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Cracked Magazine Analysis

  • Writer: Hannah Speer
    Hannah Speer
  • Jan 3, 2019
  • 5 min read

Updated: Feb 10, 2019




History

Founded as a magazine in 1958, Cracked was “a poor man's Mad Magazine for almost half a century, plugging along with a third of Mad's circulation,” as David Wong, Cracked editor, says[1]. The magazine would slowly sputter out, eventually going under and getting sold by owner Dick Kulpa to a group of investors, who would redesign Cracked as an editorial humor print magazine alongside a website in 2005. While the printed magazine would also fold, the site continued to grow under a small group of editors and writers headed by Jack O’Brien. It was purchased by Media Demands in 2007[1]. By 2011, Cracked had surpassed other humor sites such as The Onion, Funny or Die, and College Humor for most visited humor site in the world.[2] The site also began to explore video content, and in 2011, was putting out nine shows with more in production[2], all disseminated through both Cracked.com and YouTube.

In 2016, E.W. Scripps bought Cracked.com from Media Demands for $39 million[3]. In early December 2017, E.W. Scripps laid off 25 staff writers and editors, including the entire video production team to reduce costs after writing off close to 90 percent of the $39 million paid for Cracked as a loss[4].

Target audience

E.W. Scripps initially bought Cracked.com in order to reach a higher millennial audience[3]. According to Alexa.com, Cracked readership is mostly college-aged and skewed toward women[5]. As a targeted audience, Cracked seems to be reaching out to left-leaning/liberal, college-aged/millennial readers with a high interest in pop culture, informal writing, and humor. It gives ample opportunity for interactivity with user bases; so targeted audiences would also include people with a willingness to engage with both writers and with other audience members.

Mission statement

Cracked.com’s mission statement, as reported on their Facebook, is one word: Accomplished.[6]

While Cracked’s marketing has used their Mission box to tell a joke, as is the Cracked style, they do offer a company overview, also on Facebook: “We offer heaps of facts smothered in humor. We are the professors you wish you had in school; we are Indiana Jones except with less adventures and more sarcasm.”[6]

It describe itself as “Comedy with a college education.”[6]

Editorial Mix

Cracked has a wide variety of content produced: articles, videos, images and podcasts. Within these broader categories, articles are further broken down; list-based articles, short humorous ‘how-to’s, profiles and reviews of movies and books. Video content, previously, ranged from pop culture debates between four popular staff writers to a buddy-cop narrative following fictionalized versions of two Cracked writers working in the main Los Angeles office. Community contests involving photoshopped images following a theme are often posted to showcase funny or clever jokes in visual formats.

Staffing

In April of 2016, it was reported by Recode.net that Cracked had 40 employees[7]. This included on-staff writers, editors and video production. In December of 2017, 25 Cracked employees were terminated due to bad financial performances by the company[4]. This included former managing editor John Cheese, and Daniel O’Brien[8], who had been the original intern when Jack O’Brien (no relation) first began the site in 2005, as well as the video production team[1]. David Wong released a statement on the site to assure readers that a small editorial team had still been retained, including himself[9].

Advertising, Promotion and Revenue Generation

Adage.com reported that, according to E.W. Scripps, Cracked brought in $11 million in revenue in 2015[3]. Chief Digital Officer of E.W. Scripps Adam Symson said that Cracked would be going along with most of the industry in switching from traditional advertising to branded and native content[3]. Cracked cross-promotes along a number of social media, including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. In 2011, then-general manager Oren Katzeff said that 20 percent of traffic comes from social media, with 50 percent of that coming from Facebook[2]. In Scripps’ third-quarter 2017 report, it was announced that Cracked’s financial performance was “subpar” and “disappointing.”[10]

Design, Photography and Graphics

Cracked.com is visual-heavy in design. Every article has at least one picture or gif to add to the text, the website itself is photo-heavy and uses particular images to bring users into an article (i.e., “6 Famous Things That Only Exist Thanks To Laziness"[11] with a picture of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine to tease at what may be inside involving a big star and/or beloved comic character). Additionally, photoshop/image manipulation contests are important ways that Cracked interacts with and engages community members. Overall, visual images are used heavily to attract readers and to enhance the reading experience.

Social media

In 2011, the Cracked general manager said that 20 percent of traffic to the site was driven by social media, and 50 percent of that was from Facebook[2]. In February 2018, the Cracked Facebook page had close to 3.8 million likes and 3.4 million followers[6] while the Twitter page had just over 940,000 followers[12]. Cracked posts multiple times a day, directing traffic to the website or posting images with small excerpts from articles to be seen on social media. Rather than cross-posting the same content to every account, each site has generally different content, with image-heavy edits on Twitter and links to actual articles on Facebook, posted at different times throughout the day.

Reader feedback and Interactivity

Reader feedback and interactivity with Cracked content is seemingly healthy. According to the Facebook messaging feature, Cracked generally responds to Facebook messages within a day[6]. Facebook posts seem to generate more engagement than Twitter posts, though both have at least three or more retweets/reposts and one or more comments. Content posted on the website, though, has the highest comment count, with most having 40 or more comments posted within a day or two of posting.

Story Analysis

“The Hidden Connection Between ‘Ghostbusters’ And The Remake,”[13] written by JM McNab opens with a summary lead: “For some reason, the story of a gang of disgraced academics using nuclear physics to battle misshapen demon puppets was super appealing to everyone back in the '80s.” Though the whole story is less than 700 words, the nut graf does not make an appearance until paragraph six, with the line “But we ended up getting a movie that completely wiped the ghost-busting slate clean. Or ... here's a thought: What if the new movie was part of the original canon, but set in another dimension?” Following is an in depth breakdown of the theory McNab is defending, including screenshots of the comic the theory is based off of, and how the canon of the stories come together when it is applied. Overall, the story has an organization to it: Introduce the history of the Ghostbusters franchise, brief explanation of the problem, introduction of the theory, a breakdown of the theory, humorous tie-up of the article that makes sense and, perhaps, paves the way for a follow up article. It sources its facts, gives credit for pictures and art used, and is written with the proper tone of a Cracked article: that is, informal and the target audience’s brand of funny, with a zany pop culture topic. As this was an opinion piece, the writer does include his thoughts on the movie (that it was “not great”), but he presents the theory being discussed with cited sources and informed knowledge of the franchise.

Sources


[5]“https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cracked.com,” Aleka.com, last accessed February 28, 2018.

[6]“https://www.facebook.com/cracked/,” Facebook.com, last accessed February 28, 2018.

[12]“https://twitter.com/cracked,” Twitter.com, last accessed February 28, 2018.

“http://www.cracked.com/,” Cracked.com, last accessed February 28, 2018.

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