There are (depending on interpretations) somewhere between 4 and 8 patreons run by ex-Giantbomb people alone, and that’s before the final implosion.
You’re taking on a lot of risk,workload, and most importantly expense, that was previously handled by specialist staff previously, for a much smaller and ever decreasing slice of the previous revenue.
Just to tag on to that, what Ash was saying in the episode about (a) it’s another job to promote yourself and (b) not everyone is well-suited to do that work too is also relevant here. I hadn’t thought about the self-branding and marketing as another job, but dang, yeah, it is.
To be clear, I wasn’t imagining that they would each make their own website, but that they -maybe with other writers in similar situations- could band together to start one. Like Aftermath but with broader coverage. I agree that the personal branding side of doing anything creative these days really sucks, and you can only support and keep up with so many individual creators.
well what they could do is just a total maximalist approach and have all the old giant bomb, 1up, idle thumbs, etc all get together (bring it in guys) and do print and digitial, video, strategy guides, lore explainer videos, have weird debates about politics, mr beast style elaborate competitions, man-on-the-street pseudo harassment streamer antics, and also eat hot chicken wings. Something would have to stick at some point
The real problem is funding - somebody would be on the hook for that business loan, which is a big deal. Also in most cases the writers and the sales team are (kind of necessarily) separated, so they’re not likely to know someone who they trust to take care of ad sales. Salaried game journalists do make around $100k now (those that remain) so once you’ve got 5 people on staff (which is not many!) you’ve got a large spread to cover every year before you consider any other costs like actually creating the site, web hosting, video production equipment, etc. Most of the folks who get hired live in large cities to get them proximal to events, so that $100k didn’t get them any savings with which to get started - once they lose their jobs they need a new one right away. I’m really not sure you could actually get a loan large enough to cover even a year of that in the united states, it’d be like… $700k minimum to start?
I think there’s also some pessimism about breaking in as a new text-based entity in an era when fewer people are reading.
It is of course possible but it’s difficult enough that it made more sense for the aftermath folks to take big pay cuts and try to go for it community supported. Definitely worth discussing, but those are some of the issues that I see that keep folks from that approach.
Brandon saying no offense and following it up with saying a guy looked like a Gamergater absolutely killed me.
I try to put some effort into my clothes and hair these days, but some guys who’ll grab the first clothing they see each morning can be a little weird about it. God forbid a guy put effort into his appearance. I sometimes feel like I’m on crazy pills when I notice the way people act about how someone else dresses, so this bit was validating for me. It made it hard at first to actually try, and still does slow me down from branching out more. I appreciate you talking about it, @exodus.
And it’s refreshing seeing the varied takes on games journalism here. Much of the internet will just say that games journalism is a joke/incompetent/reviews are bought, and they deserved this, only to get all of their games news from r/games post titles and tweets that are the headlines from those very same websites while refusing to read the actual article while complaining that the headlines are “click bait”. I can see I’m getting pretty negative already so I’ll leave it at that lol. It’s just so frustrating the way people treat this industry while the people in it are routinely ground into dust by the machine.
I’m thinking about trying the sonic shirt airport strat for when I need to go to the US…
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a I feel like a very under-discussed friction in progressive online spaces is that two universal virtues in those spaces are
“Use an ad blocker, ads are terrible!”
and
“I wish there were more voices in [blank] journalism”
And those two things are, in a lot of ways, contradictory. Is it ideal that the model that evolved for making money on the internet is ostensibly ad-based (unless you do a Patreon)? No! Ads do suck. But as someone who used to work in local publishing it would drive me to pull my hair our whenever a friend would say, “Gosh I wish the local newspaper wasn’t dying” and then also being like, “well yeah duh” when I asked them if they use an ad blocker
Short of display ads/spon con, the only model that works for media is subscriptions (see: Defector, substacks, etc).
Seeing media and journalism I really liked die because of the slow creep of capitalism is wretched, but what makes me even more bitter is that the core audience of that journalism–who claim to see that kind of writing as Good and Virtuous–cannot be bothered to pay for it in any way.
