Hipster Runoff Goes to Auction

by Corinna Kirsch on January 21, 2015 Internet

"I just wish I could be the altest couple on earth," a typical caption by Carles.

“I just wish I could be the altest couple on earth,” a typical caption by Carles.

The once wildly famous blog Hipster Runoff is FOR SALE.

It was the first single-author blog to offer an ironic explainer of hipster culture, through the voice of an anonymous writer called “Carles.” His short takes on buzzbands, Gen Y, ravers, Juggalos, and alt experience defined the voice of the blog, and a generation of hipsters and bloggers who came of age in the aughts. Carles was voted Hipster of the Decade by Gawker.

Hipster Runoff made it OK 2 TLK IN ALL CAPS SO NORMAL BRO. Thanks to Carles, you can blog like you text. You can blog like you’re high. You can make up trends. You can talk about authenticity, but only with irony. All this had to end. Like Rome, whose expansion was too vast, hipsterdom, too, had to fail. When the micro-culture turned global, it became an homogenous brand of creativity marked by neon V-necks and trucker hats. Now we’re all bored with it.

This blog has an important place in Internet history though, and many believe it should be preserved (rather than transformed into an ad farm).

But the pitch, given by the blog’s seller on the domain auction house Flippa, is that you can make “$1,300/mo w/ no work.” (How very hipster of them.)

Great opportunity to take brand and rebuild audience. Carles got bored and we never got around to doing anything new with the site but the persistent organic traffic and revenue has really surprised us and speaks to an opportunity for someone else. The brand has some tangible value as well and we used to do a brisk business in t-shirts.

These traffic and revenue numbers are not at all reflective of performance before Carles stopped blogging in November 2013. This is after 13 months of inactivity. Happy to share the previous details. Operating costs are down to just above $100 per month beginning in January 2015.

You get everything that was Hipster Runoff—namely the archives and the domain. It doesn’t matter that the site has been inactive for two years, ad revenue continues to roll right in. And that’s even without the “brisk business in t-shirts.” Seven days remain in the auction; the highest bid is currently valued at $10,001.

ht: Stereogum

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