What happened to Cracked?

Three major things happened.

The core talent of Cracked, the names people recognise like Michael Swaim, Daniel O’Brien, Jack O’Brien, Soren Bowie, Katie Willert, Katy Stoll, Cody Johnson, etc. moved more heavily to the video production side of it. As they were all based in LA it made sense for this move, especially when their video content was usually great. So while there remained a good talent base churning out articles, and a solid editorial team, the articles had a slight change in tone.

Secondly, the guy who had helmed the company for the entire length of the website’s existence, Jack O’Brien, moved on to How Stuff Works (where he makes The Daily Zeitgeist podcast with Miles Gray) and the company was bought out from it’s previous owners for a few million dollars.

Lastly, the company realised that the way to ‘maximise’ profit was to fire all of the contracted staff and rely solely on freelance contributions (freelancers are generally cheaper than contract employees) while maintaining a few staff to manage the editorial process. This killed the video section immediately, knocked many of the favourite talent off the site, and generally lead to a bit of a backlash from long time fans who enjoyed the personalities more than just the listicles.

But if you are interested in following the old Cracked staff they can be found in various places:

• Michael Swaim runs Small Beans with Abe Epperson. Many Cracked Alumni appear on their podcasts and in their videos.
• Tom Reimann and David Bell founded Gamefully Unemployed, which has many Cracked Alumni on their podcasts, and their DnD and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series are stacked with old Cracked writers
• Jack O’Brien hosts The Daily Zeitgeist on How Stuff Works and runs the comedy network for How Stuff Works.
• Robert Evans is still doing freelance reporting but also hosts and writes the Behind the Bastards podcast on How Stuff Works, which covers the bastards from history.
• Daniel O’Brien can mostly be found on his twitter and at BunnyEars.
• Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll run Some More News, the news show and podcast.
• Soren Bowie writes for American Dad and tweets a bunch.
• Alex Schmidt is still at Cracked writing and producing The Cracked Podcast.