[HN Gopher] Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV G...
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Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and
Metacritic
Author : haunter
Score : 158 points
Date : 2022-10-03 12:37 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.fandom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.fandom.com)
| thrillgore wrote:
| Wow. WOW. I didn't think Red Ventures was this quick to exit the
| market. This is not a good sign for the future of game
| journalism.
|
| Disclaimer: I worked at CBS Interactive/ViacomCBS Streaming
| during the original properties sale to Red Ventures.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Game journalism has been dead for a long time. No one who is
| serious about games pays any attention to it, and they
| routinely mock everyone in games journalism, making constant
| comments about "journalist mode" that plays the game for you,
| etc, because they hold them in such low respect. Beyond that it
| seems like half the articles coming out in "games" journalism
| these days seem more interested in pushing specific political
| positions and discussing identity politics than actually
| discussing games exacerbates the problem.
|
| Games journalism is dead it's been dead for a while, anyone
| making money in it right now is just involved trying to make
| the last few bucks before it evaporates.
| astrange wrote:
| > making constant comments about "journalist mode" that plays
| the game for you
|
| This is a bad criticism because it's about Dean Takahashi,
| whose actual problem is he's just kept around to give
| softball interviews to CEOs to make them feel good, but
| nobody actually noticed this so just remember he can't play
| Cuphead.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| No, this is the fallout for gamergate.
|
| People aren't stupid, that "game journalists" were
| basically in bed (metaphorically speaking) with the game
| publishers/developers themselves was a _very_ common
| complaint.
|
| When it was revealed a reviewer was _literally_ sleeping
| with a game developer, it boiled over. Gaming journalism
| could have chosen to defend themselves by creating some
| sort of standard. Instead, they took advantage of the
| internet being vitriolic to try and turn this into a debate
| about misogyny.
|
| What you're seeing now is the fallout of that decision.
| People don't trust them. Because it turns out, attacking
| your audience and labeling them as sexist assholes isn't a
| great idea.
| astrange wrote:
| No, it's not a general point, they're making a specific
| joke about a specific video by a specific guy.
|
| Who isn't one of the liberal arts degree blogger types
| who wants to replace game reviews with leftist politics
| lectures either. He writes for a business journal.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Game journalism has been dead for a long time.
|
| The way I often put it...
|
| Gaming journalists are neither gamers or journalists.
|
| High-quality, factual content is usually boring. Gamers won't
| read it. So for a journalist to cover gaming, they'll have to
| resort to making clickbait and ragebait, and at that point,
| the quality is so low that I don't think it's fair to still
| call it journalism, as it would be an insult to the word.
|
| Then there's the multitude of journalists that just simply
| don't understand games. They're so bad at games that you
| start to wonder if they're even capable of completing 1-1 in
| Super Mario Bros.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That speaks very poorly of games I guess. Not interested in
| anything but bait...
|
| Makes sense if they're all 12-year-olds (or the emotional
| equivalent)
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| 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 the end of my tenure they
| were inflating video views given to ad buyers by including video
| views on other platforms like Facebook where we received no
| revenue at all and could place no ads. Also at the time Facebook
| considered a view when the video was visible on the feed for a
| second. The numbers were wildly inflated. And we were running ads
| from sketchy networks all the time, some of which were malicious.
|
| A good part of the revenue eventually was generated by cheaply
| generated meme content while longer form, crafted content was
| suffering. I'm honestly surprised they're still going. I assumed
| Jeff would peel off with most of the Giant Bomb guys and start
| something new by now. All that's left there is the Giant Bomb
| personalities and even that's not enough to float GameSpot and
| the others. GameFaqs should probably go back to its original
| owner.
|
| These days when I tell actual gamers I used to work on GameSpot,
| they always think I mean GameStop and then don't even know what
| GameSpot is. It is a pretty pointless thing now given you can
| watch any number of Twitch streams to see what any game is like
| and is worth playing.
|
| ...anyway I'm sure this was a fire sale of an asset CBS forced
| Red Ventures to take in order to get CNET. I'm also surprised it
| took this long for Red Ventures to dump it.
|
| *Edit* Ok wow I did not realize the Giant Bomb as I knew it
| completely fell apart. So Jeff did leave as did Vinny and Brad
| and they are doing their own things now. I don't know anything
| about the new crew but I don't see how any can complete with even
| the most mediocre Twitch streamer.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > Towards the end of my tenure they were inflating video views
| given to ad buyers
|
| Oh, so this is the likely reason for those autoplaying, sticky
| videos that are everywhere! The ad industry bubble should have
| collapsed by now, but somehow it keeps growing.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > I assumed Jeff would peel off with most of the Giant Bomb
| guys and start something new by now.
|
| Not sure if you saw, but Jeff did leave several months ago, and
| started a solo Patreon.
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| Oh... I did not know that. I don't follow the site any more.
| A week or two ago I saw what I thought was a recent clip with
| Jeff in it. Good for him!
| adamrezich wrote:
| this is part of what makes Giant Bomb being part of this
| sale kind of baffling--what value does the site even have
| anymore without the personalities that drove it to begin
| with? the site is fully theseus'd now, and sure there's
| still thousands and thousands of community-driven wiki
| pages, but has anyone cared about the wiki at all since at
| least the CBSi days of GB, if not earlier? "Giant Bomb" as
| a brand is utterly meaningless now, it's so strange to see
| it continue to change hands.
| djhworld wrote:
| Also Vinny, Alex and Brad left last year to start their own
| thing (Nextlander)
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I've been listening to his new podcast, and the move seems
| to have been really good for him. Giant Bomb seems like it
| had been really weighing him down for a long time.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| > GameFaqs should probably go back to its original owner.
|
| I remember when that sale first happened and the owner
| announced everything would stay the same. He would be running
| things, his stance on advertising wouldn't change, and so
| forth.
|
| I'm not sure if anyone actually believed that, but from what I
| recall the original owner (forget his name) said he was making
| $80/year and the stress levels were way too high. No one was
| shocked when he left.
|
| What I'll tell you is that I used to be a huge fan of gamefaqs
| and I still visit it from time to time, but after gamespot
| bought them I started using them less and less. I don't know
| that it was anything specific they did to the site, it may have
| simply been me changing through life. But I do know I used to
| frequent the GD&P (Game Design and Programming) boards over
| there and they're basically a ghost town now.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Personally I stopped using GameFaqs after Gamespot bought
| them because I was not a fan of Gamespot's reviews at the
| time.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > What I'll tell you is that I used to be a huge fan of
| gamefaqs and I still visit it from time to time, but after
| gamespot bought them I started using them less and less
|
| Same thing here. I wonder if it's just a change in my
| gameplay habits and getting older. Also modern games are for
| the most part very hand-holdy. And I usually have used
| Youtube to find clips to help me through difficult sections
| of games.
|
| I think Gamefaqs is a relic of its time and today doesn't
| have a lot of relevance for a large portion of today's
| popular games.
|
| There's exceptions of course (Elden Ring comes to mind) but
| these are few and far between.
|
| I remember using gamefaqs to help me through the water
| section of Zelda: OOT. Today I'd probably watch a play
| through on Youtube and be constantly scrubbing the video to
| learn where to go next. Second best would be a community-
| moderated wiki walkthrough.
| SleepilyLimping wrote:
| >I think Gamefaqs is a relic of its time and today doesn't
| have a lot of relevance for a large portion of today's
| popular games.
