State of the Blog: The Flytrap's 2026 Annual Report

Hello, readers! It's been 18 months since The Flytrap's last formal State of the Blog update in May '25, and a lot has changed since then. We'll tell you about it all shortly in this post!

The topline is this: Our original goal remains the same. Every week, we publish kick-ass feminist cultural criticism, without apology and without deference to the algorithm. We think we're doing it even better today than when we launched back in November '24. But we still have a ways to go before we're sustainable in the long term.

The Basics

The Flytrap is a worker-owned cooperative of feminist creatives, meaning we share editorial, developmental, and administrative responsibilities. Each worker-owner has a minimum requirement to meet according to their skill set(s)—whether art or editorial—and we track the hours we work on business development, admin, and other keeping-the-lights-on type stuff. We distribute profits at the end of the year according to our contributions, and as of this summer, are able to pay each active worker-owner a monthly stipend of $500. We are also the proud home of the Cancel Me, Daddy! podcast from current co-founder Katelyn Burns and co-founder emeritus Christine Grimaldi.

We launched two years ago with 1,748 free and paying members. In two years, that number has grown to 5,543 free and paying members. We originally launched on Beehiiv, but migrated operations to Ghost in August 2025 in search of better publishing flexibility and a more robust internal recommendations network.

We've also tracked some of our freelancer demographics as part of our commitment to publishing work from new and diverse creatives. This year, The Flytrap published 10 pieces by freelance journalists and writers. Seven of those articles were written by Black writers and six of them were written by women. We also published five queer writers and three trans and/or nonbinary writers. We published one incarcerated writer and two disabled writers. As a small publication with very limited space and budget to publish writers, we believe this is a pretty good attempt at increasing the diversity of the perspectives we publish. But there's always space for improvement. Internally, we've discussed what we envision for the diversity of our writers next year. We would love to publish more Indigenous writers, work with even more queer and trans writers, and continue to platform incarcerated writers in the next year.

With everything we publish, we have equity in mind. We announced our National Writers Union-approved contract policies in Summer '25; part of this agreement is our commitment to paying a fair rate for freelance work ($.50/word for writers, and industry rates for illustrators). That's allowed us to fund amazing pieces, including: Jourdain Searles on how the discourse is ruining conversations about film; Dr. Brittney Cooper on Juneteenth and Blackness in America; and adrie rose on the cultural archetype of the "loose woman" and how we talk about sexuality and desirability.

There are a lot of ways to support our work!

• Become a Friend of the Flytrap for $6.66 monthly or $65/year
• Become a Resident of the Bog for $110/year (includes exclusive Bog-only hangs with Flytrap worker-owners, early access/discounts on goodies and merch launches, PLUS a free gift sub for a buddy! This is essentially a REAL SWEET TWO-FER-ONE deal!)
• Become a Big Chungus for $1000/year (all the perks, forever, plus the satisfaction of funding a whole-ass freelance piece or illustration-and-a-half!)
• Get cool Flytrap stickers, posters of our article art, and a cornucopia of "fuck the algorithm" merch at our merch store! Get dripped out and accessorized, get compliments, and tell people all about us.
• If you're MacKenzie Scott...please email us, we'd love to talk

On the Art Front

Since we launched, we quickly recognized a need for expanding our illustration capacity—we hear from readers all the time that our illos make the Flytrap stand apart from other indie pubs, and we LOVE it. But while Flytrap art director rommy torrico is a stone-cold genius, they're not able to carry our newsletter's illustration needs on their own. We also want to diversify the artists, especially emerging artists, that we work with, in keeping with our values as a feminist publication creating opportunity and building a resilient media ecosystem.

Thanks to reader funding, we've hired freelance illustrators such as Carolyn Depot, who illustrated Nicole's feature on why screenwriters hate AI, and we opened up our first fellowship program to bring on the outstanding Melissa Em, who first appeared as a freelance artist on s.e.'s "Housing Haunts Me," about the eternal struggle of millennial housing anxiety. You've seen her incredible art on articles like "This World Cup is Bad," "Embodied Horror," and "The 'MAGA Makeover' is Over, and Its Replacement is (Even More) Terrifying." We fell in love with her instantly, so we're thrilled to announce that she'll be joining us as a worker-owner in 2027. She'll also be taking on web design and features—in the coming year you'll see aesthetic and accessibility improvements across our site and emails.

