After hitting rock bottom earlier this year, addiction website TheFix.com is on the path to recovery.
The site is a popular destination for people seeking news and opinions about drug addiction and recovery issues, but it sat dormant for months this year after a messy dispute between a founder and an investor that led to a bankruptcy filing.
The site got a fresh start recently when it was purchased out of bankruptcy by Clean and Sober Media of Malibu in October. Then last week, TheFix hired a new publisher and editor-in-chief, Jay Levin, founder and former editor-in-chief of the LA Weekly. He’s now running it out of his home in Beverly Hills.
Levin said the focus is on rebooting coverage and expanding into new areas, such as mental health issues. He’s hoping to get traffic back up to increase the value of ads, but said the concentration for now is on content rather than revenue.
“You want to get the audience numbers back up and show you’re demonstrating visitor growth,” he said. “We’re fortunately financed well enough that we don’t have to go desperately seeking revenues.”
That new financial backing comes from Clean & Sober’s owner, Delphine Robertson, who was a music supervisor at Tom Hanks’ production company, Playtone Productions. She is also the daughter of musician Robbie Robertson, famous for his work with rock group the Band.
Delphine Robertson won a competitive bidding process that pitted her against large players such Internet Brands of El Segundo, which operates online forums, and Recovery Brands, a San Diego enterprise that generates leads for recovery centers.
A purchase by either of those other companies could have dramatically altered the site’s focus. Under Robertson, whose winning bid was $400,000, the site is expected to maintain its casual tone. Its tagline is “Recovery and Addiction, Straight Up.”
The site was formerly run from New York and gained popularity among readers for its at times contrarian take on drug and alcohol addiction and recovery, such as an article about the cultish tendencies of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The site brought in most of its money from addiction treatment facilities, which would, for example, pay a couple of thousand dollars for placement of their name and a link to a review of their facility on TheFix’s homepage. Facilities would also pay the site for referrals that came in by way of an 888 number.
But that didn’t bring in enough money. TheFix’s previous parent company, Recovery Media of New York, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in July.
Breaking even
TheFix was co-founded in 2011 by Maer Roshan, a journalist and former editor at New York Magazine. He launched the site with a recent Harvard business school grad, Allison Floam, and Joe Schrank, a social worker and operator of a New York treatment facility. Along with posting stories, part of the idea was to create a Zagat-like guide to the roughly 60,000 treatment facilities in the United States.
Roshan was able to raise substantial money from investors, most notably Paul McCulley, a former managing director at Newport Beach investment firm Pimco. McCulley invested $2.4 million in the site in 2011 and went on to become the majority owner.
Roshan, who apparently now lives in Los Angeles and is on the board of a Venice startup, said in legal documents that he was fired from TheFix when he entered rehab early last year. What’s more, he said in a lawsuit designed to open the company’s books, McCulley offered him just pennies on the dollar for his shares – about $30,000 for a 30 percent stake of the company. Roshan claims the website was worth as much as $10 million. The lawsuit has apparently been rendered moot by the bankruptcy and sale of the website.
McCulley could not be located for comment for this article. Roshan did not respond to a request for comment.
This summer, an editor at TheFix emailed staffers that the site was shutting down, citing legal costs from Roshan’s lawsuits. The site ceased publishing stories in late July. That’s also when treatment centers were notified of the bankruptcy.
Among those notified was Robertson’s husband, Richard Taite, founder, owner and chief executive of ultra-high-end treatment facility Cliffside Malibu, which charges $68,000 a month for a private room.
Taite had been paying about $3,000 a month to TheFix to get a review of Cliffside featured prominently on its homepage and another landing page. He found it to be effective in bringing in clients and was dismayed to hear of the bankruptcy.
He told Robertson, who has been sober after going through substance abuse treatment at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage 18 years ago, and she decided to enter a stalking horse bid of $250,000 for the site. It was later raised to top bids from Internet Brands and Recovery Brands.
Taite said his wife chose to buy the site to preserve as a public trust given its importance to treatment centers and those recovering from addiction.
“I think this is the most important website in our industry,” he said. “It’s the Huffington Post of the addiction recovery industry.”
Now Robertson, who was not available to comment, is building up the site’s staff again, first by hiring Levin. He was previously coaching people on reducing stress and otherwise improving their lives. Robertson and Levin were connected by friends of friends. The site also has a handful of editorial employees and contracts with paid freelancers, who receive between $50 and $500 per post.
Levin dismissed any notion that the website would unduly favor Cliffside, despite the clear ownership ties between the two.
“I’ve been granted complete authority over the editorial content of the publication,” he said. “This was done by Delphine out of her own interests in saving this and out of her own pocket. There’s no editorial pressure around what her partner owns.”
Levin said he was partly drawn to the site due to its tone, which he called “cool, savvy and authoritative.” Along with adding more mental health coverage, the site will feature new-age recovery practices commonly found in Los Angeles.
Levin said he also saw a legitimate business opportunity given that the site still had an audience of hundreds of thousands each month, even as no new content was posted for four months this summer and fall.
New stories began appearing last week. Levin said he is looking for permanent office space in West Los Angeles.
Taite said there is an expectation that in three months the site will begin to pay for itself with banner ads. But his wife’s primary objective isn’t profit but a positive impact.
“She’s not looking to monetize it for profit,” he said. “What she’s looking to do is break even on the site to where she can feel good about contributing in the way that the Fix has in the past to its readers.”
