When Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News in April, no one thought the host, known for his shows that frequently advance racist ideals and conspiracy theories, would be off the air for long. He wasn’t, using X (formerly Twitter) as his platform of choice for distributing his videos — until Fox sent him a cease and desist. Now Carlson plans to expand on that content with his new media startup, Last Country.
Last Country will release longer videos behind a subscription paywall, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company raised $15 million through a SAFE note from 1789 Capital, Omeed Malik’s venture fund, which he says is focused on investing in companies that live in an emerging parallel economy that caters to those who champion free speech and is against “woke” ideals.
This isn’t Carlson’s first foray into being a media founder. He co-founded the Daily Caller, a right-wing news organization, in 2010 before selling his stake and stepping away in 2020.
But the Daily Caller was started during venture-backed digital media’s heyday of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Many of the high-flying brands from that time haven’t paid off for investors, and the current landscape looks mediocre at best. Vice raised multiple rounds of venture funding during the 2010s, $1.6 billion in total, and a $5.7 billion valuation to match in 2017. That didn’t last long: The alternative media startup struggled for years before it declared bankruptcy this year. BuzzFeed didn’t fare much better. It was once valued at $1.7 billion by investors. Now it’s a shell of itself and trading publicly at a market cap of $47 million.
But Malik told TechCrunch+ he doesn’t think that Last Country will fall to the same fate of many other media companies for a key reason: Advertisements are a nice to have, not a need to have, for its business model.
He said people used to flock to Vice in its early days because it was edgy and cool. But to land advertisements, it had to water itself down, and it lost some of its grip on readers. I’d imagine there were also advertisers that still wouldn’t sign on even after it was toned down.
He thinks Last Country’s plan to rely on subscription revenue will help it avoid that pitfall. His confidence that people will subscribe comes from looking at Fox Nation, Fox News’s subscription video-on-demand service. Malik said that Fox Nation’s 1.4 million subscribers — I couldn’t confirm this number but multiple sources fall in the range of 1 million to 1.5 million — shows him that people would be willing to pay for content like Carlson’s.
“It is a member of this emerging parallel economy; this is a free-speech-oriented product,” Malik said. “There is a lot of built-up support of that. When you look at the TAM it is attracting, which is massive, it is the future of media consumption.”
Malik thinks ad revenue would be a bonus, and he anticipates strong demand. Malik said that this parallel economy of those who champion free speech — and the businesses that cater to them — has grown so much in the last just three years that companies like Last Country don’t have to worry about finding advertisers. “The mouth-watering distribution you would get by advertising with him,” he added.
He stressed that Last Country, and his entire investment thesis, centers around giving people a choice or where they want to spend their money or what media they want to consume. He compared Last Country’s inception to that of Fox News, which he said was also launched to cater to an audience that was hungry for content that other networks weren’t showing.
A name like Tucker Carlson, in his mind, helps to de-risk the endeavor. He said other media startups launch and hope that fans are willing to change consumer behavior to get their news or entertainment from a new source. Carlson already has fans, and Last Country previewing content to Carlson’s 10.5 million Twitter followers definitely doesn’t hurt.
Last Country won’t be immune to challenges, of course. For one, a lot of people aren’t going to touch this kind of content with a 10-foot pole. So while he is catering to a sizable base, it will always be limited by political views and world ideologies.
The traction of Carlson’s success on X thus far is based on data regarding impressions. Malik said that Carlson’s videos get 70 million to 80 million impressions, on average. But impressions data from X isn’t really a good gauge of how many people are tuning in — or how many would be willing to pay to subscribe.
Impressions data from X includes literally all impressions. So if one person looks at the same video five times, that’s five impressions. Or if a few bots come across it multiple times, it is going to taint the numbers. This makes it a bit harder to gauge real traction.
While I hate to say it, Carlson and Malik are likely onto something, though; after all, that’s capitalism, baby! Products catered to this demographic have definitely garnered interest. Conservative social media site Truth Social, for example, has millions of downloads and a strong base of active users. But it is important to remember that people who actively lean into Carlson’s ideas represent less than half the country, if not a lower percentage.
Last Country could be the next conservative hit, but as Vice, BuzzFeed and others showed, it will first have to prove it can surpass the challenges of digital media startups.