It is -- the sites sold for $135m in 2016 (out of the gawker bankruptcy) to Univision. Gawker media group was famously operationally well run and threw off lots of cash.
After Great Hill bought them for $20m -- presumably with a ton of debt, or something -- they then put an idiot named Jim Spanfeller in charge. Jim managed to get the entire staff of deadspin -- also a profitable, well run site -- to quit en masse. Said staff later started Defector and are running it as a coop, basically. Defector has survived a full year running on subscription fees and largely without advertising (or maybe entirely without?).
