They’ve been funded my whoever pay their bills. For ONN/Today Now, that was paid for by IFC, a TV network. Their Onion Digital years (Sex House, Onion Talks) were basically ads for them as a creative agency (aka Onion Labs, which was shut down in late 2015). Since then, they were sold to G/O Media, and have been basically been gutted.

There’s more than one series which was funded by a streaming platform that has since shut down, and is basically lost media at this point.