Best of Mere Orthodoxy: 2025

Written by Jake Meador | Dec 29, 2025 12:00:01 PM

As we wrap up every year, we have long had a habit of reviewing the past year's work here at Mere O and sharing some of our favorite pieces in an end-of-year recap. This collection is not necessarily indicative of traffic, but simply is our own attempt to highlight some of the year's best work.

It has been a full year for us. We have grown our team to three full-time employees, our email list, which was at 800 in the spring of 2024, has exploded to over 22,000 as we close out the year. Our paid membership has likewise nearly tripled from where it was in early 2024 to where it is now.

Additionally, we are now posting ten original essays and reviews per week rather than five, which means we have doubled the amount of work we are already giving away for free on our website every day. If you've been encouraged, helped, or otherwise blessed by the work, the simplest way for you to help us continue doing it is to become a Mere Orthodoxy member today.

Often in these posts I will also consider some broader media trends in the past year and how those have influenced our work.

What I shared above largely covers that, however: Social media is dying or perhaps dead as a traffic generation tool for online media. Relatedly, "selling ads based on high traffic" is also dead and has been for some time. These days Facebook, Twitter, and other similar platforms want to treat their platforms more as walled gardens then as a portal to the open web. When I first took over Mere O in 2015, our leading traffic source was direct traffic, with Facebook and organic search next in line. Twitter was also significant. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, Facebook traffic had dropped off substantially, but Twitter was still a good traffic source.

In 2025, however, 75% of our traffic is coming from direct site visitors, email, and website referrals. Search and social combine for only 25% of our traffic. This implies a broader change in how online media works today. In the past, the goal was traffic, social media made it relatively easy to get large amounts of traffic, and then publishers tried to monetize their site via their traffic, usually via partnerships with advertisers of one kind or another.

Though it is sometimes remembered as a golden age of blogging, this wasn't a great model, actually. It incentivized poor behavior on the part of media producers, it caused media producers to build their publications on top of audiences they did not own or have direct access to but only could access through a mediator, such as Facebook or Twitter, and due to the low payments offered by advertisers it forced media companies to chase unsustainably large audiences just to pay their bills.

The model we have now is generally better, but also a bit harder to break into. The default funding model these days is a blending of reader support in the form of memberships and sponsorship ads for podcasts and email, which both work far better as advertising platforms than websites, and donations.

The reason this model is harder to break into is because it is much harder now to build an audience as an individual writer or producer. That said, the media organizations that succeed with this model will be far better positioned for long-term success than the signature digital media outlets of the social media age, such as Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, Vice, and so on, virtually all of whom exist today, if at all, only in a zombiefied form.

The current business model for supporting online media encourages publishers to know their audience, makes it far easier for them own their audience and access them directly, and can theoretically allow for the flourishing of small magazines of the sort that once thrived in America and might do so again. On that note, here are some of our favorite pieces from our own small magazine's work this year.