I see this sort of thing a lot, too. A pretty common one is questions getting asked multiple times a week because people don’t even understand how to do a proper search query for what they want to know, particular when it comes to basic stuff like “has a release date been announced for X?” and the like, but also for more in-depth questions
I suppose some of it is just the long tail of Google making itself useless: it’s often easier for someone to go on Reddit or elsewhere and ask than to try to turn up info themselves
I hear you - though I find myself less angry at the people doing the ad blocking than the situations that got us here. Ads didn’t used to be so intrusive or invasive as they are now. I doubt folks those same would be upset about static banner ads, it’s the ones that interrupt your reading (which are pervasive) which piss everyone off. Ultimately they want to read, and that’s the real issue, and putting barriers in place (like ads I have to click away which are designed for you to miss the button on, or auto-playing videos, or screen takeovers) just causes people to shift away from reading.
It is also unfortunate that (and this is largely anecdotal) the people I know who would most like to consume news either don’t really have the money to pay themselves, or don’t perceive the value any longer because there’s a general idea that the news will filter through somehow anyway. There’s a lot at play here obviously. One of the reasons I don’t pay for many news services is because it’s annoying to use - my browser tends to log me out of things constantly, so I have to re-sign-in every time I want to read something, which is its own kind of pain. I basically never see any of the ko-fi or patreons I subscribe to until their posts are public because the constant and persistent login process is just enough to turn me off reading and toward something else. It’s a shame! But with everything being so much all the time I do understand why people get completely turned off by minor annoyances, because there are thousands of those happening daily now, and it’s just easier mentally to not engage with any new hurdles.
this part
Sorry for the bump, but just wanted to say that I thought this was a really wonderful episode all around. Also pretty neat that, at the very least, Giant Bomb came out the other side of this in the hands of the people that actually make it, care about it, and understand it. I really like listening to Grubb, Jan, Jeff and Minotti as my newsiest gaming podcast – stoked for them in any case
(also I’ve been going back and listening to the Insert Credit podcast from the beginning on Spotify during some hellacious unpacking for a new apartment, and sometime around episode 10 or 12, Frank predicts the death of Game Informer. but then the panel also predicts that we’ll hit GTA XX sometime in the 2050s, so you win some you lose some)
i’m less interested in voting with my wallet / eyeballs than i am in just taking the money from the people with all the money (by the traditional method) and giving it to the people without all the money. this is always the end goal of course, but in the shorter term, i will gladly pay a subscription fee rather than willingly submit to the fascistic obscenity of advertising out of some misplaced sense of obligation.
This strikes me a bit like the meme where a guy is like “we should improve society somewhat” and the other one is like “and yet you participate in society, how curious!”. It’s not really contradictory to want quality journalism and to not appreciate being constantly bombarded by advertising. People will do what’s best for them, and businesses are the ones who have to figure out how to keep themselves afloat, not the other way around.
I mean functionally places like, say, Defector (and other outlets that people talk about when they say they want non-corporate media and things) are absolutely businesses in the strictest sense, so if you take that tack then I suppose you’re right
But I don’t view those things as traditional business relationships (like me getting a Starbucks or whatever) because I attach a virtue to it and therefore recognize that I have to make some compromises for it
Like how I get groceries at my local Co-Op—there’s tradeoffs like being way more expensive than a regular grocery store. But I get more than money out of it, and so I meet it way more way it’s at
What I’m saying is that at some level people are gonna have to pay for something and the onus of that isn’t entirely on the publication when it comes to these sorts of boutique publications
the onus is on the publication to gauge what people are willing to pay for and how, and to convince them of what is worth supporting. it is actually way more of a traditional business transaction than Uber or other services whose entire existence is artificially inflated by venture capital money. another word for something being “assigned virtue” is Marketing. just like with climate change or world hunger, I wouldn’t bet on people making sacrifices out of the kindness of their hearts to be the fix that solves it, just as I certainly don’t think that a lack of that is the cause of the problem. if all games websites are wiped out, maybe the need for them will become obvious again, and somebody will put up the money for it one way or another.
