Hooksexup Founder, Rufus Griscom
We have some pretty exciting news over here — after more than a decade of running Hooksexup, I am formally passing the baton to Sean Mills, the esteemed former president of The Onion, who has joined the Hooksexup team as our new CEO. We have long admired The Onion, our venerable neighbor here in downtown New York, and have noted that Sean managed not to screw it up during his seven years there. Indeed, under Sean's leadership The Onion grew substantially, expanded into video (with the infamous, Peabody-Award-winning Onion News Network), and spun off one of the best culture sites online (The AV Club). In a medium that favors aggregation and commenting on the comments of commenters, The Onion has stubbornly persisted in creating finely crafted original content, and done extremely well in spite of it.
It's hard to fathom what kind of havoc Sean will wreak on the good ship Hooksexup — I , for one, am really looking forward to seeing what he and his team create together. The intersection of sex, dating, and relationships needs a great website that appreciates the beautiful, sexy absurdity of it all — a website with the courage to evolve. Hooksexup has done a great deal of exploring of this terrain in the last decade, and in the coming months and years we can expect more fearless investigation of our collective underwear drawer.
There will be some changes — Hooksexup Premium will be expanded and moved to a new website, and features on Hooksexup proper will take some innovative new turns. There may be some loud noises and foul-mouthed workers ambling about during this renovation, but it's going to be well worth it. Thanks for your loyalty over the years, and stay tuned.
Rufus
Hooksexup CEO, Sean Mills
Following on that lovely note from Rufus, I wanted to share some news and a couple assurances. But first, a word or two about where Hooksexup is today. Over the years, Hooksexup has come to do three unique things:
1) Hooksexup is an online magazine that explores the intersection of sex, dating, and relationships with honesty, humor and intelligence.
2) Hooksexup offers a paid subscription site — Hooksexup Premium — which features photography that manages to be high caliber and sexy at the same time — a rarity online.
3) Hooksexup is also a leading online dating site — Hooksexup Personals — which serves as an important alternative to the mass-market web personals sites.
These closely related but discrete efforts have all co-existed at hooksexup.com for the past six years and — first assurance — we remain committed to seeing that all three thrive in the years to come. Hooksexup has become a leader in each area over time, and we will continue to build on that success.
That said, like Darwin's iguanas, Hooksexup is an evolving entity, and we will continue to change when we think we can make the site more interesting. One significant change is that we will be moving Hooksexup Premium to a new site in the coming months. We want Hooksexup readers to be able to enjoy a range of content without running into registration walls, and we want Hooksexup Premium subscribers to enjoy a beautifully designed, dedicated site without advertising, and therefore free of restrictions. We're confident this move, and the extra focus it brings to the different components of Hooksexup, will result in livelier, more engaging and beautiful websites.
As we evolve, Hooksexup will remain true to its core mission of approaching our subject matter with more intelligence and daring than the next guy. That's assurance number two: Hooksexup will not be tamer, toned down, or less wild than it has been in the past.
Speculate freely about how, specifically, we're going to change, but we'll confess we don't know all the specifics ourselves just yet. We're going to experiment a lot and keep things very interesting on the site every day. As always, we'll cover the absurdity, the seriousness, the humor, and the thrills of our modern dating lives. Hooksexup's groundbreaking features have led this conversation for the past ten years and we'd be idiots to screw that up. So we won't.
Sean
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