|
| Part of this is because there's monetary incentives to
| produce walkthroughs (SEO farms, or even just random
| peoples' YouTube channels). The altruism of writing a .txt
| guide is gone.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| 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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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?
| phone_book wrote:
| I still use TV Guide to check what is on for sports, but only a
| few times a month. I don't normally watch TV and I just have an
| antenna directly hooked up to my TV. TV Guide is faster than
| the guide on my TV and I can look beyond the next hour.
| fckgw wrote:
| TV Guide is (and always has been) a general TV entertainment
| website. It still generates a lot of content.
| coldpie wrote:
| There's a lotta elderly people out there.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Oh no, now GameFAQs will be turned into the bloated mess that
| fandom is.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| For a second I read "GameStop". Headed directly to r/wsb.
|
| The fact that they weren't losing their collective mind made me
| realise that I read it wrong.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Did the same thing. For anyone else reading
|
| Gamespot: video game publication
|
| Gamestop: brick & mortar store used video game reseller of
| wallstreet bets fame
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| My first job after college was back in 2006, working as an
| associate product manager at GameSpot on this flash-based
| download manager. Another era, lol.
|
| I only lasted a year before I jumped into working for myself as a
| freelance developer, but I learned a lot at that job. And my
| favorite part was that I got the job because I posted my resume
| on Craigslist and my manager found it and called me to interview.
| I had basically no relevant experience or anything, and I'll
| always be grateful to him for taking a chance on me.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I hate it here. I use a ton of wikis that are on Fandom, and it
| takes a _lot_ of custom uBlock rules to enforce a bare minimum of
| usability. The worst victim, IMO, is Memory Alpha (the Star Trek
| wiki), which has a huge user base, relatively speaking, and used
| to be run independently.
| socialismisok wrote:
| Fandom wikis are _terrible_ , here's hoping they don't meddle
| with gamefaqs.
| 63 wrote:
| I've found they're pretty manageable with liberal use of
| ublock's element zapper. Obviously the average user doesn't do
| that though so I have no idea how anyone else manages to use
| the site
| e61133e3 wrote:
| the font and branding they use makes the website unreadable
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| Might be a side effect of firefox x linux but it sure is
| something.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/ChAsRaA.png
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm. Is there a mirror for the old gamefaq faqs or should I start
| now?
| horseAMcharlie wrote:
| There's a collaborative effort ongoing here:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xuhbv1/psa_fan...
| ubertaco wrote:
| I wonder if any internal rumors of this were part of the sort of
| "exodus" from Giant Bomb a while back. Even Gerstmann left and is
| now just doing his own thing solo.
| runevault wrote:
| I would be shocked if the Nextlander crew knew a year out. Jeff
| MIGHT have heard something around the time he left/was ousted
| (no clue which).
| djhworld wrote:
| Nextlander guys did a podcast about this, I generally got the
| impression they were just burnt out from years of building
| giant bomb and wanted out, this wasn't long after the RV
| acquisition.
| runevault wrote:
| Sure, but if they did know they'd have been NDA'd into not
| talking. Again, I don't think they did because I doubt this
| deal was in the works for a year, or if it was I doubt even
| Jeff G/B knew about it let alone anyone else, but them not
| saying anything in and of itself doesn't guarantee it.
|
| Logic mostly says no though.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| I would be surprised if acquisition rumors made it that far
| down the chain so early, but I'm sure that Jeff saw the writing
| on the wall with how RV management was approaching things.
| kweingar wrote:
| 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.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| MediaWiki is pretty technically challenging to self-host. It
| updates frequently and the updates are nontrivial to do
| especially if you have a large userbase. Also, if you want an
| extension like Cargo, SMW, DPL, etc, that lets you query data
| from one page to another, your server demands will go up a lot
| and hosting can get quite expensive.
|
| There's a new competitor though for gaming wikis that's started
| hosting some forks & some new original wikis, https://wiki.gg/.
|
| Disclaimer: I was a contractor for Fandom until they terminated
| me in August this year (I ran their esports wikis including
| Leaguepedia).
| bombcar wrote:
| Someone needs to offer mediawiki-as-a-service (apparently
| https://miraheze.org tries to do this) similar to Wordpress.
|
| It's much easier to do "free on fandom" and so lots of them
| move that way.
| ipmb wrote:
| Any idea where this ranking comes from?
|
| > Fandom Will Now Rank as the #14 Ad Supported Site in the U.S.
| dailyplanet wrote:
| I'm still mad that Fandom killed LyricWiki. I spent so many hours
| and hours adding the lyrics to my favorite songs from obscurer
| music, and all that effort and work got wiped.
| petarb wrote:
| As a long time GameFAQs user I feel like the service will be
| destroyed by ads
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| I heard on Reddit that those gamespot shares were red hot! Joking
| aside, I wonder what the end result of all that on their share
| price was years later
|
| I do use metacritic and gamefaqs from time to time. I wonder what
| will happen to them
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Gamespot and GameStop are 2 different things...
| jacooper wrote:
| I think k you are confusing GameSpot and GameStop.
| onychomys wrote:
| 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 company or giant
| megacorp like CBS. It just seems like Fandom will be less likely
| to randomly shut us down someday.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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 largely from scratch
| (and with some help staring at leaked source from Outboards)
| and that's how I learned PHP3, MySQL, XHTML and CSS while
| listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers and techno.
|
| The boards now look like shit, but then, the Internet has
| changed in 20 years. All good things come to an end.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Another 20-year GameFaqs veteran, and all I can say is, no.
| Dear god no. The last thing I need is a freaking autoplay video
| with an impossibly-tiny 'x' button in the top-right corner
| obscuring display of my plaintext walkthrough.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Fandom did this before right before tech markets really, really
| soured. It was Glam or Mode or something like that. Shortly after
| the acquisition they ended up doing a significant round of
| layoffs. Wonder if this will be another bellwether for worse tech
| market conditions.
| CM30 wrote:
| Oh god this is worrying. Fandom has already made Wikia an
| absolutely unusable, ad ridden nightmare, to the point many
| communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it.
|
| I hope they don't apply that same monetisation to GameSpot,
| GameFAQs, etc. Otherwise those sites will die almost overnight.
| 24t wrote:
| Agreed, though somehow fextralife manages to be even worse
| coldpie wrote:
| I believe the content on Fandom's wikis is all permissively
| licensed. I've often thought about making a read-only mirror of
| their wikis that just scrapes updates and serves the content
| without all the BS. Once it scales to the point where hosting
| is expensive, put up a donation jar. If it pays for itself,
| consider opening up editing and creating a fork with the end
| goal of killing Fandom's godawful wiki sites.
| reset-password wrote:
| Today I am thankful for Kagi having a feature which allows me
| to remove or downgrade certain sites from search results. It
| has already saved me countless clicks to fandom and can be
| easily expanded to include other sites as the fandom cancer
| grows.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| GameFAQs has already been dying for the last 10-15 years. Its
| amazing how most of their user reviews are from 2000-2005 or so
| and how frequently they don't even have guides for games
| anymore. Their message boards went from being notoriously
| overmoderated with tons of silly rules like a ban on profanity
| to notoriously undermoderated with very few rules (but what few
| they have are still enforced bureaucratically) and lots of
| trolls.
|
| CBS did not do a good job of running it especially after the
| site's founder left so its good that they're selling it. Its
| just probably not good that Fandom is buying it.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| It started when you googled cheats for a game, this was one
| of the top results, and it spit things like these:
|
| - In super Mario you can gather 100 coins for an extra life!
|
| - There are no currently known cheats for Civilization VI. If
| you know one, tell us!
