Exclusive: Bustle Group’s Nylon is launching a free, invite-only club for ‘young tastemakers’ that aims to reinvent media business models

People have risked bodily harm to attend a Nylon party. 

At 2023 Art Basel, two people tried scaling a fence and swimming across a small channel just to get into a bash hosted by the publisher of the “it” girl-focused magazine. This may sound far-fetched, but it’s a testament to the gravitational pull of Nylon’s gatherings—events that have become about more than just a good time. From Art Basel to Coachella to New York Fashion Week, these parties represent something much bigger: a shift in Nylon's business model, expanding into live events and creating a thriving community.

“You never know who you'll be standing next to at a Nylon party,” said Bryan Goldberg, CEO and founder of Bustle Digital Group, the publisher of Nylon. “That's why everyone wants to go.”

Nylon is now looking to take things further, reinventing a media business model around communities and events. The brand is launching its Nylon membership program in late 2025, Fortune is the first to report. The membership is invite-only and capped at a few thousand people—and it’s free.

“The membership model is so hot right now,” said Goldberg. “So, we're taking the model and we're totally inverting it to be something new and different. The current model is that these clubs are charging members as much as $10,000 a year to be a part of the community. I think that when you charge people to be part of a community, it necessarily prevents you from getting a lot of the best people to join your community.”

Goldberg wants to remove that barrier with the purpose of getting the right people in the room, both figuratively and literally. 

“I don't think people should have to pay to be part of a community,” he said. “The Nylon membership is selective, but it's free. We're going to bring together thousands of the most influential young tastemakers in America into a membership, and the brands will pay us to get adjacency with this incredible community of influencers.”

It's a concept that harkens back to the "controlled circulation" business model in the days of print media, in which a special publication targeting a specific group (for instance bankers, or corporate IT professionals) was sent to the reader at no cost while advertisers paid to be in the magazine and reach the select group. Goldberg is, in a sense, adapting the model for the 21st century form of community.

The Nylon club will include high-profile people and influencers, but isn’t expressly linked to follower count. As much as anything, it’s about the power of the group’s aggregate reach.

"Our goal is to ultimately get this program to 50,000 influential people with an average of 100,000 followers each, which would get us to a five billion reach,” he said. 

I put the question to Goldberg: What makes him think advertisers will bite?

“I'm confident, because they're already paying, and because we're getting some of the biggest and most powerful brands in the world to pay top-dollar to be at our events, to meet and engage with these tastemakers,” Goldberg told Fortune. “And if they're doing that in real life at the events, I think they'll continue to do it the other 364 days a year.”

The partnerships have frequently taken the form of "activations" — hands-on demonstrations and experiences to try a new line of make-up or savor a tequila — at these swanky events. How this kind of thing will translate to a year-round experience that isn't necessarily tied to an in-person event remains to be seen, though one could imagine online events and other types of promotions.

For Goldberg, this is high-stakes. He’s spent his career in media, cofounding Bleacher Report (which sold in 2012 to Turner Broadcasting System) and founding Bustle in 2013. He believes the model he’s pioneering with Nylon could be a turning point for media business models, at a time when the industry is under astonishing financial pressure. 

"Media businesses have not embraced community enough,” Goldberg said. “The missing step is really proving out that media companies can matter to their audiences, and can matter a great deal… I think the mistake media companies made in the last ten years was that, in the drive for mass scale, they lost all sense of connection with their audience. You can't be something meaningful to 10 million people. You just can't. And I want Nylon to be incredibly meaningful to 50,000 or 100,000 people, where the connection is incredibly deep.”

Goldberg says that community will get the party started again, in more ways than one. 

“We draw inspiration from Studio 54,” he said. “We want to bring that energy back."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com