in the world we live in, making the ethical choice in every situation is impossible, or at the very least, very very expensive. that means whatever you do, you are always sacrificing something. if you go to the co-op, it’s because it’s not too much of a strain on your means. everyone gets to decide where that line is for themselves and if there is no space there for patreons and a bazillion ads, that’s not hypocrisy. when newspapers were around, they were the cheapest, most unintrusive way to know what was going on; now they aren’t anymore, so they are pretty much gone. that makes sense.
I don’t believe we live in a meritocracy, or in the invisible hand of the market, even though it seems like that’s what I’m saying. I know there are a million other factors to why things are the way they are. but it really rubs me the wrong way to blame people’s choices, when the choices they are making are the ones that make the most sense for them. you see the same with the PR spin fossil fuel companies put on recycling, and a million other manipulations. it shifts responsibility from people who are in positions of immense power to people who are in positions of very little, minuscule power. you should choose to watch ads or have less money to eat or the death of journalism is your fault. well, no, it wasn’t me who killed journalism, it was Peter Thiel, Jim Spanfeller and all those fuckers. and it is an immense gift to them and people like them to reduce everything to the consumer’s personal choice.
I don’t disagree with you on the larger point at all, so I think it would be genuinely useful to interrogate what it is you disagree with me about; when you zoom out to the macro I agree with you that individual choices mean jack squat in the grand scheme of these trends. But in the micro, they matter very, very much. It is in fact bad for a local coffee shop to go to the Starbucks across the street. It is bad for the Shop Around the Corner when someone shops at Fox Books.
These are human choices that, even when made for a good reason, are consequential. Could someone say, “well, Starbucks’ ability to operate at scale allows it to make a latte for $1 less and therefore its larger macro trends killing the local shop and not individuals?” I suppose so, but I would look at you a bit askance for saying so.
What choosing to save a dollar to go to the Starbucks instead says is that your one dollar is worth more to you than the virtue of the local busines. Which is fine insofar as it goes, but if you’re someone for whom local businesses are good and virtuous then that seems like a very silly dollar saved.
An alternative weekly I worked for early in my career had a website that was ad-supported, and that alt weekly ended up going out of business, in part because we couldn’t make enough money via ad revenue to continue to operate. During the decline, we would get emails asking about coverage declines or cutting back the number of days printed, and I always liked to ask if the people emailing were using an ad blocker when they visited the site. Most were.
When the publication shuttered, people were crestfallen, but what was the publication to do? Journalists need to be paid, the printers need to be paid, people distributing the paper need to be paid, web servers need to be paid for.
I think the macro thing is substantially more important. a lot of the makeup of the world comes from macro choices, not micro ones. structural problems can only be solved by the actors in a position of power being pressured to do the right thing. supporting local businesses should be done because one likes them and thinks they are worth supporting, not because you have been shamed for going to starbucks. the people who benefit the most from hyperfocusing on individual choice are the companies who get to keep polluting the planet while selling “carbon neutral” plastic, not local businesses. I would say putting the blame mainly on people’s choices is Starbucks (what Shell and BP want you to be thinking about), and putting the blame and effort and scrutiny on the actions of decision makers that define what people’s options are for them, is the Co-Op, if you will.
in a diagram of people who should be shamed and ashamed of their actions, I would put people who use adblock probably at the very bottom, if at all.
I don’t want to be rude–we’re all friends of sorts here on IC–but I’m not sure what you’re arguing with me about here
Plainly put: if the constituency of an online publication for quality games journalism is predominantly using ad block and eschewing subscriptions, how is that publication meant to make enough money to support the livelihoods of the people writing for it?
I have my own ideas about that, but my point is simply that it is the publication’s responsibility to resolve that problem, not the audience’s. shifting attention and responsibility in this way benefits bad actors more than honest ones, and perpetuates the real problems.