onGamers

» see ongamers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2014 I was thirty and writing code for a living. Competitive gaming had a press by then, with salaried reporters and video crews behind them, and I was not in the audience for any of it. My own stretch of it had happened a decade earlier in Ankara internet cafes playing Counter-Strike, when the entire coverage apparatus for esports was the person sitting at the next machine telling you what he had just done.

onGamers was CBS Interactive's attempt at building that press properly. The company appointed Kim Rom as vice president of esports in July 2013 and had a site in beta by 7 November. It arrived with staff and a budget at a moment when most esports coverage was one person with a YouTube account and a strong opinion, and the ambition was exactly what it looked like: be the newsroom for professional gaming before anybody else was.

The problem sat underneath the whole thing from the first day. More than half of onGamers' traffic came from Reddit. Not from search and not from a homepage anybody typed. From links posted into subreddits, in a community that decides for itself, out loud and by vote, what it wants to look at.

On 3 July 2014 Reddit banned the domain. Rod Breslau, the site's first employee and senior editor, had been messaging redditors asking them to submit onGamers stories, which Reddit read as vote manipulation. CBS Interactive relieved him of his duties the same day. The ban stood anyway, for at least a year, and visits dropped by half.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a ban actually costs ~

Kim Rom's own public number was that Reddit accounted for over half of onGamers' total traffic, which is the sort of figure you only say out loud once it has already gone. A newsroom can survive losing half its readers if the remaining half belongs to it. What the ban demonstrated was that onGamers had never had an audience in the first place. It had a referral source, and referral sources are somebody else's property.

Breslau denied rigging votes. His account was that he posted and voted on onGamers stories himself but did not organize staff to do it for him. Both versions arrive at the same place, because the ban was not really a verdict on one editor. It was Reddit noticing that a corporate site had been working the mechanism, and pricing that in.

~ the fold ~

CBS Interactive cut back the live video operation over the following months and the site limped through 2015 without recovering. In December 2015 it was retired without a closing post that anyone can point to. Every onGamers article was redirected into GameSpot's League of Legends section and the whole property was rebranded as G|League.

~ the next chapter ~

Esports journalism did not die here. Nearly everything onGamers was trying to build got built within a few years, mostly by people who either owned their own distribution or were native to the platform they lived on rather than parasitic upon it. The specific lesson it left behind is older than esports and gets relearned about once a decade: if a platform supplies most of your readers, that platform can end you, and it does not need to be angry with you to do it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »