Former CNET cofounder and CEO Shelby Bonnie founded Whiskey Media in 2007 as a platform to build media and entertainment content sites. The company, located in stunningly beautiful Sausalito, California (north of San Francisco) has no outside shareholders pestering them for a quick exit – the five cofounders, all former CNETers (Shelby Bonnie, Mike Tatum, Ethan Lance, Dave Snider and Andy McCurdy) have funded the company to date with less than $1.5 million. I recently had lunch with Bonnie to talk about how Whiskey Media is doing. It has quietly grown in the last year and a half, and the team is preparing to unveil a number of new sites this year.
We first covered the company in October 2007 with the launch of Political Base. It was, and is, notable because it’s built as a “structured wiki” – freely editable by anyone, but the data isn’t just one big unstructured blob like you see on Wikipedia and other wiki sites. Each section of a page is a separate silo, making it much easier to slice and dice data, and cross link around the site. Political Base was the primary inspiration for how we structured our own CrunchBase database of people, startups and venture funds.
PoliticalBase is a PHP application and separate from Whiskey Media’s newer sites, ComicVine (comics), GiantBomb (games) and AnimeVice (anime). Those three new sites are entertainment and media focused, and written in Python using the Django web framework. More sites are coming this year on that platform.
ComicVine originally launched in late 2006 as a PHP application, but was ported to the new platform last April and now sees over 10 million monthly pageviews. The newer sites, GiantBomb and AnimeVice, have 10 million and 800,000 monthly page views each. Most users are male, in the 13-30 demographic.
Not bad for a startup with a handful of employees that’s burned through very little capital. And like Wikipedia, the readers create most of the content – they’ve added a million pieces of content to the sites to date, says Bonnie.
The sites don’t look anything like Wikipedia, having a rich content experience more like Wetpaint, an unstructured wiki site that lets users create new wikis on any topic. Third parties can also access the content on various Whiskey Media sites via an open API.
Clever company. I guess revenue through adds only?
Ads seem to be their only major revenue stream, but at the moment they’ve only had relatively few ads, at infrequent intervals. I guess it’s a sign of the shrinking advertising industry to the recession.
Although, being the co founder of c net, I’d imagine Shelby Bonnie isn’t exactly short of money, so in the short term it’s probably not a huge issue. Hopefully the economy will recover before it becomes an issue.
I am sure they’ll do fine. Lots of experience, sound approach and proper funding. Can’t see much going wrong here on the long run.
The link to Political Base goes back to your blogging / draft system. Don’t think that’s where you want us to go
Yeah it gives an error that we don’t have permission to see TC drafts.
fixed thx.
lets see if they can run this company the same way as CNet…drive tremendous debt into the company, try to build their own pay per click engine (which failed when pitted against google on their own properties), then offload the company to some poor sucker (CBS).
wtg python. the article seem more about php vs python then the actual company .
Agree with the self-financing, low burn rate approach. Everyone should do that.
Two years to launch 3 sites? Can’t agree with that, particularly with the low traffic. We’ve launched 20 sites in 6 months. Here is our http://games.tEarn.com/ supersite. Have to move at web speed, not publishing speeds.
Quickerfy, Mr. Bonnie.
Also gained 22 more followers in the 5 minutes it took to read, research, and write this reply. Quickerfy.
Yes, it’s easy to launch 20 sites in 6 months when they are complete garbage, like the one you linked to.
yeah, was gonna say…easy to launch Blogger sites on the quick, harder to do it when you’re building something from (relative) scratch…
A recent blog from whiskey employee Mike Tatum said “While we have the ability to rollout sites the scale of Giantbomb every couple of weeks (like we did with Animevice). Instead, we’re focusing on areas where we have the most interest and think we can offer something unique. Expect to see some new products this year in other entertainment verticals, specifically areas where our communities already have shown interest.”
The Full blog is here (it’s an interesting read): http://www.whis...ear-for-whiskey
Self marketing is the only way I get leads lol….
So i too will second that,
Nice post.
Very impressive lineup, I’m happy to see these guys succeed. Proof that experience, funding and careful execution can go a long way, even with a small team.