Karadalis said:
It seems with the raise of youtube celebrities and patreon that the traditional websites are taking a beating all around.
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Youtube taking away views and add revenue from gaming websites as a whole? More likely and was actually discussed in many articles here and on other websites allready.
Words don't get the pageviews to pay the bills, most advertising companies (people in general?) are lazy/incompetent and refuse to adjust to anything that isn't the easiest route of using large ad networks that serve content via easily excised third party javascript includes. Video is where all the eyeballs/ad money is these days, and even then, the laziness comes into play with the majority of ad buys refusing to use non-youtube video because it requires doing something slightly differently to manage the campaigns. (on that note, we DO have a new player working with HTML5 and all the fun stuff, but it's in the queue behind other projects before we can make it live)
Pubclub helps things, but "only" provides a few thousand a month, costs quickly eaten by the expenses of an office with multiple full-time staff (it's more of a way for people to get the prettier version of the site / fun things when we can think of them - we really do need more ideas for it though). Donation drives are disingenuous because they have to recur every year or month (Penny Arcade is the closest gaming site I know of to funding with minimal external ads, and I don't believe even they repeated their massively successful donation drive - PA Report itself was unfortunately a financial drain though... because "words" instead of pictures/videos). Patreon is really interesting, especially in Jim's case, but quickly becomes less viable if he brings on any full-time help.
Our forums and community have always been somewhat more on autopilot then not, so I'm hoping this gives us a solid excuse to do more things on the community end. I'd rather have forums be our source of page views then cheap low effort front page content for that sweet ad money sustenance (and if it lets me run game servers with pubclub tie-ins, that would be a nice extra supplement / source of video content for the video ad-view throne). After all, forums have killed more server hamsters then any other part of the site, so I'm hoping this'll be a good motivator to do more interesting things as a gaming community rather then just a gaming audience.
We don't play nearly enough videogames together and I feel like it's partially my fault because I'm usually too burnt out from sitting at a computer desk all day to log in and die repeatedly on the TF2 or other game servers.
Luckily the corporate overlords love the Twitch stuff (BECAUSE IT COMES WITH PRETTY NUMBERS) so we've been able to use that as an excuse to start playing games with you folks on work time, and I know Mr. Bolding has been trying to play all sorts of fun things whenever they let him.
Ergh, thanks for sticking with us, hopefully we'll have some new fun things soon.
*Gamergate was/is a drama shitstorm about things that we've already had internal policies against from the beginning (hell, I remember being suspicious of radio DJs when growing up for where they were getting their free CDs from) - and needed external policies written up that just weren't because :effort: - nothing that happened recently had Gamergate anywhere near it, and the only in-office discussions were along the lines of discussing a trainwreck as seen from an advertising-metric-filled Zeppelin. It's all about money and effort. Like pretty much everything. :/
