CSS-Tricks is independent again as longtime writer Geoff Graham buys it from DigitalOcean
CSS-Tricks is independent again: 12-year writer Geoff Graham bought it back from DigitalOcean; newsletter restarts Nov 10, AI submissions rejected.
CSS-Tricks, the front-end teaching site Chris Coyier founded in 2007, is back under personal ownership: on October 26 the site announced in “CSS-Tricks has a new owner” that Geoff Graham — a contributor of 12 years who has effectively run the place solo for the past few years — has bought it back from DigitalOcean, which purchased it from Coyier in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. Graham calls the job his full-time work “at least for a while,” and the announcement lays out concrete terms: the long-dormant newsletter returns November 10, publishing settles at roughly one or two articles a week, revenue reverts to ads plus memberships (with a course and a shop alongside), and AI-generated submissions are not welcome.
Key points
- The new owner, Geoff Graham, has written for CSS-Tricks for about 12 years and describes the site as “an independent site once again”; DigitalOcean bought it from founder Chris Coyier in 2022.
- Before the sale, the site had published nothing since August 31. Graham wrote in September that his last few invoices went unpaid and DigitalOcean stopped responding.
- The plan: newsletter back November 10, about 1-2 posts a week, display ads / sponsored posts / newsletter sponsors as before the acquisition, plus a membership with Discord, a paid beginner HTML/CSS course in development, and a merch shop. AI “slop” submissions are rejected.
Background
The sale ends a quiet collapse that played out in public. In a September 14 post titled “Why CSS-Tricks has been quiet,” Graham explained that nothing had been published since August 31 — against a normal cadence of 2-5 articles a week — and that he had paused “not because I want to, but for noisy noise behind the scenes.” He had been working unpaid for months: “I had been paid up until my last few invoices,” he wrote in the comments, adding “I literally can’t afford to work free for months on end.” DigitalOcean, he said, had gone silent — “it’s just tough when you’re talking to a wall” — and he saw nobody lined up to take over: “It’s been a solo operation for years and I don’t believe DigitalOcean has anyone tagged to pick it up.”
Six weeks after that post — nearly two months after the last article — the man who had been keeping the lights on owned the building. The two posts read together like a before-and-after: the cloud company bought a content brand, left it unattended, and handed it back to the one person still minding it.
The deal and the plan
Every public fact about the transaction comes from the buyer: neither the announcement nor Graham’s blog discloses a price. On Hacker News, gkoberger guessed “Digital Ocean bought it for $4M; I bet they sold it for $0 (rather than shut it down)” — that figure is a commenter’s speculation, not a confirmed number, and neither party has commented on price.
What is verifiable is the operating plan:
| Item | Plan | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletter | Returns November 10 | Announcement footer |
| Cadence | “Maybe one or two articles most weeks,” at least initially | Announcement |
| Advertising | Back to pre-DigitalOcean formats: display ads, sponsored posts, newsletter sponsors | Announcement |
| Membership | Includes a Discord community and perks; price not announced | Announcement |
| Course | Beginner HTML/CSS course in development, to be sold | Announcement |
| Shop | T-shirts, prints, stickers, mousepads | Announcement |
| Submissions | Guest form reopened, but the backlog covers the rest of the year; AI slop rejected | Announcement |
On AI content, Graham’s position is blunt. He links to a post from November 2025 titled “If You’re Not Gonna Bother Writing It Yourself, I Ain’t Gonna Bother Reading It Myself,” and allows in the announcement that the only submissions he’ll turn away are “slop submissions, of course.” Beyond submissions, he wants the site to serve beginners better, arguing the skills gap is growing — and he doesn’t plan to write most of it himself: he’d rather help “writers develop a voice.”
What others say
The Hacker News thread (367 points, 86 comments when checked October 27 via the Algolia API, still climbing) turned the sale into a referendum on whether subscriber-quality content sites can survive the LLM era at all.
The optimists bet on small, high-value audiences. simonw (Simon Willison): “Attract an audience of people who make purchasing decisions, then attract sponsors who want to be put in front of those people. Quality of readers is more important than quantity” — though he conceded the counterargument “I don’t disagree with any of that.” petercooper reached for the Economist and WSJ: publications with named authors and track records still draw readers. A decade-deep front-end engineer, jeromechoo, supplied the practitioner’s view: “Nothing a frontier LLM has built me in the last year has been satisfactory to me… frontend isn’t ‘solved’ just because LLMs exist.”
The pessimists run the math colder. dfabulich argues sponsorship “has been on the decline for years”: high-value audiences now ask LLMs directly, and “LLMs approximately never click on the ads.” That is not a fringe fear — earlier this month a federal judge dismissed the publishers’ antitrust suits over Google AI search (our earlier coverage), leaving publishers with no legal recourse for lost search traffic. sobiolite says CSS-Tricks now ranks “about as relevant as ‘PostScript Tricks’” — hand-written CSS as, at best, a hobby for dedicated tinkerers. Others noted the irony that a long announcement about AI says nothing about AI-generated CSS.
One commenter had first-hand knowledge of the prelude. vanadium, self-identified former DigitalOcean staff: “I was at DO at the time, so I can at least validate exactly what you implied about it frustratingly not being a priority. There’s a whole story behind that I probably can’t get into.” That squares with Graham’s September account: a cloud company bought a content brand, and nobody was left minding it.
Our take
For anyone who ships CSS, the near-term news is good: a free, human-edited front-end reference survives, with — per the announcement — guest posts banked through the rest of the year; subscribe November 10 and the roundups land in your inbox for nothing. The slammed door on AI submissions also keeps one working example of what an edited, human-written tutorial site looks like. The long-term question is the interesting one, because Graham is explicitly betting on Willison’s model — reader quality over reach — in a market where the dfabulich counterargument (reference queries get answered in a chat window, ads starve) has real force. This site is now the live experiment: if ads plus memberships carry a full-time editor, every other niche content site has a playbook to copy; if not, this was a graceful exit rather than a revival. Worth watching, too: membership and course pricing are unannounced, so two of the four revenue legs don’t have numbers under them yet — the announcement reads confident, but the business model is still on paper.