So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 50) Why you should see if your favorite website's about to go up for sale

Hello, weekend readers. This is a make-good for the issues I skipped earlier this week. It's also a very exciting milestone for the newsletter, because this is the 50th newsletter sent out to inboxes beyond mine. Thank you, all of you, who have invited me into your inboxes and shared this newsletter with your friends.

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Brace yourself: We have hit the portion of the tech/culture bubble where there's money sloshing in and out of media ventures. The Onion and Funny or Die are both putting themselves up for sale, while Say Media -- publisher of Remodelista, Fashionista and and ReadWrite -- is shopping around its titles to any interested buyers.

So what? The brands listed above have varying traffic stats (The Onion boasts 11 mil uniques per month, while Remodelista is estimated to bring in only 386K) but what they all have in common are staffs producing original content, and some companies are finding that it's not so easy to adopt the Buzzfeed recipe of content + native ads + backend tech = profit (vol 1, issue 12). It is worth noting that it is the editorial properties, not the back-end tech, that the CEOs are sending out to find new homes.

Who cares? The fate off spun-off or acquired media brands is far from assured -- witness the trajectories of Domino (brought back last year) or Lucky (spun off from Conde Nast recently) for this go-round, or hit Amazon and buy a remaindered copy of Starving to Death on $200 Million, which details how the Industry Standard ran into the ground back in the Aughties. On a micro level, this means if there's something you like on any of those sites, figure out how to save it to the cloud, because it may not be around later.

On a macro level, the people who care are the people who have to figure out how to make a content-creating website make money. There has been a big shift in how ads get placed on websites -- say good-bye to advertising networks and hello to "programmatic buys," where software tools can use real-time data to delivered targeted ads to specific audiences (thus lowering the CPM for ads and meaning less money to run a site), and there is some quibbling over how successful branded content (aka "native content") is -- Funny or Die's been very good at making it work, while fashion bloggers have had considerable issues. As the investors who have been pumping millions into companies like Say Media and Buzzfeed want to know: How do you make money as a content publisher?

Why did I pick the image that I did for this topic? Because The Best of Everything features Joan Crawford as a lady editor in publishing.

By the way, this film is a must-see. Based on the Rona Jaffe novel of the same name, the film's arc seems faintly similar to The Devil Wears Prada: advantaged girl Caroline goes to work in a glamour industry, has a dragon-lady boss, eventually gains success at the expense of her personal life, gets an object lesson via her former boss, and then -- because this was the 1950s -- decides that really, what she wants is to just let her boyfriend be in charge for a while.

My thumbnail description doesn't do justice to the lunatic greatness of this flick: I haven't mentioned the actress who gets killed stalking her ex-svengali or the naif who is so adamant that she won't get an abortion, she flings herself out of a moving car and into the arms of a doctor. For a fascinating article on how the novel became the movie, read "The Lipstick Jungle."

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Your pop culture note of the day: ... was sort of covered with the hat tip to The Best of Everything up there.

But let's craft a syllabus to justify a weekend of thematic movie watching: All About Eve (1950); The Best of Everything (1959); The Valley of the Dolls (1967); Nine to Five (1980); Lace (1984). I am a sucker for classic movies where women try to balance professional ambition, friendship, societal expectations, and their libidos. And YES, Lace counts as a movie.

Feel free to submit your own proposed essay topics via email or Twitter after knocking these flicks off. The question I have: What is the 1990s' answer to The Valley of the Dolls? (Hint: The answer is never Spice World.)

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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "When did she send out a picture of Brandon Routh snuggling a car?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was November 11, 2014, btw.)

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions via email or Twitter. Always let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares? If you really like it, tell a friend to subscribe.