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

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

#111

Post by oneandtheonly »

snide wrote: post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

Great question, this is essentially trying to solve the trilemma of creators: building reach by cracking algos, retaining relavence in ever changing content formats and monetization (ads or otherwise)

Drawing an analogy from movies where MCU gets made for theatre format and smaller independent movie for OTT format, creators would also need to diverge in their engagement and monetization paths.

Someone like Joe Rogan may build large audience in big platform to build different monetization model whereas a creator creating content for D&D enthusiasts would depend on building strong community driven monetization model.

My bet is that most of the creators would fall in the latter category who are trying to force fit their content to be relevant on larger platforms which is sub-optimal. As long as they get a chance to bring audience out of the bigger platforms to engage their audience in a format of their liking & create an experience for them, they stand a better chance of monetization.

That is the bet I have taken in my start-up. The idea is to create an ecosystem of tools that help content creators engage with their smaller set of audience who are willing to pay for the content. Keep the whole experience as seamless as possible to make the experience exceptional.

This still does not solve for the discoverability problem for which they have to still rely on larger platforms. The idea is to give as many tools as possible to help creators once they have identified audience who are willing to pay the creator and give them a better fighting chance.

My 2 cents on this.

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

#113

Post by eropple »

tpxl wrote: post #98
eropple wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently. 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 ever…

How far does PeerTube or something similar go towards solving this problem? You'll still need to seed the initial streams, but if you get a big spike of users, they'll seed the video amongst each other.

From a content and branding perspective, I wouldn't touch PeerTube with a thirty-foot pole. It is fundamentally untenable unless you want people able to take screenshots of your content being featured next to literal-not-figurative Nazi shit. Yes, that's the point of federation, and that the watcher is the one who has those settings to put them next to one another. No, it's not your fault. Yes, it looks awful and it's your responsibility. No, nobody cares about the explanation and if you are in a place where you must explain "well, actually, it's the viewer's fault that my thoughtful video is next to some guy hanging swastikas in his bonus room," you have already and irrevocably lost. (This can, I want to note, happen in a more diminished form on other platforms--there's nothing stopping somebody's YouTube recommendations from being a disaster area. But people know what YouTube is. They know YouTube picks the hits. PeerTube isn't that, and having to explain at all is what would sink it.)

Also, even if you ignore the "we're camping next to fascists" vibe of the whole thing, PeerTube quality-of-experience management is deeply poor besides. If you're using some small DIY CDN, you have predictably bad performance, instead of suddenly bad performance, and if you're using a big CDN, you have working traffic steering.

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

#114

Post by insane_dreamer »

snide wrote: post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

I think subscription-based instead of ad-based is the only way to monetize good content. It doesn't scale nearly as big (which is why companies like Meta will never go for it) and won't make any unicorns, but that's OK. An ad-based model will eventually pollute the platform no matter what esp as companies try to extract as much revenue as possible from it.

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

#115

Post by coldpie »

ravenstine wrote: post #102

Why TV Guide? Is that relevant in some capacity? They were considered obsolete when I was a kid and only the elderly would still use them. Seems like an interesting purchase, but I quit watching TV a long time ago. Is there something TV Guide does that people still pay attention to?

There's a lotta elderly people out there.

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

#116

Post by giantrobot »

snide wrote: post #61
nonameiguess wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hinted at by dbingham's comment elsewhere, but I believe many fan communities and information stores that host user-generated content should be run as non-profits. One of my favorite YouTube channels is PanTheOrganizer, who is effectively how I learned to detail and care for my own vehicles. Far and away the best channel in that particular niche, but something that stands out about it he is extremely professi…

I think that's valid. I guess then what I'd look to create is something akin to Stripe Atlas + a content delivery platform for non-profit communities. I think it's a lot easier to just say "make it non-profit" without understanding how hard doing something like that might be for your average content creator.

Maybe the average content creator isn't actually making something that is financially sustainable. Just because a lot of effort went into something doesn't mean someone else owes them for the act of creation. Someone else has to value the created content. Even then that value needs to be somewhere north of a dollar because it's not practical to conduct transactions less than that. Before anyone screams "crypto" the transaction fees for cryptocurrencies are ludicrous and even in the best case there's not really a way to pay someone less than a dollar.

Even though magazines are largely dead/dying that subscription model seems like the only workable one. You get a bunch of content for a relatively low yearly price. Even then no individual creator is going to get independently wealthy.

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

#117

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

rickreynoldssf wrote: post #77

I'm an Ex-Engineering Manager at GameSpot & Giantbomb at CBS (2013-2016). All the stuff Dave mentioned was very much the same when I was there. The unit was always in trouble losing money quarter after quarter and focus was always on the ad sales. E3 was the biggest time for revenue and it was stressful in the lead up to it hoping we'd sign enough to keep things going. It got progressively worse each year. Towards th…

Not to distract from the major point but this is incorrect:

> Also at the time Facebook considered a view when the video was visible on the feed for a second

It was always 3s. That being said, if any of the video was in the viewport, it counted, which was nonsense.

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

#118

Post by hnburnsy »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #114
snide wrote: post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

I think subscription-based instead of ad-based is the only way to monetize good content. It doesn't scale nearly as big (which is why companies like Meta will never go for it) and won't make any unicorns, but that's OK. An ad-based model will eventually pollute the platform no matter what esp as companies try to extract as much revenue as possible from it.

I wish instant, frictionless micropayments was a thing, would love tip blogs, journalists, and other content creators directly without entering credit card info and risking my finances.

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

#119

Post by ravenstine »

coldpie wrote: post #115
ravenstine wrote: post #102

Why TV Guide? Is that relevant in some capacity? They were considered obsolete when I was a kid and only the elderly would still use them. Seems like an interesting purchase, but I quit watching TV a long time ago. Is there something TV Guide does that people still pay attention to?

There's a lotta elderly people out there.

Maybe. I can't imagine my parents using TV Guide when they reach their 80s. Though I'm sure they'll still be using a DVR and intentionally deleting recordings to "save space" even with 80 petabytes of storage.

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

#120

Post by fckgw »

ravenstine wrote: post #102

Why TV Guide? Is that relevant in some capacity? They were considered obsolete when I was a kid and only the elderly would still use them. Seems like an interesting purchase, but I quit watching TV a long time ago. Is there something TV Guide does that people still pay attention to?

TV Guide is (and always has been) a general TV entertainment website. It still generates a lot of content.
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