@Griffinmills said:
@thornie said:
formed under similar circumstances
I was reading through the thread and was wondering how accurate this is? I had the impression Giant Bomb was formed with Jeff and Ryan messing around on Skype after the whole Gerstmann and Eidos and Kane & Lynch etc. debacle left Jeff with a lot of free time on his hands. Is there a comparable event going on with one of the staff at this new site or am I reading too much into this? I've been out of touch for a few years after some severe family health issues and one of the things that drew me to check in to Giant Bomb now that I'm back in the land of the living was to see, "Whatever happened to that Jeff guy" and the site has really grown on me especially for it's "Little Guy making it good with his loyal friends" vibe and I wondering if we'll see something like that from these new folks effort.
Basically, Gerstman left GameSpot and very shortly after that, so did everyone else. Dicked around with Arrow Pointing Down and stuff for a bit (not sure if that was before any deal with WM officially or not) and eventually, he struck a deal with Whiskey Media. A company with (including GB) just a very small handful of sites (four?) that works to provide really solid content. Crafted and curated content. By people who give a fuck from the bottom to the top of the company, it would seem.
Vox was formed off the back of SBNation, which is several hundred sports websites. It's one of those 400-500 employee mega-corporate media content sites with more than 400 paid writers where you are the product and their advertisers are the customers (integrity is always an issue, in this model) and the content is only relevant in as much as drawing you to their pages (linkbait, anyone?). And where they have a $100,000,000 valuation. They brought Tapolsky over from Engadget to start The Verge. Now they're bringing some established dudes over to do a gaming site. Basically, they say "we need to serve XYZ demographic to our advertising network, so let's start a website that will cater to that demographic". Not unlike Gawker/AOL content farm networks, basically.
I guess they *are* the "little guy" if you consider that Vox's latest round of investments brought in $25,000,000. And that Comcast is one of their biggest investors. And that their founders are guys like the dude behind Daily KOS. And that the pre-vox network it is built on (again, a sports network of sites) is almost nine years old.
So, basically, they're "the little guys" in the same way that GameSpot, CNET, Joystiq, Gawker, Engadget, etc are "the little guys".
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