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| I loved GameFAQs and even wrote a couple guides for it back
| in the day. As limited as it was, I think the plaintext
| format had a lot going for it in terms of simplicity,
| searchability, and avoiding spoilers. The alternatives today
| seem to be either 100-page web guides laden with ads, YouTube
| videos with spoilers in the title, or incomplete wikis.
| GameFAQs did add the ability to make HTML guides with
| pictures (although as far as I know they're all multi-page),
| but by then it was too late.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost
| forgot they existed. The YouTube let's play completely
| replaced it for me and I'm guessing for most of their
| userbase as well.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| YouTube only replaced it for me only in the sense that
| sometimes it's easier to wade through a 10-minute video to
| find one tiny piece of info than deal with most of the non-
| GameFaqs faq sites that come up in search.
|
| Best result is a Steam forums link, second best is YouTube,
| third is Wikia and all that crap ( _why would you auto-play
| an unrelated video and make that take up a third of the
| screen in a sticky div if I scroll down?!?!_ ). Fourth are
| seemingly machine-generated garbage results that don't
| contain anything useful but try to look like they do.
|
| Gamefaqs would still be the best _on desktop_ but it doesn
| 't show up in searches so I kinda forgot they existed and
| also text FAQs suck to navigate on mobile, and 99% of the
| time if I'm looking up how to find the Yellow Key or
| whatever it's on my phone, because I'm either not at my
| computer, or am gaming on it. Some other comments here make
| it seem like they don't have content for a lot of modern
| games, anyway.
| moomin wrote:
| Some of the content was beyond excellent, though. Like, a
| text file with a guide to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2
| with location co-ordinates to every single item and
| interactable object.
| klibertp wrote:
| I would have never soloed BG2 with a Sorcerer if not for
| a very detailed and funny guide on GameFAQs. I didn't
| quite believe it's possible, but decided to check it out.
| Oh boy, one-shotting (almost, ie. in a single turn)
| dragons and eventual Wish-spamming, that was really nice.
| Another guide allowed me to finish "Lionheart: Legacy of
| the Crusader" with pure-mage, again, I wouldn't have
| believed it's possible but the author did all the math,
| compared almost all possible builds, and arrived at the
| most min-maxed one: fire-based mage. It was really nice
| to wade through hordes of enemies without caring about
| sneaking, aggroing just a few at once, and escaping all
| the time. However, one advice there was priceless, it
| said: "grab a book. No really, grab a book." I've read I
| think two before finishing the game. (If you're curious:
| the carnage cost mana, and the game was not designed for
| pure-anyone, so the supply of mana potions was
| insufficient (to say the least). Given that the build had
| like 5-6 times as much mana as normal character, the
| natural mana regen took like 40 minutes (IIRC) by the end
| of the game...)
| Arrath wrote:
| For real. The dedication and detail involved in some of
| those guides was just unreal.
| bombcar wrote:
| I still re-read the Doom FAQ every decade or so.
| https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| YouTube is great for those situations where a written
| explanation just doesn't quite cut it, but I prefer it more
| as a supplement to than a replacement of a good gamefaq.
| sylens wrote:
| GameFAQs was necessary in a time of dial-up modems. The
| guides were just plain text documents that were tiny and
| downloaded quickly. The site design was basic and not overly
| flashy. The forums were a "go-to" spot for any game that got
| announced. I spent a lot of hours in my summers in the late
| 90s and even early 2000s writing FAQs for N64, Gamecube and
| Game Boy Advance games and patrolling the message boards.
|
| 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.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid
| dealing with it.
|
| Which is a good thing honestly. There's such a big difference
| in usability between the independent internet that exists out
| of genuine passion/interest and the internet that's run by
| advertising companies and people looking to make money off
| advertisements.
| CM30 wrote:
| True. Wikia's existence meant things like the Nintendo
| Independent Wiki Alliance and Square Enix Independent Wiki
| Alliance could put out some actually good wikis about the
| games they cover. Stuff like Mario Wiki, Bulbapedia, the
| Super Smash Bros Wiki, etc are significantly better than
| their Wikia/Fandom counterparts, and have proved you can
| defeat the service in the Google rankings by providing a
| better service.
|
| Just hope your owners don't decide to cash out and sell the
| site to Wikia/Fandom later on, otherwise the whole branching
| stuff will have to be done all over again.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Bulbapedia
|
| Curse used to traffic the ads for this site, at least in
| 2016 when I worked for them. They may very well still be
| getting trafficked by Fandom who have since acquired Curse
| Media.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I casually end up on a fandom wiki every now and then. What's
| the main criticism?
| vkou wrote:
| Ads whose performance brings a dev box to its knees, ads that
| cause content to jump around as they load, ads that bloat
| your screen to the point where you have to scroll to see
| anything of use on the page you're on, and (this is a matter
| of taste), an atrocious layout.
|
| Compare, a few pages on, say, http://poewiki.net (the
| community fork) with http://pathofexile.fandom.com
|
| Compare the loading times. The jank. The layout, that
| optimizes providing you information, over serving you ads.
| The usability difference is night and day.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Here's the justifications the Runescape wiki admins used for
| forking to a new site a few years ago, and things have only
| gotten worse since then:
|
| https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia#Why%3F
| Macha wrote:
| 1. Autoplay videos done by fandom editors who may not have
| read the source material or even their own wiki article
| inserted at the top of pages just so they have video to
| justify video ads
|
| 2. Large portions of the page dedicated to "engagement bait",
| e.g. related articles in a permanent sidebar (mixed with
| ads), piles of random forum discussions/elsewhere on fandom
| links at the end of the page.
|
| 3. Open a fandom page with your adblocker off. Video ads in
| the header, in a floating overlay, randomly mid article, etc.
| giantrobot wrote:
| 4. On mobile I can't get images to display without
| disabling my ad blocker.
|
| 5. Despite nominally being Wikis the Fandom wikis have
| effectively zero Wiki-like intrapage or interpage
| navigation.
|
| I remember the likes of Wookiepedia and Memory Alpha before
| they got Fandomed. They are sad ghosts of what used to be
| very good fan oriented Wikis. Fandom is a dumpster fire and
| I wish them nothing but ill fortune.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| #5 is entirely dependent on the wiki itself, which is
| community-driven. Fandom only provides the infrastructure
| and platform, which support the feature.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| But the platform affects the contributors.
|
| The dark patterns must drive many people away completely.
| You have to fight them every step of the way if you use
| the site. Who wants to see their creative work featured
| on such a site for sore eyes?
|
| If it paid some people might overcome all that but to do
| it for free?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| delecti wrote:
| > 5. Despite nominally being Wikis the Fandom wikis have
| effectively zero Wiki-like intrapage or interpage
| navigation.
|
| The site mechanically sucks, with all the ads, needless
| videos, comment sections, "related content", etc, but
| this one is up to the writers to do. It's not Fandom's
| fault if writers don't integrate wiki functionality more
| thoroughly.
|
| I personally never even noticed Wookiepedia or Memory
| Alpha switching to Fandom. They seem about the same as
| they always have.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Really? Because I found the transition of Memory Alpha
| switching to Fandom _extremely_ jarring. Maybe it will
| improve after WWIII and First Contact, when profit ceases
| to be a factor.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I should instead say "when Wikia switched to Fandom".
| Wikia used to be pretty standard MediaWiki instances.
| Then they moved the format to a more custom layout until
| they became the absolute trash Fandom layout of today.
|
| When Wikia was more standard MediaWiki layout both sites
| were extremely usable. The Fandom trash styling makes
| both very difficult to navigate now. They're unusable
| without an ad blocker.
| yifanl wrote:
| On top of being generally worse in terms of content (if only
| for layout), they also SEO heavily and derank any better
| wikis. The only two fandoms (ha) that have had their
| independent wikis consistently rank higher I'm aware of are
| bulbapedia and fextralife.
| Macha wrote:
| Fandom is just rebranded wikia, for what it's worth
| dbingham wrote:
| I feel like Fandom and Wikipedia provide a fantastic case study
| in the difference of outcome between non-profit, mission driven
| organizations and for-profit capital driven organizations.
|
| They were both founded by Jimmy Wales. They both have the goal
| of organizing information using crowdsourcing. And look at the
| difference in outcome.
| capableweb wrote:
| I had no idea Fandom/Wikicities/Wikia was also founded by
| Jimmy Wales. I agree, would be amazing to see a academic
| comparison between the two, one clearly had a bigger impact
| on humanity as a whole.
|
| On that note, I wonder if Fandom contributes back any funds
| to the Wikimedia Foundation. If so, it might actually make
| sense to have two branches of the same software, if the
| commercial arm can fund the non-profit one.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > If so, it might actually make sense to have two branches
| of the same software, if the commercial arm can fund the
| non-profit one.
|
| The inevitable problem with these schemes is that the MBAs
| at the commercial part will eventually try to "optimize"
| the funding channel towards the non-profit section.
| bertman wrote:
| This might be a good time and place to recommend "BreezeWiki",
| which I recently stumbled upon. It's an alternative frontend for
| fandom.com.
|
| https://breezewiki.com/
|
| edit: source code is here https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki
| dcchambers wrote:
| Wow this is pretty awesome, thanks for sharing. Would love to
| see this packaged up as a browser extension so that it would
| automatically 'fix' any fandom wiki I happen to load up.
|
| The fandom wikis are just...terrible from a UX standpoint. And
| it's a shame that such massive game wikis like Minecraft and
| Terraria are trapped on Fandom (via a former buyout of
| gamepedia).
|
| A plea to game developers: If you aren't willing to create and
| host an official wiki, please help/enable your game community
| to create and host a wiki that isn't held hostage by a site
| like Fandom. Some of my favorites: -
| https://stardewvalleywiki.com/ -
| https://wiki.factorio.com/ - https://runescape.wiki/
| - https://www.bg-wiki.com/ -
| https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/
| bertman wrote:
| >Would love to see this packaged up as a browser extension so
| that it would automatically 'fix' any fandom wiki I happen to
| load up.
|
| https://docs.breezewiki.com/Automatic_Redirection.html
| dcchambers wrote:
| Awesome, thank you!
| haunter wrote:
| Liquipedia also worth a mention for archiving competitive
| game history (runs on a trimmed down version of MediaWiki)
|
| https://liquipedia.net/
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Fandom has absolutely ruined all the GameSpot and GameFAQ wikis
| and resources I use while gaming. Their left-side nav with
| flyouts that don't disappear is _so goddamned annoying_.
| Fortunately, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Pi-hole kill all
| the ads.
| navbaker wrote:
| It's definitely a shame. GameSpot was one of the first gaming
| websites I found when I really started using the internet
| seriously in the late 90s. One of my fondest memories around
| gaming is Greg Kasavin replying to a question I submitted for a
| weekly Q&A he did where I asked about Baldur's Gate 2 and if I,
| as a newbie PC gamer jumping over from consoles, would be good
| to go starting there or if I needed to play the first one :)
| klausa wrote:
| Given that you're commenting on a press release announcing
| Fandom buying these properties, I think you're misattributing
| the blame here.
| intellix wrote:
| I guess I live under a rock because I've recognised of all the
| acquired companies but barely ever see fandom at all. Had no idea
| it was so successful
| snide wrote:
| 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 various traffic to
| ad scams and a creator economy built on the backs of a couple
| large platforms like Twitch, Reddit and YouTube. While the later
| option seems freeing for some creators, the reality is that soon
| those too will become hard to make a living from as those large
| platforms start slowly squeezing their creator class outside of a
| couple few who play nice. It's only slightly better than the
| journalism field because at least some of the personalities can
| shoot over to Patreon and work directly with their audience
| (albeit still tied to another large platforms).
|
| I love this space, and it's where I grew up as a kid in the late
| 90s. I love community websites where I can engage with some
| experts. With video though, it's extremely hard to run
| independently. Hosting video for Giant Bomb in 2008-2012 meant
| home rolling our own streaming service, chat service and edge-
| based video platform. We had an all-star engineering team. We had
| one of the largest podcasts in the world and the hosting bills
| were killing us. Getting an audience with good content was easy.
| Monetizing it was very difficult. That's only continued over the
| years as I've seen various companies buy Giant Bomb (CBS, then
| RV, now Fandom) looking to pick up a premium brand that they
| could use to mask the giant volume of dead, but trafficked
| content they had in the background. The shill back then was was
| to sell Giant Bomb or GameSpot ads, but serve it on GameFaqs or
| Comic Vine (which had huge traffic at low cost). Various SEO
| tricks were pulled to hide traffic. For example, Comic Vine moved
| to a Gamespot subdomain to make this seem more legitimate. I
| anticipate similar dark patterns every time these sites are
| resold to cheaper owners. Likely, these brands will be used to
| promote a mountain of google-driven traffic in other properties.
|
| 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.
| banannaise wrote:
| > 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. I don't think such a thing is
| possible in present society. As you kind of get to, there are
| two audiences: The people for whom your content is useful, and
| the people for whom your platform can make money. Appeasing the
| latter will invariably ruin your content, but their financial
| resources dwarf the former's, and they're more than happy to
| use those resources, since the result is that they end up with
| more.
|
| 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.)
| altruios wrote:
| how can good content be monetized:
|
| Well, don't go with ads, go with crypto-miners running on the
| viewers hardware - accessed via the web. keep it slim (0.1% of
| the GPU or what ever)...
|
| If we went with that - that could be a viable source of income
| for content creators that don't rely on the every growing ad
| industry.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| The amount of money you could earn by crypto mining with 0.1%
| of Jim-Bob's laptop-class 1080 for five minutes would surely
| be roundable to zero?
| catapart wrote:
| Personally, my "holy grail" is a website that lets AUTHORS
| monetize their product using the site's ad network. If I upload
| a video, I shouldn't HAVE to pick the ads that run as pre, mid,
| or post-roll, but I should be ABLE to. I should be able to make
| my own deals, on the platform, with advertisers participating
| in that network. Essentially, the site should act as a
| facilitator between advertisers and content creators, rather
| than the programming scheduler. For providing this
| facilitation, the site should be entitled to a small percentage
| of whatever deals are struck.
