What the fuck happened?Īnthony Volodkin: It's hard to overstate how much the Internet has changed in the past 10 years. Noisey: In 2009, The Guardian declared Hype Machine one of its '100 essential websites.' Now, less than a decade later, you’ve had to launch a crowdfunding campaign to keep the site running. In short: The indie ethos of relying on only the support of your fans now applies to websites as much as it applies to bands. In our conversation below (which has been edited for clarity and brevity), he describes the changing economics of online advertising that reward the largest websites while starving out smaller ones, but also how users can buck this trend. I recently discussed Hype Machine’s rollercoaster journey with Volodkin. Thankfully, the site was able to hit both of its crowdfunding goals in mere months of announcing the campaign. Having always been a lean operation, it only needed enough funding to pay three full-time employees (including Volodkin) and to keep the servers up. Without investors or funding, the site had been operating for the last 12 years on advertising revenue alone, but due to the shifting nature of ad buys, it could no longer rely on that MO. Its meteoric rise is all the more reason why news about the website earlier this year was so unexpected: Hype Machine needed the financial support of its users to keep running.

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