Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by mecha_ghidorah » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 1:43 AM UTC

snet0 wrote: post #55

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 the hard, honest answer is getting people to pay for things. Netflix, Prime Video, etc. have leap-frogged TV in terms of audience enjoyment by optimising for being a good product that people will pay for. The hard thing is getting people to recognise the options in front of them: pay for the thing you enjoy, or have it slowly turn to shit as it desperately morphs to optimise for ad money. Patreon is in a simi…

> The hard thing is getting people to recognise the options in front of them: pay for the thing you enjoy, or have it slowly turn to shit as it desperately morphs to optimise for ad money.

With Netflix dipping into ad supported type things I'm not even sure "pay or watch it turn to shit" is the case. I know right now the ads are going to be on a new, even cheaper tier, but I am not convinced it will stay that way. Increasingly I feel like over time it will all just turn to shit eventually anyway.

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

#202

Post by adamredwoods » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 2:29 AM UTC

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…

>> The question I haven't been able to solve:

>> 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? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.

I'll tell you how: pay-per-view content

But don't do it by individual silos. I want a service where I pay monthly, say, $50, and I can go to ANY content to get what I need: Bloomberg, WSJ, wikipedia, Medium, CommonSenseMedia, Gamespot, whatever. Stop forcing me to view these sites daily to maximize my return (ie. newspapers). I want ala cart that pulls from a common fund. I don't want to sign up for 20 different sites with recurring fees that I have to remember to cancel when I don't use it anymore. Anyone can put what they want in ($5, $50, $100) and the premium content pulls from that. Per article. Per visit. Per 5 requests, whatever.

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

#203

Post by sbarre » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 2:33 AM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #13

onychomys wrote: post #9

I've been an active gamefaqs user for over 20 years now (I actually have more GF karma than HN karma, and you only get 1 GF karma a day!), and I'm honestly kind of okay with it. Yes, Fandom's sites are filled with terrible ads and autoplaying videos and all the other things that make the internet lousy. But I'd much rather have owners that are at least somewhat related to the content than be owned by some acquisition…

I haven't been active for about 17 years, but I got on GF in 2002 for the Final Fantasy VII walkthroughs. Then I fell into this weird roleplay community of "factions" that existed on some old game boards for Atari 2600, I was part of Z-Tack. Then there were some people who build clones of the message boards, mostly in PHP. Outboards, Darkside Legion, Magician Type 0 were some of their names. I built my own clone larg…

> I got on GF in 2002 for the Final Fantasy VII walkthroughs

You and 75% of the rest of us. ;-)

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

#204

Post by celdon25 » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

snide wrote: post #159

celdon25 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you were the one who made the shitty knockoff version of mp3.com --after-- the acquisition?

Hard to take credit for that as the "one", but I did work on the site as a community manager near its launch. The idea (which wasn't mine) was that in a world where digital downloads existed, there would be no one store that would have them all in one place. People were likely going to need to go to multiple places to get their music, and mp3.com would act as a registry for that content, pointing you in the right dir…

Ha, interesting - Thanks for taking the time to share, the original site was very special to me when growing up. I heard that the rights to all of that original music got transferred to some BigCorp that had a lot of involvement with elevator music. Lots of history lost there, which was a catastrophe if you ask me. The original I'm talking about was from 2000-2001 or so. Can't believe it's been 20 years.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mp3-com-spin...

https://www.theregister.com/2004/01/12/vivendi_spinoff_takes...

https://www.theregister.com/2003/11/19/dont_shoot_the_mp3_co...

Being a community manager during the transition must have been a bit rough, so I apologize if my message brought any bad reminders.

Cheers.

Edit: Looks like some of it was recovered, and there's hope that the archive still exists somewhere. https://www.wired.com/2007/01/ilike-responds-/

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

#205

Post by sbarre » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

kweingar wrote: post #104

Something I’ve always wondered: Why don’t fan communities host their own MediaWiki instance? I don’t imagine that the storage/bandwidth/compute needs of a niche fan wiki would be cost-prohibitive. Then you could completely avoid all of Fandom’s ads.

Because the hosting costs are the cheapest part of it?

The real, time-consuming work is building the site up front, then on an ongoing and perpetual basis: doing technical maintenance and updates, moderating the site for trolls and spam, monitoring and logs, backups, user support, community administration, etc..