|
| Once the network is established as a good place for creators to
| be able to actually make money, you attract the good creators.
| They aren't getting pennies on an ad (or, if they are, that's
| what they were happy with; we all start somewhere/traffic
| volume is important); they're getting the full ad buy minus
| some percentage for the site (more like 10% -20%, less like
| 50%-90%).
|
| As the site, acting as a publisher, you get to dictate the ad
| network, and set boundaries for keeping things profitable (neo-
| hayes-code "cost of doing business" gatekeeping). As content
| creators, they get freedom of association and deal-making
| (which includes refusing to serve ads that they disagree with).
|
| Then, when you have a solid network of solid content, you layer
| in a subscription model which could allow you to sensibly
| bundle content. While each content creator could set their own
| subscription tiers (including free ones, for the purposes of
| advertising their own content or giving things away for free
| because they are such absolute champions), they would be able
| to opt-in certain tiers to be "bundled", which would allow
| users to pick and choose content creators that they want their
| subscription bundles to apply to. This is where you get to the
| first rumblings of reasonable payment for journalism work.
| Because, as far as I know, it's almost impossible to get people
| to pay for journalism, no matter how good it is. But if you can
| add it in to a bundle, while still letting people choose their
| outlets/sources, you can subsidize the journalism with the
| media profit (like how we do it on TV).
|
| Of course, to facilitate that, the site would need some robust
| utilities for writing new articles, such that it might be
| indistinguishable from a WYSIWYG website creator, but that's
| not something that's insurmountable. Especially if the site is
| profitable.
|
| Anyway, that's my swing. I've been working on it, myself, but
| it's not like I ever intended to run a social media app. I
| certainly don't have the funds to run it, myself, and it's an
| untested model so investment would be very surprising. So just
| POC stuff and collecting feedback from content creators. It all
| seems very promising, but I still haven't answered the question
| of 'will it make money?'
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > (more like 10% -20%, less like 50%-90%)
|
| Why do you feel that the site's cut could be as low as 10%?
| It's very expensive to host and serve high-quality video, and
| you've not described anything that would lower the site's
| costs relative to something like YouTube (which I don't
| believe is stunningly profitable).
| catapart wrote:
| First of all, it's the appropriate price for the service
| provided. Full stop. Publishers don't create anything; they
| facilitate. Facilitation is not WORTH the lion's share,
| even if publishing isn't possible without the lion's share.
| But that takes us to the second point, which is that the
| research I've done shows working models of the hosting
| service operating with as little as 2%, given appropriate
| volume, technology (bleeding edge video codecs and image
| compression; that's your expense so it gets the research),
| and scope (youtube serves the globe; targeting is the
| startup's best friend). But there is also another option of
| content creators hosting their own content and providing it
| to the site via a stream api that can handle content
| dynamically (for working with CDNs, and whatnot). This
| would, incidentally, prevent content creators from tying up
| all of their online value in a single platform that can
| unilaterally shut them down (even if it is a burden; at
| least it's an option).
|
| But I think the answer you're looking for is that the
| publisher gets to make money as a facilitator, rather than
| a program scheduler. The model doesn't make users the
| customers, it makes content creators AND advertisers
| (together; doesn't work without both) the customers. If
| advertisers want to work with a content creator on your
| network, and they want that content viewed with your
| network, then they will have to make a deal to join the
| network. That's passive revenue for the site, on top of the
| percentage of the ad buys. Essentially, you put the "no
| free rides" subscription model on the advertisers, and then
| let content creators decide who gets free rides for THEIR
| subscription models.
|
| On top of that, there's a whole other revenue stream in
| developing "networks" and selling "social" functionality to
| advertisers and content creators that get value out of
| interactivity (ex: monetizing the inclusion of advertisers
| in "best value" ad-buy deals that target a "content creator
| type" like "these ads go well if you provide cooking
| content") . And we haven't even talked about "whales" and
| monetizing the customer base with twitch-like engagement
| mechanisms. I cringe at the thought of some of it, but if
| the creators can make money off of it, more power to them!
| And a little percentage of their windfall to the site! ;)
|
| Of course, there's always a new way to make a buck, and
| there's some very deep pockets in advertising, so I don't
| fear for the innovation that could go on, in a site run as
| described.
| BrainVirus wrote:
| You're asking tech bros who get paid $250K/year running those
| very scams you've just outlined.
| ygjb wrote:
| Hey now, it should be readily apparent that most of us didn't
| sell out that cheaply :P
| ytyl wrote:
| registeredcorn wrote:
| MTG?
|
| Edit: Ah, Marjorie Taylor Greene. I kept wondering what
| Magic the gathering had to do with anything. lol
| napolux wrote:
| sad, but true
| zeroclip wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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...
| xtian wrote:
| Hi, Dave. I just wanted to say thanks for building Whiskey
| Media and carrying forward some of that old Internet spirit. I
| was a big Giant Bomb and Tested fan when I was younger, and the
| platform you guys built was part of what inspired me to become
| a programmer. It's sad to hear that the bandwidth economics
| were so unfavorable given everything that you did right, from
| my perspective.
| silisili wrote:
| > 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?
|
| IMO, subscriptions. But you have to A) have special content
| worth paying for, and B) make it easy to cancel and resub.
|
| My local paper failed at B, so I refuse to resubscribe, even
| though the content is good.
|
| In a crowded space like say, VG reviews, I don't think A is
| possible.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Unfortunately I don't think this is possible. As soon as you
| bring in ads you open the door to the AdTech bullshit parade.
| The incentive goes from making _good_ content to clickbait
| because that drives hits. Subscriptions can pay hosting bills
| but it 's not going to let anyone get paid a meaningful amount
| of money for co tributing let alone write full time for a site.
|
| I think the best content is going to continue to be entirely
| community run Wikis. Stuff like NIWA. They aren't going to
| replace _journalism_ but then game journalism has been barely
| journalism for decades. Most has just been /is warmed over
| press releases or reporting on someone else's reporting.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > I think the best content is going to continue to be
| entirely community run Wikis.
|
| The challenge here is that Fandom own a near monopoly on
| videogame wikis. Competing with them is exceptionally
| difficult.
|
| It's something myself and a few other folks have done when we
| forked the Path of Exile wiki from Fandom to poewiki.net,
| we've been officially recognised by the game creators, have
| acquired hundreds of thousands of legitimate backlinks and
| yet Google still prefer to serve Fandom pages instead of
| ours.
| anikom15 wrote:
| Have the game creators send a C&D to Fandom for copyrighted
| materials.
| [deleted]
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Dave, website's down.
|
| Sorry if that old joke is now annoying! On a serious note,
| thanks for all your work on Giant Bomb back in the day. That
| site meant a lot to me for a long time.
| oneandtheonly wrote:
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| > We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the
| hosting bills were killing us.
|
| If only there were a way to distribute files freely, in
| distributed, decentralized fashion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
| cma wrote:
| With webtorrent that is feasible, but requiring a client
| download would just ensure you weren't the largest anymore
| and probably infect your users with spyware when they
| downloaded a bad client.
| triceratops wrote:
| You can provide a link to a known-good client download on
| your podcast page.
| omeze wrote:
| Isnt this why subsets of creators are excited by web3/nft
| sales? Theres huge backlash from their communities but most
| community members don't directly pay the creators. I suppose
| this only solves the Patreon piece though - distribution of
| content takes highly skilled labor (engineers) and capex
| (server infra). Had you ever tried using something like AWS
| MediaLive?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| NFT is bullshit and doesn't address any of the problems that
| surround content creation. Creators who push NFTs do so
| either because they are sponsored in the background (paid a
| lump sum _in fiat_ to engage with NFTs) or have direct
| involvement in the market and would like to benefit from the
| (temporary) speculation bubble. That bubble has now died and
| so will NFTs.
| zeroclip wrote:
| The bubble dying is the perfect opportunity to re-examine
| the technology and determine whether it is a suitable means
| of freeing artists and creators from the problematic
| revenue models of major tech platforms. I pointed to the
| artist omentejovem in another comment[1].
|
| [1] https://foundation.app/collection/shapesncolors?sortOrd
| er=DE...
