Giant Bomb Premium: what are the benefits for the GB team?

I've been following Giant Bomb since the beginning, always as a lurker. I've finally decided to subscribe to GB Premium, I'm a bit ashamed to have waited for all these years.

Anyways, here's a question: how are the profit from GB premium used by the GB team? What does it fund? The benefits for the subscribers are clear, but I would love to know how these $ are used. I believe making this information public on the GB premium subscription page could also incentivize people to subscribe!

Thanks everyone for everything you've been doing over the years :)

Uh...just an assumption, but I imagine it (along with non-premium ads) pays their salaries, lets them purchase equipment, etc. It's more complicated than that since they have a parent company that ultimately makes the decisions regarding pay and expenses, but I think it's fair to say that's mostly it.

Of course I don't know all the details, but as Giant Bomb is owned by Red Ventures, I think it's safe to say it's really just income for Red Ventures, which then pays the GB staff and their expenses. Pretty straight-forward business practices.

I don't want this to sound like a cop-out answer, but... everything?

I can't say exactly how Red Ventures is structured and I don't have insight into GB's financials specifically, but as someone who works for a media company (a newspaper) in which we highly value subscriptions, the money goes toward every aspect of the product. Paying staff, keeping the site up, buying equipment, etc. etc.

Without subscriptions, Giant Bomb may have still survived all these years (though it's not guaranteed, because ad revenue on the internet has gone down a lot unless you're Facebook or Google), but in order to do so they probably would have had less freedom and had to resort to some more "gross" ad-based deals. A healthy number of subscriptions can also translate directly into how much money they have to do things like hire more staff.

So, to put it simply, the benefit for the GB team is that they get to keep doing what they do (and what we love having them do), so your support means a ton. If you ever hear somebody say, "We couldn't do this without our subscribers," that's usually not lip service. It's true.

Jeff has said in the past that Giant Bomb's business model is focused around selling subscriptions. I don't know anything about the financials of the site, but it's a large portion of their revenue and if I had to guess I'd say more than half, which makes sense considering the balance of premium to free content. The free content makes some money on advertising, but it seems like mostly it's meant to bring people into the site so they buy the premium content (though I'd imagine the podcast ads are also a significant source of revenue.)

What benefit does it give the staff? It keeps their employer in business. This is kind of an odd question. It's like paying to attend a sports game you could see on free TV and then asking how that benefits the players. It doesn't necessarily directly (though Giantbomb may have profit sharing, we don't know) but it is revenue for the team and that indirectly benefits the employees.

Duder feels like a bot or a troll.

As others have said, the subscription money accounts for probably the majority of revenue the site brings in. The other revenue streams are there (merchandise, podcast ads, website banner ads, etc.) but it sounds like since 2010 or 2011, it has really been the subscriber revenue that justifies the overall budget/salaries/expenses for the website.

I think the staff has decided that free trials of premium (and making certain premium videos freely available permanently) is the way they want to get people interested in premium. Not everyone is as motivated by "how does premium help the staff improve the website", and new users who don't know the history of the site as well are probably better motivated by "what other video series could I be checking out if I had premium."

Thank you all for chiming in! Unless a staff member replies we won't know how these funds are actually used (and it's fine if they don't share internal information of course), but I've made the same guesses as you.

My take away is that these $ will help Giant Bomb keep its editorial independence. I'm happy to upgrade my trial to my first subscription :)

No, I'm genuinely curious.

@dinosaurc: So ask them then. None of us know.

This is kind of a silly question if you dismiss all responses other than staff talking about the details of their finances. You could be genuinely curious, but you're not going to get any new information here. Money is fungible, and memberships are obviously an important revenue stream for the business.

My very limited understanding from discussions in the past is under CBS they were salaried employees, with ‘who knows what’ kind performance bonuses and points (idle speculation on my part). What we can tell is the site still generates revenue from ad views and I remember loosely it been explained that subs created budget that allowed for creation of better and more unique content.

Take all of this with a salt mine, as honestly I don’t really know any more than you.

Believe it or not, the $35/year is much more than the site would get from ad revenue. Selling internet ads bring in pennies per eyeball if that.