As with Jezebel, Splinter will sell ads directly, filling its supply at a substantial CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Jezebel recently secured its first direct buy, from the University of California Press.

Splinter, like Jezebel, will also offer an annual $80 (or $8 monthly) membership for readers, providing exclusive content, an exclusive weekly newsletter, merchandise and other perks.

Paste Magazine is exploring options to bundle the membership products for Jezebel and Splinter. The media company also plans to allocate 25% of all membership revenue to be split annually as a revenue share among staff and key contributors, said Jackson. 

The publisher will inherit all of Splinter’s existing social media accounts and email listserv, so it won’t have to fully rebuild its audience. It plans to reach readers primarily through search, X (formerly Twitter) and its daily newsletter, although its YouTube channel has been deactivated and will need to be regrown from scratch. 

However, “The third-party distribution systems that publishers have relied on for the past decade—namely, search and social media—have gotten much less hospitable,” Willens said.