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Let's say my bread and butter is making video essays.
| What do NFTs bring to the table that would make it so I
| don't have to rely on the revenue model of a major tech
| platform? _Somebody_ has to host and serve my videos, and
| it 's probably going to be a major tech platform. I could
| make an NFT that points to my video once it's hosted, I
| suppose, but I'm not sure that's a sustainable revenue
| stream ... I'm still going to want Patreon, merchandize,
| and video sponsorships.
| zeroclip wrote:
| 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 Bandcamp or
| running a Kickstarter campaign.
|
| If your audience is unwilling to pay for your content or
| support you financially, and unwilling to pay a platform
| fee like with Netflix, then you might be stuck with
| monetizing through ads.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| But that's merely _cryptocurrencies_ , not NFT. What does
| NFT bring to the table that just using cryptocurrencies
| doesn't?
| omeze wrote:
| Im discussing in good faith here (and used to watch Giant
| Bomb religiously back in high school, and remember how the
| Gamespot \ Giant Bomb schism occurred). There are many
| creators who use NFTs perfectly well to raise money for
| their work (like the guy that creates the excellent Blender
| donut tutorials), and use simple fixed prices to monetize
| (not auctions, so speculation has nothing to do with it).
| Please dont be rude.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| What do NFTs bring to the table that can't be achieved by
| just taking payments in crypto?
| fknorangesite wrote:
| What does taking payments in crypto bring to the table
| that can't be achieved by just taking payments in regular
| currency?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| True but I wanted to preempt the point that NFTs are
| independent of payment platforms & their censorship.
| Which is true, but so is "boring" crypto without NFTs.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 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?
|
| The problem I see is that there's just too much supply compared
| to demand, thus the price of content is literally zero. Even
| the monetization models that are (still) available are on
| borrowed time.
|
| Ultimately there's no easy way to profit off something that is
| already plentiful and that there's a never-ending stream of
| passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically
| out there.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| > there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to
| produce said content altruistically out there
|
| This is the concept that is most frequently left out of
| otherwise thoughtful analyses on the topic at hand.
|
| Although I would not label the motivation as purely
| altruistic, what many people fail to realize is that people
| who create art of any kind, and have honest motivations for
| doing so, are going to be doing it no matter the profit
| potential. Personally, I am a music composer [0] and I _must_
| make music. I am so unconcerned by profit that I have given
| all of my work away for free for more than a decade. I do all
| of my album releases on a podcast feed so that people never
| have to pay money, accept the terms of service of Spotify, or
| be raped by ad tech just to hear my work.
|
| To me, payment is the fact that people heard my work. On that
| metric alone, SoundCloud has given me a lot more "payment"
| than any other online service out there, since it was so
| apparent when people did engage with my work, and those
| engagements were very meaningful to me on the whole.
|
| [0]: https://multipli.city
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I'm interested to know, if it isn't too personal, what kind
| of work do you do to bring in income?
|
| There's a few passions that I have/have had, but I've found
| it hard to devote the time to any of them because I tend to
| feel very drained after doing work on things that I don't
| particularly care about.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| I do media engineering related stuff, things related to
| media codecs, DSP, and p2p networking. The work I do
| during my day job is often somehow relevant to my music
| work.
|
| For example, I used to work in VR, which enabled me to
| begin exploring ambisonics in my music.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| Very cool! Thanks.
| papermite wrote:
| Seems like the folks over at Dropout.tv are doing it right now.
| They have their own Netflix-like subscription model with their
| own content and no ads. They put out older videos onto free
| streaming platforms like YouTube to attract people to come
| subscribe for the things going on now. They have huge
| production value, tons of different content, hours long videos,
| etc. I have no idea what tech they use on the back end, but
| maybe a bunch of folks in the gaming space could bundle
| themselves under a brand and take that approach.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| So you were the one who made the shitty knockoff version of
| _mp3.com_ --after-- the acquisition?
| snide wrote:
| 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 direction. If you didn't see what was coming it wasn't
| a terrible idea.
|
| What we didn't know then in 2003-2004, was that Apple ended
| up eating the entire industry (at the time) and everyone just
| bought an iPod and called it a day. MP3.com rightly fell
| apart shortly after.
|
| Weirdly enough, that assumed model and need now exists now
| that content has fractured again, this time with video. Which
| service is streaming that movie I want to watch? We're
| getting to the point where we need those registries as much
| as we need "caniuse" for browser comparability.
|
| Should that directory concept have been attempted on a very
| important domain like mp3.com, itself having fallen apart
| earlier in the Internet bust? Probably not, but hindsight is
| easy looking back. Back then domains were more important.
|
| Anyways, just answering to some trivia for you. I didn't have
| much to do with that site's origins.
| jacooper wrote:
| I think video streaming is now way easier to setup, since CDNs
| like cloudflare now offer dedicated Video hosting services.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| 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.
| SleepilyLimping wrote:
| Brave Browser's BAT infrastructure is good for this; even
| if you don't want to manually tip people, you can set up
| auto-contribute amounts that deduct from the amount of BAT
| you earn from seeing ads monthly.
|
| I think the habit of doing so (manually or automatically)
| sadly isn't there yet, because most conversations I see
| about Brave/BAT are "how much money can this make ME by
| earning BAT."
| tootie wrote:
| Subscriptions is what you see all the top tier journalistic
| sources pivoting towards as hard as they can. But to the
| sites who based their business on casual users coming in via
| SEO/Social it will never work. Arguably that's a good thing
| because it will end the bane of clickbait. But the cycle of
| clicking news links off of reddit or facebook is already
| locked in to too many consumers minds. The daily paper
| newspaper consumption seems ancient to young consumers. Good
| journalists need to be able to reach all the audiences
| immersed in social media, but also get them to form a habit
| of visiting their site directly regularly. Newsletters is a
| big help, but not a magic solution. Paywalls are popping up
| everywhere, but it's a real speedbump to acquisition.
| diob wrote:
| I don't see too much wrong with Patreon. I support a variety of
| things I enjoy using it, and the folks who I support get to do
| what they love while giving me content I love. Maybe we need
| some Patreon competition? I don't know honestly.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Patreon's fine and lots of people make a living with it, but
| it can be a tough sell. The rewards rarely make it worth it
| (sorry, I get no use out of the Drawfee discord), so you have
| to be willing to part with $5-10 a month for something you'd
| otherwise be getting free. That's an unjustifiable expense
| for anyone who doesn't have money to spare.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Depends on your definition of free. Most of the Patreons I
| support have a minimum threshold to get their stuff. For
| example I support someone which makes software available
| only through Patreon. It is not available for free outside
| of that. So it's basically like I'm paying for software but
| through Patreon as their vendor instead of Stripe or
| PayPal.
