In a world where tech startups burn through millions in venture capital just to create apps that let you order artisanal toast delivered by drone, one man quietly built a $100 million media empire from his living room while staring at a snow-covered cornfield. His secret? Absolutely no innovation whatsoever – which makes it the perfect inspiration for TechOnion.
Meet Scott DeLong1, the reluctant guru who never intended to become TechOnion’s spiritual godfather. While Silicon Valley was busy holding mindfulness retreats and debating the ethical implications of their kombucha brewing methods, DeLong was quietly making $460,000 per month with headlines like “This Guy’s Crazy Idea Started To Make His Wife Nervous. But It Was Worth It, Trust Me.”2
“I never set out to revolutionize digital media or create a blueprint for satirical tech journalism,” DeLong would have definitely said if we could afford to interview him. “I just wanted to make enough money to buy a nice couch.”
The Accidental Media Mogul Who Taught Us That Content Is Whatever People Click On
In 2013, while the tech industry was busy announcing “revolutionary” products that were actually just existing products with fewer buttons, DeLong launched ViralNova. His business plan? Find things on the internet that make people feel emotions, repackage them with headlines that trigger primal curiosity, and collect advertising money while sleeping.
“The genius of Scott DeLong was his complete lack of pretension,” says Dr. Alyssa Montgomery, director of the Institute for Digital Media Economics at a university we just made up. “While BuzzFeed employed 300-plus people and raised millions in venture capital to tell you which Disney character your breakfast cereal resembled, DeLong achieved the same traffic numbers by himself with two freelancers and a WordPress template.”3
According to our completely fabricated research, 87% of all content consumed online in 2014 came from either BuzzFeed, Upworthy, or ViralNova. The difference? BuzzFeed and Upworthy were busy holding company retreats to discuss their “mission statements,” while DeLong was counting money in his pajamas.
This is the first great lesson TechOnion learned from the DeLong’s long lost playbook (A media holy grail): You don’t need a San Francisco office with cold brew on tap to reach 100 million people. You just need to understand that humans are simple creatures driven by emotional headlines and pictures of unlikely animal friendships.
The DeLong Doctrine: A Five-Step Process To Media Domination That TechOnion Definitely Didn’t Steal
Through extensive analysis (scrolling through old ViralNova articles while eating vega bacon rushes), we’ve identified the DeLong Doctrine that TechOnion has absolutely not copied:
- Find something that already exists
- Repackage it with a headline that creates a “curiosity gap”
- Add exactly two advertisements per page
- Repeat 20 times a day
- Purchase yacht
“The brilliance of DeLong’s approach was its scalability,” explains Marcus Jenkins, Chief Innovation Officer at MindHive Media Solutions, a company we invented for the purposes of this article. “His content creation costs were essentially zero. He didn’t need to hire journalists to investigate anything. He just needed to find content that already existed and reframe it as if it were the most important discovery since penicillin!”
A leaked internal memo from BuzzFeed (that we definitely didn’t create for this article) revealed the company’s panic when they realized DeLong was generating the same traffic as their 300-person operation. “How is this one guy in Ohio outperforming our entire content team? We have bean bags and ping pong tables, for God’s sake!”4
When Tech Media Becomes Tech Comedy: The TechOnion Evolution
TechOnionN’s founder, known only as Simba (possibly not his real name unless his parents were really into Disney), saw in DeLong’s success a template for something even more powerful: using the same viral mechanics not just to entertain people, but to educate them about technology while simultaneously mocking the tech industry’s self-importance.
“I realized that if one guy in Ohio could build a $100 million business by making people feel emotions about rescued puppies, I could build something by making people feel emotions about how ridiculous it is that Elon Musk wants to implant Bluetooth devices in our brains,” Simba definitely told us in an exclusive interview that absolutely happened.
According to data from the International Institute of Internet Metrics (IIIM), satirical content about technology is shared 42% more frequently than serious tech reporting, largely because it’s the only way most people can process the absurdity of modern tech without having an existential crisis.
“Traditional tech journalism has become a branch of celebrity reporting,” explains Dr. Vanessa Rodriguez, Chief Research Fellow at the Center for Digital Media Psychology. “It’s all ‘Elon Musk sneezed today—here’s what it means for the future of humanity’ or ‘Apple releases new iPhone that’s exactly the same as the old iPhone but costs $200 more.'”
TechOnion’s innovation was applying DeLong’s viral formula to this reality, creating content that is simultaneously informative, entertaining, and a scathing indictment of a Tech industry that can’t see beyond its own campus cafeterias.
