Greedy Goblin

Thursday, March 10, 2016

TMC going down

I obviously never liked the Goon propaganda site, but spewing bad opinions doesn't help, so I ignored it as much as I could. But recently I noticed the lack of content on the site. So I counted the posts and made this pretty chart about how many posts they published a week ("TMC week in revew" posts are ignored as they are not new content):

"They seen better days" is a large understatement. They had twice as much posts a year ago than now and in May they made a deal with Sony (or Daybreak) to promote H1Z1. From the money they could hire contributors and the post count skyrocketed to 40+ per week. As they started to run out of money they started to lose these contributors and post count sloped faster than SMA membership during an AFK cloaking campaign. Finally - probably when they had empty coffers - they made their last stand with the Fountain War book campaign and this once again increased the post count close to 20 per week. While this was half of their peak, at least they weren't sloping.

Unfortunately for them, the infamous Fountain War kickstarter met with the disgust of the community platforms and sank in less than a month. After that the post count dropped to the current 12-13/week level. Probably they can operate on this level for a while using volunteer work, but as they bleed FCs and other former leaders due to their desperate attempts to monetize, I doubt they can keep these volunteers. They might be able to linger using this unpaid skeleton crew or they can't even pay for servers and shut the damn site down. Either way, we are free to celebrate this magnificient failure of the one in the wizzard hat to monetize our game.


PS: Here goes the good killboard of CO2. And there goes the rest of it.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mittani declared he was going to restart the book in March, so here we are..

nightgerbil said...

It started out a good project, but then all the neutral posters got purged and it became a goon only site. Still good to follow, but then they re did the lay out and all of a sudden it became a chore to read it. Its orig incarnation, with a bunch of articles about all kind of things on a main page that you could click on, with variety of articles was good. Reading about LOL world of warships even about kirbles or nasa's latest project. Its now a shadow of its former self and has been for a year or more. I'm not surprised its posts are down, I bet its readership has sunk massively as well.

For me its failure comes from its owners (mittens and crew) not thinking about how it is to actually be a user of their product. If you put your customers first, tailor your product for them, you can make alot of money as your product will basically sell itself.

Stabs said...

@ nightgerbil

"It started out a good project."

It started out a conflicted project. Angry at very real bias from EN24, they wanted both to create a site with a higher standard of integrity and, at the same time, to create a site telling their side of the story. They've continually waivered between the two not realising you really have to just pick one and stick with it.

There have been a lot of contributors who have tried to bring balance to the site but any attempts at reporting credibility have been constantly undermined by Goon leaders using it as a place to rant, biased comment moderation and falling out with the "talent" for not following the Goon party line.

They needed to separate Church and State at the beginning and from the name on were utterly unable to do that.

Anonymous said...

SMA's site is even more dead, pretty hilarious.

Anonymous said...

'put your customers first'
the readers were never the customer.

the facebook buisness model the advertisers are the consumer. the users are the product.
TMC wasnt even this.

TMC pretended to be a media company. They drew funding from angel investors and did deals for capital investment. All this money flowed to Sion, Mittani and thier cronies.

Its these people who drew salaries that were the customers of TMC. When the money started running out they tried to get more with the failed kickstarter.



Anonymous said...

TMC is just here for the money now, it's kinda sad because it was a good eve news website at the beginning

V.

Anonymous said...

@ Anonymous 10 March, 2016 03:13

NO thank you, we already have Andrew Groen a History of the great Empires of eve online.
Why would the "community" want a Goonies b(i)ased book about one large war in eve online?
source: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sciencegroen/a-history-of-the-great-empires-of-eve-online

Regards, a Freelancer

ps: besides the Something Awful ""community"" (two brackets right Sion ?) did not backed Mittens book with just about half a plex price per GSF member.
The GSF counted >15.000 and the profitability amount for the book was set at $ 150.000
source: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1318670671/fountain-war-book

Vince Snetterton said...

There is zero chance of goon Pravda ever dying. No chance the failed lawyer's ego would allow that. He NEEDS a public forum for his sociopathic madness. If it came to it, he would pen his own propaganda, even if no one else would write for that site.

But he has too many sycophants and others dependent on goon RMT operations for that to ever happen. That site will remain a cancerous part of the Eve fabric, no matter how much damage it does to the game.

Anonymous said...

I hate to be the one dissenter on this blog but I do like TMC and I like it more these days than when it was trying too hard to be a H1Z1 marketing site. Generally, nowadays the articles are well written and reasonably well edited.

Of course, its a biased site - what would be expect? BBC? Within that context, I do like to read it and I do occasionally learn something new.

As a side effect, it brought up the quality of EVEnews24 and Crossing Zebras. Especially evenews24 was unreadable before TMC came along and instilled a much calmer, professional environment where other screaming, foam-on-mouth sites just couldn't compete.

Overall, I am not in love with TMC but in the right context, I do enjoy their posts. But then again, I don't take goons or EVE that seriously.