The three people behind the immensely popular Twitter accounts @HistoryInPics and @EarthPix have raised $2 million from investors. What started as just a handful of Twitter accounts is quickly growing into a media empire that they call All Day Media. Let's just hope All Day hires some editors and fact-checkers with some of that cash.
According to TechCrunch, venture firms 500 Startups, Upfront Ventures, and Daher Capital have all thrown in for the social media start-up that as of a year ago was raking in about $50,000 a month. They're now reportedly taking in about $1 million a month.
All Day's Twitter accounts have become immensely popular online, amassing millions of followers in less than two years of existence. The company gets its content largely by scraping places like Reddit for images and captions. The only problem? The images are often fake and the captions are often wrong.
The company now has a front page, complete with advertisers like Ford running sponsored content. Thankfully, the articles on All Day's homepage are more factual than their Twitter counterparts, but that's mostly because they appear to be plagiarized from Wikipedia. Just take a look at the images and text for All Day articles next to Wikipedia articles. They're often identical.
But plagiarism, inaccuracy, and frivolousness have never stopped emerging media companies before. In fact, that appears to be the recipe for success. Even Buzzfeed experienced similar growing pains, including accusations that they were nothing more than unattributed cat photos, or the ouster of serial plagiarist Benny Johnson. Unlike Buzzfeed, though, there's no indication that All Day cares about what it's getting wrong—or has any interest in fixing it. [Techcrunch]
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