Image via Riot Games

I try my best to include as much information as humanly possible, but there are some things that may not be covered, just to ensure the most important parts are not missed.

On the 30th of April I was forwarded an email from River by the GAMURS Managing Editor at the time, Aaron Hetzer. The email was titled “Esportspedia Sponsorship” with an attached deck on Esportspedia’s statistics and history. At the time, Esportspedia was generating about ~6m monthly pageviews with 900k monthly active users. For a young startup that had only been in the esports scene for ~4 months, this prospect was exciting.

River and I got on the same page very quickly. She was interested in bringing Esportspedia under the GAMURS umbrella with our support, and we were ecstatic to support such a great resource for multiple esports communities. We made an official offer to acquire the Esportspedia brand and staff on the 2nd of May, and in the next week agreed on the specifics of the deal. Everyone was thrilled. The deal needed to await the finalisation of River and Azubu’s deal, something all parties were aware of.

To not bore you with details you are already aware of (if not, please read here and here) — Azubu decided not to continue with their offer, and instead wanted to issue River a royalty-free (3 month only) license to run it. This was not acceptable to us, so we instead decided to move forward with a similar deal, and hired the whole Esportspedia team to launch a new wikis website: EsportsWikis. We were fully aware that the original Esportspedia website had a dozen issues which needed fixing, whether it was the downtime problems, the fact that it was haemorrhaging cash, or many others. We were not oblivious to the fact that this was a hard task, we just weren’t aware as to how difficult this would be to monetise — and the responsbility for that lay with us.

EsportsWikis Launched

Very quickly, we launched EsportsWikis with a great reception from the community. What we quickly realised was, even though the community loved us, we needed the mainstream audience of the titles we covered to find us. With Esportspedia, Gamepedia, and Leaguepedia around, we weren’t able to compete with their search engine rankings, even though they were (and still are) regularly behind us in updates and whatnot. I will say though, the EsportsWikis team at the time fought valiantly, and succeeded in growing EsportsWikis to surpass it’s predecessor Esportspedia in traffic today, even with the significant head-start they had on us.

Unfortunately, this was simply not enough. Producing high quality data, supporting contributors financially, and ensuring it is done in a timely manner is not cheap. When you’re also doing that on legacy software that so few engineers understand, you end up paying a consultant $150–200/hr for basic work. To install ad units on a normal website would take 45–60 minutes and cost a negligible amount, the wikis however cost us over $1,500 for such a simple task.

For further transparency, to support the traffic, we needed to invest $30,000 in architecture work and $20,000 in annual-prepaid server costs within the first 3 months.

Traffic

Site Speed

Either way, regardless of the above issues we were still ecstatic to be managing the EsportsWikis brand. Supporting River and the team in achieving their vision was unbelievably important to us, which is why over the last 12 months we invested a total of $270,000 across wages, architecture, and server expenses. We knew going into this project that this was going to be expensive, what we didn’t understand was the difficulty in monetising a wiki (1), and the difficulty in growing the wikis (2).