A Button, a Mogul, and a Pulled Ad Buy
CinemaCon, Las Vegas, 2026. The annual gathering where studios show exhibitors their slates and everyone pretends the numbers are fine. Somewhere on the floor, a rumpled veteran journalist named Richard Rushfield is handing out buttons. They read "Block the Merger" - a cheerful little protest against a proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. combination. Paramount responds the way large corporations respond to small indignities: it pulls its advertising from his publication.
Here is the part that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The publication doesn't blink. It doesn't issue a clarifying memo. It doesn't quietly reassign the columnist. It keeps publishing, because its money doesn't come from Paramount. It comes from tens of thousands of subscribers - many of whom work at Paramount, read the piece at breakfast, and forwarded it to three colleagues with the subject line "have you seen this."
That publication is The Ankler. And that little scene - the button, the pulled ads, the shrug - is the entire business model performed as street theater.
Hollywood's Coverage Problem, Solved by Rudeness
Every industry has trade papers. Hollywood's - Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline - have covered the business for a century, and they do it under one structural handicap: the studios they cover are also the advertisers who pay them. During awards season, that relationship becomes something closer to catering. The result is coverage that is thorough, professional, and allergic to the one question everyone in town is actually asking: is any of this working?
The Ankler exists to ask that question, loudly, in your inbox. It covers the business of Hollywood - streaming economics, studio politics, the awards-industrial complex, the creator economy eating everyone's lunch - with the tone of someone who loves the movies and has completely run out of patience with the people making them.
The name tells you everything. "To ankle," in old Variety slang, means to leave a job. An ankler is also, unavoidably, a thing that nips at your ankle. The publication is both: a chronicle of Hollywood's departures and a persistent, low-grade bite the industry cannot shake off.
Wilde said a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The Ankler's trick is the reverse - it knows the value of everything in Hollywood and insists, weekly, on printing the price.
"Ankler Media gets ahead by saying what the Hollywood trades won't." - Press Gazette, on the company's strategy
One Angry Newsletter Becomes a Company
Richard Rushfield started The Ankler in February 2017 as a one-man dispatch - a veteran of the LA Times and BuzzFeed writing the Hollywood analysis nobody would print. In 2019 he moved it to Substack, where by 2021 it ranked among the platform's top three business publications. It was sharp, it was profitable-ish, and it was still one guy.
Then, in January 2022, something genuinely strange happened. Janice Min - the executive who had rebuilt Us Weekly and then The Hollywood Reporter into forces - joined the one-man newsletter as co-owner, CEO and Editor in Chief. The woman who once ran the establishment trade signed up to run its heckler. Rushfield became editorial director. Together they formed Ankler Media.
Stranger still: they took the company through Y Combinator. A Hollywood newsletter, pitching alongside dev-tools startups at Demo Day. It worked. In June 2022, Ankler Media raised $1.5 million at a $20 million valuation, with backing from Y Combinator, Dick Parsons' Imagination Capital, Goodwater Capital, Pioneer Fund, FilKor Capital and a cast of individual investors.
- Feb 2017Richard Rushfield launches The Ankler as a solo email newsletter.
- 2019Moves to Substack; by 2021 it's a top-three business publication on the platform.
- Jan 2022Janice Min joins as CEO and Editor in Chief; Ankler Media is born.
- Jun 2022$1.5M seed at a $20M valuation via Y Combinator.
- 2023-24Back-to-back Webby nominations for Best Independent Publisher; NPR's LAist radio deal; live events at TIFF.
- Jan 2025Launches Like & Subscribe, a standalone creator-economy trade, at $129/year.
- Apr 2026Leaves Substack for Passport, the publishing platform built by Ben Thompson.
Growth, Every Single Month
Media startups usually grow like fireworks: a spectacular launch, then gravity. The Ankler has grown like a tide. The company reports subscriber and revenue growth in every month since its 2022 launch, subscribers up 13 percent year over year as of 2026, and - the stat Min clearly enjoys most - more advertising revenue in the first six weeks of 2026 than in the entire first year of the company.
