It sounds impossible but the 2024 holiday season is here. For some, it's the most wonderful time of year; for most, it's an endless headache comprised of delayed travel, unrelenting traffic, gross consumerism, holiday parties with tiny hors d'oeuvres and weak drinks, pulling the one person in your office who you barely know for Secret Santa, and being forced to mingle with obnoxious MAGA relatives. The herald angels might be singing, but the holidays can be hell.
So give yourself a break this holiday season and eliminate at least one headache: Online ads. If you subscribe to Jezebel, you get to read all our spectacular stories ad-free. And here's one more reason to be merry: We've slashed prices, so you can now subscribe to Jezebel for $50 a year or $5 a month. (If you've already subscribed, these new prices also apply to you.) In addition to getting to read Jezebel without all the ads, a Jezebel subscription gets you access to Barf Bag (like Dirt Bag but for politics), the Jezebel Discord, the Jezebel Book Club, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter, early access to upcoming events, and more.
There's no better way to survive the season's unrelenting traffic, annoying office party chit-chat, or obnoxious MAGA relatives than by getting to read all our clever, brilliant, and thought-provoking content without all the ads.
(During the summer, we made commenting free and switched to Disqus, a far superior commenting system. So you may still see an ad or two there because of their setup.)
We originally decided to offer a subscription service because, less than a month after we started publishing again in December 2023, Google restricted our sitewide ad service for weeks due to “sexual content” (which means it was next to impossible for the site to make money). And it wasn’t just the stories that had “sex,” “crotch,” or “pussy” in the headline, it was a story about porn actors alleging abuse on set and, inexplicably, “Mila Kunis Is Right: Dudes, Stop Saying ‘We’re Pregnant’” (from 2014), and Lindy West’s 2013 classic about rewatching Love Actually. Scrolling through all the “blacklisted” posts was both infuriating and confusing, even if we now have a priceless list of some of Jezebel’s best-ever stories.
We had the choice to self-censor or remove ads from hundreds of our “offending” articles in order to get ad-serving restored. We chose the latter. But in this media environment where “brand safety” (that is, advertisers being overly cautious about what they’re advertising next to) reigns supreme, our subscription offering allows us to create even more content for our most loyal readers while freeing us from the crushing weight of Google’s prude algorithm.
As always, thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing, and thanks for not using the comment section to tell us to take coding classes.
