2.1% monthly, she says.
  • “Our revenue for the first six weeks of this year has exceeded all our revenue for our first year of business, 2022,” she says, “we’re up 79% in ad revenue from the start of the year, so that’s just moving really quickly.”

All The Ankler’s ad sales are sold directly. There is no programmatic, and no dependency on third-party cookie targeting. As she says:

The beauty of what we do here in the entertainment space is there is no CPM applied to the advertising. … People take out sponsorship on The Ankler because they want to reach this very rarified audience. There’s a real premium being paid to reach what they believe to be the influencer class of Hollywood.

That premium applies to her subs pricing model, too. When her business partner Richard Rushfield started The Ankler he was selling it cheap: $70 for an annual subscription. Substack’s default sub rate is $8 per month or $80 for a year. Min raised that: The Ankler charges $18 per month or $149 per year. There is no subscription marketing. She has no subscription manager. “There’s no science going on here,” she says. The price is based on her guess about what your corporate expense account can handle.

Another quirk: Min took $1.3 million in venture capital investment via start-up accelerator Y Combinator. Silicon Valley VCs notoriously dislike investing in media startups because they rarely scale into the billions of dollars. Min had taken a meeting with Substack founder Hamish McKenzie, and McKenzie had then suggested to Y Combinator that they get in touch. “Don’t forget the timing herethey had just had a very successful outcome with The Athletic which had been a Y combinator company,” Min says. (The Athletic had sold to The New York Times for $550 million.) Investors at YC like subscriptions, and they like very specified markets, Min says.

Min says she has yet to spend any of that investment and, in fact, returned $200,000 to one investor because they didn’t need it.

And then there are the costs—or lack of them. The curse of traditional open-web publishers is the in-house tech stack. The initial appeal of building your own product eventually gives way to the nightmare of having to maintain it, and finding the very expensive staff to do that.

She’s also liberated from the operating expenses of a publication dependent on newsprint or traffic. “Large operations are having a challenged time [because] you have to just keep continually increasing your costs to try to keep up with the content, the business, the expectations.”

“We’ve done all of this [at The Ankler] without spending a penny on our own tech stack. I mean, of course, we pay that 10% cut to Substack, but we have never had to go through the effort of building it out ourselves.”

“What would be the advantage if we invested in, created our own tech stack?” Sometimes Substack is glitchy, she admits, “But, you know, I am not trying to find my IT specialist, 12 hours ahead of me, to fix it.”

On Substack, “the cost of starting up is just like — it’s nothing,” she says.