Fandom sells gaming media brand Giant Bomb to long-term staff

I dont know how popular Giant Bomb is as a site, but in general video game journalism online is pretty much in the doldrums. Most of the big players from the last 20 years seem to have either disappered or are cutting staff back to the bare minimum. They seem to have become click baity and but dont even get much interaction from viewers.Looking at the Titan of the industry, IGN, they barely get more that 20k views for videos they put out on Youtube, even though they have 19million subscribers. Their audience seems to have moved on from them to individual Youtubers or twitch.

As a business proposition, video gaming sites seem like a money pit with no guarentee of a return. They may have a chance at survival by serving a niche audience that wants a specific type of content, limiting their scope and ambitions. But at the moment I just dont see a comeback for them.

Giant Bomb is a bit of a tragic tale because they essentially pioneered the idea of personality driven game streaming at a time when most video game sites were still doing the templated 5 section review. The problem is that they were a bit too ahead of their time, so they had to rely on outside funding which caused them to be sold - first to CBS, then Red Ventures, and now Fandom. If they were launching today, it would be a patreon funded YouTube channel without the overhead of an in person office, rolling your own video streamer, etc

I don't think they had issues making money, they had issues hitting unrealistic growth targets being set by their overlords. This was discussed on the most recent Nextlander podcast. Nextlander being 3 of the Giant Bomb OGs.