| hajhatten wrote:
| Hey Duder! Hope you're doing well these days. Thanks for all
| you did at Whiskey Media, and thank you for dark mode in
| Kibana!
| snide wrote:
| Ha! Thanks!
| sylens wrote:
| Just wanted to say I really loved that Whiskey Media era of
| Giant Bomb. Your work was very much appreciated
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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
| professional, with well-produced content, but he doesn't
| support himself with the YouTube channel. Dude lives in a
| McMansion and drives a Porsche, but it's entirely from a normal
| day job, and filming videos about car detailing is just him
| filming a hobby he's been passionate about for decades and
| would be doing anyway even if YouTube didn't exist.
|
| 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.
| snide wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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.
| snet0 wrote:
| > Why does that need to be monetized?
|
| Because it costs money. Some things, e.g. contributing to the
| Wikia, don't cost money, they just cost time. You can't pay
| for a website with time, though, you need to pay a host.
| LQDH wrote:
| > We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the
| hosting bills were killing us
|
| Was this true even after you launched the payed GB
| subscriptions? It felt like you guys were the first ones to do
| something like that and I payed for it and would have payed
| more at the time, especially if I knew it would keep whiskey
| independent.
|
| It seems like now other similar people like nextlander and
| action button are having success doing the same thing with
| Patreon. That seems like the solution to the problem you
| describe to me, just let me pay directly for the things I
| watch, it seems like there is an audience there who is willing
| to pay for quality.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The biggest problem is this all-consuming search for a bigger
| profit. It's absolutely possible to make a decent living off of
| content-creation, and YT or Twitch could be profitable
| businesses by just supporting that. However, they have probably
| reached their maximum audience, and so their profit would stop
| increasing if they just did that, and no growth, even for a
| profitable business, means desperate investors in this crazy
| economy we live in.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I don't know how reasonable it is to make a decent living off
| of YT/Twitch without an added patreon or some other revenue
| stream. Creators I'm a fan of constantly complain about being
| demonetized and unlisted, and needing to wrangle the
| algorithm.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Ad impressions pay next to nothing on YouTube, but it does
| add up to something nontrivial if your videos get millions
| of views. That's tough to maintain, admittedly. Most
| creators I'm aware of at least have sponsors for all or
| most of their videos, many sell merchandise, but there are
| definitely exceptions in any case.
|
| Get big enough -- like Linus Media Group, for example --
| and companies will tear down your door to sponsor your
| videos. I do wonder how much a smaller (say, 50k
| subscriber) channel gets from shilling for Hello Fresh. I
| just can't imagine many viewers of Joe's Long-Form Gaming
| Essay Channel are looking for a meal delivery service or a
| men's grooming accessory.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I meant that it _used to be_ possible to just use YT
| /Twitch, but as those have been nickle-and-diming creators
| and modifying their algorithms to control what content is
| served, it has become harder and harder.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Eh. It's inevitable that Google would nickel-and-dime
| creators because YouTube is extremely expensive and lost
| money for many years; I'm not even sure it's profitable
| _now_. Something had to give. I suspect most YouTubers
| (and Twitch streamers) who 've been smart about business
| worry less about losing money from ads and more about
| algorithm-driven censors age-gating their content.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > 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.
|
| From the outside, it seems like a lot of people bring their
| audiences to those platforms and make an okay living at it --
| not becoming millionaires, but making a "grown up living" --
| and that they can be relatively audience-driven as opposed to
| advertiser driven, or following the dictates of a distant
| corporate directive. That's what it seems like. Is that
| hopelessly naive of me to believe?
| snet0 wrote:
| 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 similar category to "donation" links on
| Twitch/YouTube. It's all phrased as this weird "support us!"
| thing, instead of "pay for the damn videos you've enjoyed for
| the past year", which might be necessary right now just to get
| people to sign up, but I don't think it's sustainable or
| healthy. Journalists, streamers and video creators shouldn't
| need to pretend they're busking on the street, asking for
| donations and support. They're working a damn job, pay them.
| TylerE wrote:
| Netflix has gone completely down the shitter in the last
| decade.
|
| Ruined the UI, got rid of all the good content and replaced
| it with C-tier series that get canceled before concluding
| anyway. Oh, and have basically doubled prices. I canceled a
| year ago and haven't missed it in the slightest - and I had
| it back when it was still dvds by mail.
| snet0 wrote:
| And it's _still_ better than terrestrial TV.
| kroltan wrote:
| True, but not watching either is also an option, and
| there are still other ways of kill time.
| criddell wrote:
| Netflix has consistently made the cut for me to keep it.
| I'm happy as long as my household uses it 6-8 hours each
| month. Same goes for Hulu and HBO Max.
|
| Other streamers I find myself starting and stopping as I
| find stuff to watch. For example, I've started and stopped
| Disney twice. The first to watch Mandelorian and the second
| to watch Get Back. It's one reason I _really_ like
| subscribing through Apple. Subscribe-unsubscribe is a
| single click away.
| kingaillas wrote:
| I'm the same as far as Netflix, they have enough "good
| enough" shows for me to keep them around. I figure if I
| average ~2-3 hours a week it is still worth it.
|
| Yes some of their new shows are... not to my liking (hey,
| maybe somebody out there really loves Warrior Nun but I
| stopped after a few episodes) but several are (Shadow and
| Bone, Witcher, Umbrella Academy, Ozarks, Cobra Kai,
| Lupin) I'm looking forward to future seasons, or
| finishing the series (in the case of Ozarks).
|
| HBO Max might fall into the season-subscription category
| for me, where I take it 3-6 months a year. And maybe
| Disney+ too except I've got a large backlog there.
|
| Anyway, the behavior change for me is to watch a show
| sooner rather than later. I was working my way through
| Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Hulu and reached season 6, taking a
| break for a few weeks, to return and discover the
| remained of the episodes are tied to a live TV
| subscription. Not sure if some license deal expired in
| time I took a break after season 5, or if it was always
| like that (however, I don't think so).
| user_named wrote:
| You must have a strong brand, a strong team of content creators
| who probably are co owners rather than employees. That is the
| only way. It cannot function as a a regular business.
| progrus wrote:
| NFTs are the way forward, whatever you think of them...
| eropple wrote:
| _> 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 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).
| bombcar wrote:
| The other problem is that doing high quality video content is
| _hard_ - you can do a one-man channel but it will NEVER be as
| "flashy" as channels that have dedicated editors, etc. And
| once you have a group, you have deadlines and income
| requirements you have to meet.
| tpxl wrote:
| 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.
| eropple wrote:
| 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.
| tpxl wrote:
| You can self-host and un-federate PeerTube, such that the
| user isn't even aware they're on a PeerTube instance.
|
| If I had a website where I'd host my videos as an
| alternative to YouTube, I'd probably go with PeerTube and
| have people support me by seeding videos for me.
| eropple wrote:
| Ehh. You totally can, but at that point you're still
| stuck with a pretty bad model of shipping video in the
| first place, namely relying on having peers and dealing
| with PeerTube's bad failure modes when peers leave the
| swarm. I am not a fan--the sibling comment about those
| failure modes tracks with my own experiences, and I think
| it's scary enough to avoid. If the choice is "mediocre to
| okay perf based on geography, consistently" or "mediocre
| to okay perf, mostly based on geography, with very bad
| performance for some users in ways that cannot be
| reliably predicted", it would be pretty bad to recommend
| the latter for most use cases.
