Whiskey Media
Whiskey Media was an American online media company founded independently by CNET co-founder Shelby Bonnie in 2008. It was the parent company of Tested, Screened, and Anime Vice, and the former parent company of Giant Bomb and Comic Vine. Whiskey Media websites were wiki community based, while maintaining an editorial staff. The company's target demographic was focused primarily on males between 10 and 30. The name "Whiskey Media" is a reference to a Kentucky distillery that was owned by the family of Shelby Bonnie before prohibition. Whiskey Media operated in San Francisco, California, after previously being located in Sausalito. On March 15, 2012, Whiskey Media was acquired by Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman's BermanBraun along with Tested, Screened, and Anime Vice while Giant Bomb and Comic Vine were bought separately by CBS Interactive.
History and development
History
Whiskey Media was created in 2007, after Shelby Bonnie resigned as the CEO of CNET in 2006, a website he co-founded in 1994. Joining Bonnie and business partner Mike Tatum were former CNET programmers Andy McCurdy, Sean Coonce, Ethan Lance, and Dave Snider. Lance and Snider at the time were running their own joint venture known as Enemy Kite, in which they had created Comic Vine. Comic Vine would become the first Whiskey Media website, complete with a full conversion from the PHP format to Whiskey Media's de facto framework, Django.Later in the year Jeff Gerstmann also left CNET after being controversially fired from his position as Editorial Director of GameSpot. This began a chain reaction in which Ryan Davis, Alex Navarro, Brad Shoemaker and Vinny Caravella would leave after the incident. This led to Whiskey Media and Gerstmann getting in touch with each other and with Ryan Davis they created the video game website, Giant Bomb, which Caravella, Shoemaker, and Navarro later went to work for.
Giant Bomb and subsequent websites, Anime Vice, Tested and Screened were designed around the same "social publishing" concept as Comic Vine, content created by tech-savvy communities, while being run by small teams of editorial staff, video producers and engineers. In an interview with The New York Times, Bonnie explained that creating a small staffed company as opposed to CNET was a, "great constraint that forces us to do smart stuff." When asked why they didn't go down the route of blog sites such as Joystiq or Engadget, Bonnie said that, "what blogs figured out was how to create a scalable inexpensive model, but there is not a shelf space for content. Content is hard to organize and it is hard to be a reference. If you think about how you create a community, you have to create anchors for community to congregate around." From March 2008 to March 2009 Django co-creator Jacob Kaplan-Moss worked for Whiskey Media as 'software architect.' Whiskey Media then became his first client in his new job at Revolution Systems, an open-source software technical support company.
At the end of 2009 Whiskey Media raised $2.5 million in funding. Paid member subscriptions were made available in 2010, one of the benefits being that paid members would view no advertisements in the future. For the majority of 2008 through 2010, Whiskey Media websites featured very little advertisements, being against cost per mille advertising and also with Mike Tatum noting that they have been, "incredibly lucky to have had the directive to focus completely on our product over the last few years." Tatum announced that advertisements would take a more prominent role on Whiskey Media websites in 2011. In addition to regular advertising, the websites have been shown to utilize their wiki-databases and the social gaming Quest system to incorporate advertisements that "don't disrupt the audience experience." It was announced that Whiskey Media had entered into a mutually beneficial ad sales partnership with Six Apart.
In April 2011, Whiskey Media was one of the many online media companies affected during the outage of Amazon Web Services, using the cloud computing service for a portion of its data storage. Sean Coonce praised social media and streaming media for providing them with platforms to communicate with and provide live content for their user bases during their respective websites' downtime and stated that the incident had no effect on their use of cloud computing or of Amazon itself.
March 2012 saw the end of Whiskey Media's independence when All Things Digital reported that Bonnie had sold the company to Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun's BermanBraun. Bonnie spoke of the sale saying he "couldn't be more excited for the combination." Of the websites included in this deal, Tested has seen the first immediate changes with the addition of Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of MythBusters to the website and an overall conceptual and design overhaul.
Also announced that day was CBS Interactive's separate purchase of the Giant Bomb and Comic Vine brands, significant for the return of Gerstmann, Davis, Shoemaker and Caravella to the CBS building in which they worked for GameSpot. Designers Dave Snider and Alexis Gallisá, and writer Alex Navarro also joined them in the move, though Navarro continued to work from his home in New York.
