OK, so one of the sites I usually go to everyday, cinemassacre.com, had a news post about some essay made by a film student about AVGN. I read a few paragraphs of the piece and I found this little tidbit:

"At Giant Bomb, which prides itself as being “the world’s largest editable video game database,” I created a user account in order to participate in the site’s forums. As within most forums, a member’s level of participation (such as one’s number of posts) is plainly available for others to observe. With this in mind, I realized that I needed to actively engage in the forums, as it would have been inappropriate to immediately create a forum topic requesting survey responses without having first established myself as a contributing member of the community. However, after I posted the survey link and request, my first reply, written by a veteran forum member who had already contributed more than 9,000 posts, was one of resistance: “…always great to see how some people spend their first post on GB” This was somewhat expected: Jenkins has noted that fans typically greet academic examinations of their subculture with skepticism or disdain. Although I expected such opposition, I felt it necessary to situate myself as an academic and not as a market researcher or just a casual fan by providing my academic email address (@ucla.edu). I also attempted to curb further resistance by reasserting my legitimacy within Rolfe’s fandom, video game culture in general, and Giant Bomb in particular, by addressing this resistance more directly: “Honestly, until today, I hadn't been to GiantBomb before, but my friend recommended it to me the other day, so I thought I'd sign up and I figured it would be a good place to find AVGN fans for my survey and to just talk about gaming stuff in general.” After having said this, the posts from other members became more positive, as many enthusiastically responded that they had completed the survey and even wished me luck with my project."

I have just quoted the part which relates to Giant Bomb, here is a link to the whole thing if anyone is remotely interested: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2012_AngryVideoGameNerd.html

I thought this was kind of random and surprised me, maybe its a sign of Giant Bomb getting more well known or just a strange coincidence?