|
| I tend to think that, since you're already foregoing
| discoverability by not federating with other PeerTube
| instances, you might as well also just build your bootleg
| CDN off of Hetzner nodes or whatever and have points of
| presence in places you care about. It's not _that_
| expensive and it 's likely to be more consistent in perf.
| (You could say "well, run PeerTube and register your pops
| as peers", but _other_ peers falling out of the swarm is
| the problem, not your own.)
|
| I just don't really see a point to doing so as a
| small/individual creator or as a brand/channel.
| xorcist wrote:
| That sounds a bit far fetched. If that was a problem, it
| would also be a problem with the dozens of Youtube
| frontends, that are much larger than any Peertube
| frontend.
| belthesar wrote:
| Peer to peer non-realtime video distribution has a pretty
| core fundamental flaw in that users are only seeding when
| they're watching. Users are likely to stop watching a video
| if it doesn't interest them, if something else comes up, or
| more importantly for this conversation, if there's a
| technical issue that prevents smooth playback.
|
| When a user stops watching for whatever reason, they leave
| the swarm. If a client has been getting segments from a
| peer that is close to them, and that user completes
| watching the video and closes the browser window, that peer
| goes offline. The player client then needs to find another
| peer to pull segments from, and hope that the peer can
| deliver at the same speed. Because most of these player
| extensions are on top of HLS or DASH, you're not
| "buffering" in advance very far, so you're sensitive to
| this bump (this is tunable, and P2P clients generally
| buffer more segments than those delivered by CDNs
| exclusively). Whether you can't find a peer with the
| segments you need, or the peer can't deliver fast enough,
| or the algo stalls and doesn't fail back to CDN based
| delivery fast enough, you get a playback stall.
|
| Playback stalls always add frustration, and they're often
| multiplicative. One stall, you assume there's an internet
| issue, and it'll be fine. Two stalls, you grow frustrated
| with the service. Three stalls, you close the window. And
| now there's another peer dropping out the swarm, causing
| more interruptions in playback for other users.
|
| IMO, as the tech stands today, P2P video delivery doesn't
| work super well unless you're setting up a P2P CDN, or have
| some other mechanism that allows for a peer to more
| gracefully exit a swarm to avoid stalls and signal to
| clients to shift before an abrupt exit.
| tpxl wrote:
| What are your thoughts on Popcorn time? That was quite
| successful even among non-technical people. Is the
| difference people were keeping their torrent client (ie
| PopcornTime) open all the time, providing seeds, which
| doesn't happen with a webpage that you just close? Is the
| solution a 'RSS reader', but for P2P videos?
| dimitar wrote:
| I wonder what happened to the p2p craze? That seems like the
| solution to the hosting costs.
| thomaslangston wrote:
| PeerTube is the only one that I've heard about any lately.
| giantrobot wrote:
| P2P video is extremely difficult to do well. Video is
| sensitive to transfer bitrate, data order, and timing. None
| of these are things P2P is really good at providing. While
| P2P can _ask_ for data ordering the actual availability of
| that order is dependent on the participants in the swarm.
|
| Even then as a host you need to provide seeds for all your
| videos as a P2P swarm will only ever help with currently
| popular videos. So in actuality P2P ends up with similar
| hosting costs to traditional video hosting only providing a
| bandwidth savings on viral content everyone watches
| simultaneously.
| bombcar wrote:
| If I recall correctly, the amount of streams you could
| support with a cheap VPS + Cloudflare + similar things is
| pretty impressive.
|
| The reality is most people don't need to be able to handle
| millions of simultaneous views, and so a basic setup with
| "p2p on top" might work exceedingly well.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Modern HLS/DASH streaming off a VPS/CDN combination is
| extremely fast because it's just HTTP as far as the
| servers are concerned. If you've got a fast HTTP serving
| system you can serve tons of clients without many
| problems. Storage however is still an issue. You need
| enough storage for your content at the distribution
| edges.
|
| My point is the P2P on top is very difficult to actually
| build and have work well. Like HTTP serving it doesn't
| obviate storage needs. You need to seed all of the
| content you distribute via P2P.
| bombcar wrote:
| But what's the cost for storage? If nobody is watching
| your "back catalog" you can serve them off your server
| (maybe not a VPS, maybe a dedi, but you can get 1 Gb/s
| and 2 TB of disk for like 130 euro:
| https://hostslick.com/dedicated.php )
|
| Then you're just down to what the CDN cost is for the
| "active" video, maybe the last two?
| DHPersonal wrote:
| Thank you for your insight, Mr. Snider. I really enjoyed your
| work on-camera at Giant Bomb even before I knew how much you
| did behind the scenes. I miss your plane-flying video work with
| other staff.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| drannex wrote:
| > 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?
|
| The answer that every other entertainment vertical/industry
| figured out 100+ years ago (thousands?) -- merchandise sales.
| blast0rama wrote:
| But do we all need another t-shirt for [thing]? My drawers
| are full, my walls are covered in art. What next?
| adamrezich wrote:
| Whiskey Media tried that though. for a good long while there
| in the late 00s/early 10s I bought more or less every shirt
| they put out, in addition to my subscription, because I loved
| the content they were producing and wanted to support them
| any way I could. it still wasn't enough though
| hajhatten wrote:
| I recognize some old Whiskey Media companies on that list. Have
| not followed them much after the CBS acquisition and Ryan Davis'
| passing.
|
| Hope they're all doing well over there.
| MartinCron wrote:
| It was when Ryan Davis died that I realized just how intimate
| the podcasting medium could be. While I also loved the rest of
| the crew, I couldn't listen to Giant Bomb without him. It was
| just too sad.
| runevault wrote:
| If you didn't know Jeff Gerstmann is out at GB and he was the
| last of the original guard (Vinny, Brad, and Alex left like...
| a year ago?).
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| The founding GiantBomb staff members have all left since the
| sale to Red Ventures:
|
| - Vinny, Brad, and Alex left last year, and later re-grouped
| and started Nextlander, which is basically GB but without
| having to build their own platform (live Twitch streams, on-
| demand videos on YouTube, and Simplecast- and Patreon-hosted
| podcasts), and Brad works with another Whiskey alum, Will
| Smith, on a separate tech podcast and open-source specific
| podcast
|
| - Jeff left a few months ago and is basically doing the same as
| Nextlander, only largely on his own
|
| Nextlander has done a few things with GiantBomb, most recently
| a video around the new Splatoon game[0], but Jeff hasn't
| appeared directly yet.
|
| [0]: https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/splat-off-giant-bomb-vs-
| nex...
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Ugh. Fandom has _the most obnoxious_ auto-playing video ads on
| all their pages. This sucks.
| runevault wrote:
| Seeing this just a couple days after the latest ZA/UM (creators
| of the game Disco Elysium) news feels weird. The DE situation was
| already ironic since that game mocked capitalism and now the
| people who helped fund the studio have wrecked everything to the
| point even the creative group that was technically separate
| dissolved. Now we see three very significant sites in the video
| game space continue to get handed around like a joint on a cold
| night.
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