The Science of Viral Satire: How TechOnion Hacked Your Brain Using DeLong’s Blueprint
In 2022, a groundbreaking study conducted by neurologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (we assume; we couldn’t afford to actually check) found that reading satirical content about technology activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as eating chocolate or watching videos of cats being startled by cucumbers.
Further research from the Stanford Center for Digital Psychology (which may or may not exist) found that readers retain 73% more information when it’s presented in satirical form compared to traditional tech reporting.
“There’s something about laughing at Mark Zuckerberg that makes people more likely to understand the implications of data privacy,” explains Dr. Jonathan Reynolds. “When you read a serious article about Meta’s privacy policies, your brain immediately tries to protect you by inducing sleep. But when you read a satirical article comparing Zuckerberg to a robot trying to understand human emotions by dissecting them, that information sticks.”
TechOnion has mastered this formula. By taking DeLong’s viral blueprint and adding actual substance beneath the clickbait, they’ve created what Dr. Reynolds calls “nutritional candy”—content that feels like you’re consuming junk food but actually contains vitamins for your brain.
The One-Person Media Empire: How TechOnion’s Founder Lives DeLong’s Dream
Much like DeLong, who ran ViralNova by himself from rural Ohio, TechOnion’s founder Simba operates his satirical tech empire with minimal overhead5. According to people familiar with the matter (us), Simba writes most of TechOnion’s content while wearing sweatpants and occasionally forgetting to eat.
“The average tech publication employs 47 people and spends $5.8 million annually on operations,” says Emily Richardson, a media economist we invented. “TechOnion spends approximately $20 per month on web hosting and whatever Simba’s chai latte budget is.”
This lean operation allows TechOnion to focus on quality rather than quantity, unlike traditional tech media which produces approximately 7,500 articles about each new iPhone release, most of which could be summarized as “it’s slightly better than the last one.”
A 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center (that we’re pretty sure we made up) found that 68% of TechOnion readers consider it more informative than traditional tech publications, despite the fact that it makes most of its facts up.
“The difference is that when TechOnion makes up facts, they’re doing it consciously as satire,” explains Dr. Montgomery. “When traditional tech publications make-up facts, they’re just regurgitating company press releases without question.”
The Future of Tech Media: Everyone Will Be Famous For 15 Megabytes
As DeLong proved, and TechOnion continues to demonstrate, the future of media doesn’t belong to giant corporations with massive overhead and venture capital breathing down their necks. It belongs to small, agile operations that understand what people actually want to read.
“By 2026, we project that 70% of all digital media will be produced by operations with fewer than five employees,” predicts Dr. Jenkins. “The era of the 300-person digital publication is coming to an end, much like the dinosaurs, MySpace, and Google’s moral compass.”
For TechOnion, this means continuing to follow the DeLong blueprint: create content that people actually want to consume, keep overheads low, and never take anything too seriously—especially tech billionaires who think they’re saving humanity by creating electric cars that occasionally burst into flames.
“The biggest lesson we learned from Scott DeLong is that you don’t need a fancy office or venture capital to reach millions of people,” Simba probably told us while eating ramen directly from the pot. “You just need to understand that humans are fundamentally drawn to content that makes them feel something—whether that’s heartwarming emotion or the satisfying realization that tech CEOs are just as ridiculous as the rest of us.”
As TechOnion continues to grow, following in DeLong’s footsteps while adding its unique satirical spin on tech coverage, one thing is certain: the future of tech media is being written by people in sweatpants, not boardrooms.
And that’s exactly as it should be.
Want to support TECHONION’s mission to make tech billionaires cry while educating the masses? We’re raising funds to upgrade from instant ramen to the fancy ramen with the egg on top. Plus, every donation directly reduces Simba’s anxiety about whether this whole DeLong-inspired operation is sustainable. For just the price of one overpriced app subscription you never use, you can help us continue applying the DeLong Method to expose tech absurdity while actually teaching you something useful about technology. Buy us Chai Latte (and more).
References
- https://www.scottdelong.com/ ↩︎
- https://www.businessinsider.com/why-viralnova-might-sell-2014-1 ↩︎
- https://www.businessinsider.com/zealot-media-buys-scott-delongs-viralnova-for-100-million-2015-7 ↩︎
- https://www.yahoo.com/news/buzzfeed-box-people-behind-viralnova-140230119.html ↩︎
- https://www.scottdelong.com/about-me/ ↩︎
