The Onion Is Starting to Feel Alive Again

The Onion's annual revenue reportedly grew 300% in 2025 according to Fast Company. After relaunching its print newspaper as a paid subscription, it now has 65,000 print subscribers spread across all 50 states and 50 countries. By some estimates, that makes The Onion the 12th-largest newspaper in the United States; larger than The Boston Globe.

Over the past year The Onion has managed to put out various forms of multi-media including a Jeffrey Epstein mockumentary, a 26 minute 4th of July mockumentary entitled America: Birth of a Nation that ends as a meta-mockumentary about Ken Burns documentaries, and launched Encircled; a spoof of Jubilee’s “one person versus twenty opponents” debate series Surrounded. It has even created an actual advertising agency under The Onion umbrella. America’s Finest Creative Agency now offers copywriting, campaign strategy, stunt marketing, and branded video services to companies willing to get weird. 

They have also gotten much better at resurfacing older projects that, frankly, I think slipped under a lot of people’s radar the first time around. Content such as A Very Fatal Murder, which The Onion recently began uploading episode by episode to YouTube:

 
The most ambitious part of this expansion is, of course, InfoWars.

The Onion has spent more than a year attempting to acquire the assets of Alex Jones’s conspiracy empire with the support of the Sandy Hook families. The legal fight over the original InfoWars brand, studio, and domain remains unresolved, but The Onion finally stopped waiting and launched its own version on July 2. For now, the project lives at TheOnion.info rather than InfoWars.com, with Tim Heidecker serving as creative director and releasing weekly episodes. The launch also coincided with a planned $100,000 payment to the Sandy Hook families from merchandise revenue.

Heidecker has already managed to turn his On Cinema At The Cinema series into a whole universe, complete with a website that's starting to look like its own streaming platform called the HEI Network. If he can do the same thing with the InfoWars brand, the sky is the limit. His stated ambition for InfoWars is similarly expansive to On Cinema: after the immediate novelty of parodying Alex Jones wears off, he wants it to become a broader home for original comedy.

The immediate challenge is that Alex Jones may be the most parody-resistant person alive. Never mind the litany of conspiracy theories, Jones’s new platform is running AI advertisements that appropriate trademarked characters such as Darth Vader and celebrity likenesses such as Clint Eastwood to sell his products: 

While watching Heidecker step inside the InfoWars machinery, I keep thinking about the warning at the center of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night: that “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” My hope is that the project really does eventually grows beyond parodying Jones while avoiding the trap of just becoming Alex Jones in the same way that a majority of conservatives actually believed Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report “only pretends to be joking” and “genuinely meant what he said.” There are limits to how long even the best impression of Jones can remain interesting, and the greater opportunity is to take a media machine built to manufacture fear and use it to create something genuine.