Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

Asking how to monetize something like GameFAQs or Wikia feels like how do you monetize friends sharing tips and talking about common passions with each other? Why does that need to be monetized? Some dude figures out left-right-B-A-B-B and posts it to a message board and doesn't need to be paid for it.

I guess another example is my favorite podcast, Iron Culture. Both the podcast and the YouTube channel don't accept sponsorships and lose money, but the hosts are both coaches, one is a scientist, one runs a small supplement company and hosts a History channel YouTube show, and they make their money from that. Recording themselves talking about their research and interests that they'd be talking about with each other anyway doesn't need to be its own full-time job.

Granted, I don't know what this means for real journalism that involves running beats, traveling, long-form investigations, all of which are definitely full-time jobs and not something you just want people doing as a hobby they record themselves during. But a lot of "good content" is not journalism. It's just people recording their thoughts and findings while doing a hobby they love in a way that they would have done for free in the past while still having a regular job, but for whatever reason, that's no longer good enough.

In the mid 2000s, a lot of that traffic got diverted to IGN (who started siphoning off prominent FAQ writers to write guides for their own site) but also Digg and then Reddit. Having a game-specific forum on GameFAQs didn't matter as much when you could moderate your own subreddit community for it.

I just left a company that's doing its level best to make this more affordable and achievable for small organizations, and I wish them the absolute best, but this was true when GB was new and it's still true now. Video is just too many bits across too many gatekeepers (like any of the big clouds). It's not that there isn't transit capacity, it's that everybody who anyone "trusts" wants to bill you per-gigabyte and if you want decent quality-of-experience you have to play ball with the CDNs, who then proceed to have a noose around your neck.

> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization?

I think, most strongly, it either has to not be video or consumers have to be willing to put up with early-2010s video jank. That's the crux of it: an audience trained on YouTube and even Twitch--despite their own jank, they're about as good as it gets for streaming and they're free--is much less likely to put up with something like a 2014 Giant Bomb media player (and 2014 Giant Bomb video quality; the cinematography was always great but 720p lasted for a long time in GB-land).

You would need to create an ecosystem that rewards public good more than private capital. To do that, you would have to start with an enormous amount of capital, and be willing to essentially give it away.

In theory, that's what government is for. In practice... not so much.

(edit: my cat submitted this post half-finished. I've completed it now.)

HN skews critical but NFT and web3 poses a possible path to improvement for certain types of content creation.

An artist or content creator can deploy their own smart contract, have full control over what media it points to, and be paid directly through it. Marketplaces like Foundation[1] act as wrappers on top of this content, and it is in their best interest to keep the fees low and website free of ad-spam and algorithmic nonsense to retain top talent on their platform that drives revenue.

[1] https://foundation.app/collection/shapesncolors?sortOrder=DE...