Heheh, good jokes.
Big media organisations getting a foothold in SA can be good and bad. I'm optimistic about it being good.
It depends on how well (Tide Media/Instance Media/NAG Magazine/whatever they are calling themselves now) approach the marketing side of things - with a big name like IGN behind them, they could break ground in terms of online marketing via gaming websites in SA. Broadened awareness and exposure of the gaming pastime and its demographics among the marketing agencies benefits all the decent local sites. They may yet have a few things to learn about the online space, as NAG has not really played in this field until now.
It remains to be seen how their entrance affects the current balance of marketing in SA - NAG has some good marketing relationships established, and they can augment their magazine offering by providing "bonus" advertising on the IGN side, and they will likely have full-scale online advertising campaigns going as well.
I'm of course not privy to the details of the deal between IGN and NAG - so it would be speculation to say IGN gives them some money for operations here, or perhaps the syndication is payment enough and NAG foots the bill for all local operations costs, also pocketing a portion of the advertising profit. IMO the magazine will remain the money spinner for the time being.
When it comes to editorial, MyGaming can't compete with the syndicated breaking news content and exclusives - they have a massive team of international journalists pumping out all the content, while MyGaming is just me and good old freelancing Wesley at the moment. However, this isn't much different from the situation pre-IGN Africa.
We'll continue to filter the most important news and put an interesting local spin on the news as we do - we have the advantage of knowing our audience well.
Part of za.IGN's mandate will be to produce locally relevant news. They might break ground in this area, or find it challenging - that remains to be seen. This is where I see their editorial competing with us directly, and driving us to improve as well. In this regard, competition is a good thing.
MyGaming's traffic continues to grow, indicative of our successful strategy as well as a slowly growing local gaming market, IMO. Ideally, I'd like to see our marketing revenue rise significantly so we can expand the team. To that end, get your friends to register and hang out on the forum
What I really want to know, and it remains to be seen if I'll get to see it, is some accurate traffic stats from IGN Africa so I can measure MyGaming against them.