From One Writer to a Newsroom
Sources: Wikipedia, Axios, Press Gazette, The Ankler. Figures approximate; bars indicative of scale, not to a common unit.
"We have a shot of getting to that number." - Janice Min, on reaching $10M in annual revenue in 2026
Note the phrasing. Not "we will crush it." Not "hypergrowth." A shot. In an industry built on pre-announcing triumphs, The Ankler even does its own hype with a raised eyebrow.
Fifteen Newsletters, One Attitude
What began as one man's inbox rant is now a portfolio - roughly fifteen newsletters plus podcasts, video and live events, each staffed by writers poached from the very trades The Ankler competes with. A sampler from the desk:
The desk, pictured in spirit: eight mastheads, one shared refusal to write the press release version.
What can you actually do with it?
If you work in or around entertainment, The Ankler is a working tool. Executives use it to find out what their own company is thinking. Producers use The Optionist to spot IP before agencies package it. Creators and brand marketers use Like & Subscribe to read the creator economy like a trade, not a trend piece. Job seekers and assistants read The Wakeup to sound informed by 9 a.m. And everyone - reportedly including David Zaslav, Kathleen Kennedy, Donna Langley and Maureen Dowd - reads the flagship to learn what the town actually thinks, minus the publicist filter.
Independence as a Line Item
Subscriptions First
Paid subscriptions fund the newsroom. When readers pay, the coverage answers to readers. Radical stuff.
Ads on Its Terms
A fast-growing ad business aimed at entertainment marketers - six weeks of 2026 out-earned all of 2022.
Live Events
From documentary spotlights at TIFF to awards-season gatherings, the inbox now has a guest list.
Platform Independence
Built on Substack, graduated to Ben Thompson's Passport in April 2026 - owning more of its subscriber relationship each move.
The Godin-ism practically writes itself: The Ankler didn't try to reach everyone in entertainment. It tried to be indispensable to the fifty thousand people who run entertainment - and let them do the distribution. The smallest viable audience, it turns out, includes several billionaires.
Its competition is both old and new: the legacy trades on one side, and the subscription insider class - Puck, Matthew Belloni's What I'm Hearing - on the other. The Ankler's wedge is temperament. Others break news; The Ankler breaks composure.
Clippings for the Scrapbook
A YC Media Company
The Ankler is one of the only journalism outfits to pass through Y Combinator - pitching investors between B2B SaaS demos.
The Subscriber List
The publication's most reliable readers are reportedly the moguls it needles. Hollywood pays for its own roast.
The Defector's CEO
Janice Min ran The Hollywood Reporter and Us Weekly before choosing the newsletter that tweaks both worlds.
Five Years Solo
Rushfield wrote The Ankler alone for nearly five years before it became a company. The voice never changed; the payroll did.
Webby Regular
Nominated for Best Independent Publisher in both 2023 and 2024.
On the Radio
A 2024 partnership with NPR's LAist put Ankler analysis on Los Angeles airwaves - the town hearing about itself on the drive to the lot.
Back on the Convention Floor
Return to that CinemaCon floor. In 2017, the scene would have been a punchline: a lone blogger with buttons, easily ignored, easier to ban. The trades would have covered the merger with sober quotes from "sources familiar with the matter," and the ads would have run right beside them.
In 2026, the man with the buttons has a CEO who used to run The Hollywood Reporter, a newsroom of eighteen, fifteen mastheads, a $20 million valuation, a Webby shelf, an NPR partnership, and a subscriber base that grew every month while the studios shrank. When Paramount pulled its ads, it wasn't punishing an outsider. It was confirming one: the industry now reacts to The Ankler the way it reacts to a rival studio.
The buttons were a joke, of course. But so was the idea that one honest newsletter could out-build a hundred-year-old trade press. Hollywood loves a scrappy underdog story - it just never expected to be the villain in one, or to renew its subscription for season five.