Products
Websites
Whiskey Media created five websites that focus on video games, technology, comics, anime and manga and movies. Occasionally staff will appear in content on other Whiskey Media websites, whereas full-scale collaborationsare rare. One such occurrence was the 'Big Live LIVE Show: Live!', a live streaming event that lasted seven hours, showcasing video content in order to promote the launch of paid memberships.
''Giant Bomb''
| Member | Position |
| Jeff Gerstmann | Co-Creator, Chief editor |
| Brad Shoemaker | Senior Editor |
| Ben Pack | Associate Editor |
| Jason Oestreicher | Video Producer |
| Jan Ochoa | Video Producer |
| Vincent Caravella | Chief Video Producer |
| Alex Navarro | Senior Editor |
Giant Bomb is a video game-focused website, launched in blog-form on March 6, 2008 and in its complete form on July 21, 2008.
Due to the circumstances surrounding its creation and the way it is run, it has gained a reputation as a website that is less business-like and more focused around fun. Its creation came about following the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from GameSpot and many of its staff leaving in turn. Of those, Ryan Davis, Brad Shoemaker and Vinny Caravella joined Gerstmann to create Giant Bomb. Giant Bomb's launch was chronicled by the How to Build a Bomb series, in which Davis and Gerstmann detailed the first weeks of turning an empty white room into an office.
Giant Bomb soon became notable for its podcast, the "Giant Bombcast", as well as several of the video series they produce, including Quick Looks, Endurance Runs and several livestreams including Unprofessional Fridays. The Giant Bombcast, hosted originally by Ryan Davis until his death and now hosted by Brad Shoemaker, unites the San Francisco Office's senior Staff to talk about their week, discuss news and answer e-mails. With over one-hundred thousand downloads weekly, it is the most popular feature of the site, consistently being placed in the top ten most downloaded gaming podcasts globally on iTunes. Quick Looks are usually long unedited videos of two or more staff members playing through part of a game, usually at the beginning. One of the most relevant video series was the Persona 4 Endurance Run, which featured Vinny Caravella and Jeff Gerstmann playing Persona 4 from start to finish during almost 100 hours, its success gaining the acknowledgement of Atlus USA itself, to which Gerstmann comically thanked them for, "not having legal team get in touch with us." Davis was the presenter on the This Ain't No Game feature, in which he reviewed films that are based on video games. Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon commented on Davis's review of Mortal Kombat Annihilation, stating that his overly negative review was still, "a bit too kind to it."
From 2009 Giant Bomb has had several staff additions including former intern Drew Scanlon becoming Video Producer in 2009, Alex Navarro becoming a writer in addition to his work on Screened in April 2010 and Brad Nicholson becoming an external news writer in May 2010. On April 17, 2011, Patrick Klepek was announced as News Editor. The main staff remained largely the same until the untimely death of Ryan Davis in July 2013, which was a huge blow to the staff and fans. Gerstmann hosted the Bombcast and live shows in his place for some time until he passed the podcast host role to Brad Shoemaker in 2014. Vinny Caravella moved to NYC in mid 2014 to form an east-coast office with Alex Navarro, now affectionately known as the GBEast. Dan Ryckert and Jason Oestreicher moved from Game Informer to join the San Francisco office in mid 2014. Patrick Klepek announced his departure from Giant Bomb in the last Game of the Year podcast for 2014 and in early January announced his new job as News Editor for Kotaku. After interviewing for his replacement, it was announced on May 30, 2015 that Austin Walker would be joining Giant Bomb as News Editor, and would be working from the New York office.
Giant Bomb has regularly produced new content, including a multiplayer livestreaming show, Thursday Night Throwdown on Justin.tv, coverage of major video game conventions at Electronic Entertainment Expo, Game Developers Conference and Penny Arcade Expo, other playthroughs, several other podcasts, a game development series called "Building the Bastion" with Supergiant Games, reuniting the former GameSpot Editors with their former Editor-in-chief Greg Kasavin, who record the development of the video game Bastion, much in the same vein as the How to Build a Bomb videos.