The expansion of our art capacity means that our merch store has more good stuff than ever, including posters of our gorgeous post art, a ton of "Fuck the Algorithm" motto gear, and our "queer magic" collection.

On the Editorial Side

We've also expanded our editorial offerings:

• Our Bitch reprints are a Friday staple for readers who (like us) long for days of feminist criticism of yore.
• We also run excerpts from new books that cover issues and ideas of interest to Flytrap readers and worker-owners alike: on queer political identity in the WNBA, maternal memoirs, criminalized survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence, Black motherhood, and even our own s.e. smith's debut book All My Dead Cats, about grieving and grief culture (order your copy today!).
• On Wednesdays, we publish Ask The Flytrap, our flagship advice column wherein worker-owners help readers with problems of life, love, the workplace, family, and the general fuckery of navigating < gestures wildly > everything.

For the curious cats out there, we can share some of our most popular pieces since our launch:

• "Algospeak Will Be the Unaliving of Me" by s.e. smith
• "The Changing Face of Evil: 'ICE Barbie' Kristi Noem’s Transformation and Our Slide into American Fascism" by Tina Vásquez
• "The Discourse is Ruining Film Criticism" by freelancer Jourdain Searles
• "Peeling Back the Tech Broligarchy's Glass Onion" by Katelyn Burns
• "Don’t be a Dick: Follow the Karaoke Rules So Everyone Has a Great Time" by Andrea Grimes

We see what y'all like, and we like it, too! To this end, we're gearing up to send out a reader survey to learn more about what our Flytrap readers want to see more of. We'll never be beholden to the algorithm, but we'll always keep our close community in mind; if you're reading this, you're one of us! Stay tuned for a survey link before the end of the year.

The Money Stuff

The state of The Flytrap’s financial situation is … precarious. Over our first two years, we’ve hit our initial goal of reaching a bare minimum of sustainability. Right now, we make enough to pay our expenses and still clear a small amount to be able to pay worker-owners on a monthly basis, but we know minimum sustainability is unlikely to provide our worker-owners with the stability we need over the long term.

We publish three times each week; original content runs on Tuesdays (one of these is a free post every month), our Ask The Flytrap column runs on Wednesdays, and our Bitch reprints, book excerpts, meet-a-founder pieces, and other fun treats run on Fridays (and in October, we celebrate with our spooky season Flytrap Fridays original work). This means most of what we publish is actually free to read!

Subscription income represents the vast majority of our revenue, and is on the decline. Especially over the past six months, The Flytrap has faced a sizable increase in the attrition rate of our member base, an issue we are seeing across independent, worker-owned media like ours. This is perfectly understandable: As the economy worsens and everyday expenses such as gas prices and grocery prices increase for folks, the first things in the family budget to go are paid subscriptions and the vast majority of people who do not renew cite finances as the reason.

As a result, our monthly revenue is declining—in the last four months, our monthly revenue has fallen by $1,000. But our costs remain the same. So far in 2026, we've spent approximately $29,000 on business operations, including freelancer pay, the technology we need to run, professional services, honoraria for our Bitch Media reprints, and taxes. We had hoped for a more successful fall membership drive this year, but economic headwinds were a big obstacle for many new and renewing members.

Some of this precarity is of our own making; we'd do some things differently if we had a feminist time machine, and recommend other independent media publishers learn from our ... experience:

Our earliest readers will recall that we launched on Kickstarter, offering a free year of The Flytrap for Kickstarter supporters. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, our loyal backers were not signed up to renew automatically in the following year. Our first member drive, in fall 2025, was primarily focused on helping our Kickstarter supporters convert to paid members who would renew annually so they wouldn't miss a single issue.

That campaign had mixed results. On the one hand, just 424 Kickstarter supporters out of a total of 1,338 ended up resubscribing; that's about 32% of our initial backers. However, we also generated 673 completely new members through an extensive social media campaign about the membership drive. Overall, we considered the 2025 campaign, building on the momentum of the 2024 Kickstarter campaign, as a smashing success.

However, we also created a new financial problem for ourselves. By having the majority of our member base on auto-renewing annual plans, 90% of which renew in November, we set ourselves up for being cash poor until our wave of autumn renewals—and when those renewals are down, as they are this year, it makes it very hard to plan for the future.

To counter this, we’ve developed a plan to rotate the months in which we run our annual membership drives. This year, we held it in September. Next year, we will run it in the summer months. Eventually, we aim to equal out the annual renewals throughout the year to provide a steadier source of revenue. We are also offering more options for monthly members who don't have the resources to commit to a full year right now, and we rolled out one-time article payments with Acta, for those who really just want to read that one thing.

Strategically, we are looking to diversify our revenue sources beyond memberships. We have discussed and made plans to sell institutional and group memberships; those plans are slated for implementation in 2027 (reach out to flyteam at theflytrapmedia.com if you're interested in being notified when they're available, especially if you're an academic librarian or manage subscriptions and procurement for feminist-minded companies and organizations that want to provide The Flytrap to their members and staff!).

We currently do not run ads on either our site or in our newsletters, though we are actively exploring how to implement ads without disrupting the reading experience. We're also excited about our merch store; this year, we've made $700 on merchandise, representing our second biggest source of revenue, and are strategizing to increase the visibility of our merch store—every time we hype merch, y'all respond with your wallets open and spread the good word of The Flytrap when you wear + display our gear!

Our biggest expense by far is paying for freelancers; we've spent nearly $15,000 on freelance work this year, paying each writer $0.50/word and freelance artists at a rate of at least $600/piece. For perspective, every Big Chungus member's annual membership covers a freelance writer or artist, making it possible for us to keep up this essential part of our mission—and you can also simply tip us if you want to see more great freelance work in your inbox.

Publishing freelancers and paying them fairly is a core value for us; most Flytrap worker-owners are also freelancers ourselves, so we understand the hustle. But most of all, freelancers allow us to publish perspectives beyond those of our worker-owners.

Our next largest annual expense is on software and professional services, such as our Ghost membership, Slack, taxes, Outpost (which helps us with member support and retention), financial apps and services, administrative necessities, and various other supports we need to run the business.

We are doing an effective job at keeping our expenses relatively low to maintain profitability and viability as a business. Which brings us to the big-big picture.

The TL;DR

Essentially, The Flytrap continues to operate because none of our worker-owners depend completely on the publication for our incomes, and we are all able to devote part time hours to its daily operations. We are maintaining financial viability with a little bit of leeway for further economic hardship and membership cancellations. We recognize that we are overly dependent on membership revenue in a volatile economic and political climate, and know we need to diversify our revenue sources while retaining our feminist values to minimize that impact.

For long-term sustainability, we need a bigger cushion to ensure we needn't compromise on reader experience and freelance commissions. Identifying new revenue sources while continuing to publish the great work we're proud of is a difficult balance to strike even with talented, highly motivated worker-owners; there is only so much time and energy we can pour into this business at the expense of our individual careers and family support needs.

Nevertheless, we are optimistic about The Flytrap's upcoming year and beyond. Minimum sustainability is still, for now, sustainable enough. We are heartened in the extreme by the enthusiastic engagement of our readers on social media, especially Bluesky, where we get to interact directly with our community. Our paid members make it possible for us to live this dream and create the badass feminist blog we’ve always wanted to see in the world.

We are endlessly grateful to you, our readers, for the continued support and cheerleading as we work to platform the thoughtful, challenging, joyful, and/or righteously angry feminist discourse the world needs now.

Fuck the algorithm forever and ever amen,

Andrea, Chrissy, Evette, Kate, Melissa, Nicole, rommy, s.e., and Tina

Say it with us: abolish ice, free palestine, defund cops, trans rights

Contributing to our community is very important to us at The Flytrap.

Currently, we're directing profits from our charity bandana designed by our Art Director rommy torrico to Gaza Soup Kitchen.

Get 'Em While They're Hot!