It's also thankless work because wikis, unlike forums, are much harder places to build a critical mass of users who will be engaged and want to invest time and effort.

So you have a proportionally small number of people who maintain the content, and a potentially large audience of read-only drop-in users who are not invested in the community in any way, but just want answers so they can leave.

Finding people to operate this kind of site reliably and long-term, unpaid, is really difficult.

So instead, for better or worse people get it for free from Fandom, in exchange for ads.

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

#206

Post by rickreynoldssf » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 3:32 AM UTC

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…

I probably should clarify that GameSpot never intentionally ran malicious ads. We shut them down as soon as they were discovered and many people on staff were vigilant about finding them. It just goes to show the need to go to bottom barrel ad networks when we couldn't sign anything else.

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

#207

Post by GBZombiePie » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:22 AM UTC

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…

Hey there Dave! It's Chris, better known as ZombiePie on Giant Bomb. I made this account to drop this comment and have no idea if I will use it any further and I have no idea if you will see this. I definitely appreciate everything you shared here and wish you nothing but the best in where you are in your life. There are just a few things I'd like to add. The precedent the Whiskey Media era made of what a video game website could do with as little interruption to the user experience set itself apart at the start, but it also was largely unsustainable as you outline here. I'm not sure how many upstart video game networks today will be able to keep the lights on for full-time staff with wages and benefits without the two or three known ways to keep a website running and profitable. There are no Shelby's that are willing to funnel millions into a digital risk like Whiskey Media in the hopes of selling everything for a profit.

Likewise, and I understand it because I was there, but the nostalgia for the "old way of things" on the internet sometimes ignore the constant failures. WM hit it out of the park with Tested, Comic Vine, and Giant Bomb, but it also had Boompa and Political Base. Also, constantly increasing the size of the net of a website network without refining it and ensuring the starting portfolio is profitable was always a constant frustration. You said it best during the 10-year anniversary podcast when you listed the many times when Giant Bomb should have died, but the new monetization systems followed by new monetization systems left behind other key features that needed refinement and updates. Also, the new systems posed issues and didn't draw nearly enough money.

All that aside, the reality is that just having a single domain your one stop shop for everything, like what Giant Bomb and Comic Vine tried to be just is not how people consume media on the internet these days. Web 2.0 also had its glory days and I certainly look back at it with a big smile on my face, but you look at things on YouTube and Twitch and you cannot help but thing media online is just changing. That's the nature of the beast.

All that aside, I wish you and your family nothing the best and I want to thank you for the many memories and for listening to my nasally voice during those call-in segments many years ago.

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

#208

Post by mynameisvlad » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 6:24 AM UTC

Macha wrote: post #178

mynameisvlad wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stretch at best. I get it, Fandom sucks. The rest of the points are completely accurate. But the amount of interlinking isn't their fault.

I mean, if they push their GUI editor and their GUI editor makes it hard to interlink, arguably that does make them part of the problem.

I mean, it’s the same VisualEditor that’s used across MediaWiki sites, including as the default on Wikipedia.

How is it only a problem on Fandom?

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

#209

Post by zeroclip » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 7:23 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #197

zeroclip wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically: if an audience is paying for your digital content or paying to support you on Patreon, they could instead pay for your content through crypto - if they are so willing and have it at their disposal. Aside from the lower fees you’d also be your own payment processor - more resistant to censorship, less platform lock-in, ability to self-host your content. Same applies to selling digital assets on Bandcam…

But that’s merely cryptocurrencies , not NFT. What does NFT bring to the table that just using cryptocurrencies doesn’t?

In a Bandcamp-like platform, the NFT would be a proof of purchase. When a user purchases your digital NFT album, they can at any point sign a message to get a link to the MP3 or FLAC files.

In a Patreon-like and Kickstarter-like platform the NFT might be used just the same, as a proof of purchase to access special content. Or, it could be used as a token or badge of appreciation, such as for being the first patron or a 1-year-continuous patron. The same way GitHub profiles show achievements and who the user is sponsoring.

In digital art platforms NFT is as it is already being used: certification and scarcity.

There’s other applications like streaming payments with vesting schedule:

https://github.com/ourzora/faucets

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

#210

Post by peanut_worm » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 12:33 PM UTC

Wow, so all of those things are irrevocably ruined like Wikia was. I hope someone archived gameFAQs I am sure the text guides will be the first thing to go.