Clownfish TV: Audio Edition
Kotaku Australia SHUTS DOWN! It’ll Get Even WORSE for Kotaku USA!
Kotaku Australia is shutting down forever as its parent company doesn’t think it’s worth renewing the license. However, this might cause a HUGE issue for the American version of Kotaku as a lot of their archives are actually hosted in Australia. OOPS. How long until G/O just cuts their losses Stateside? ➡️ Tip Jar and Fan Support: http://ClownfishSupport.com ➡️ Official Merch Store: http://ShopClownfish.com ➡️ Official Website: http://ClownfishTV.com ➡️ Audio Edition: https://open.spotify.com/show/6qJc5C6OkQkaZnGCeuVOD1 About Us: Clownfish TV is an independent, opinionated news and commentary channel that covers Entertainment and Tech from a consumer’s point of view. We talk about Gaming, Comics, Anime, TV, Movies, Animation and more. Hosted by Kneon and Geeky Sparkles. Disclaimer: This series is produced by Clownfish Studios and WebReef Media, and is part of ClownfishTV.com. Opinions expressed by our contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of our guests, affiliates, sponsors, or advertisers. ClownfishTV.com is an unofficial news source and has no connection to any company that we may cover. This channel and website and the content made available through this site are for educational, entertainment and informational purposes only. These so-called “fair uses” are permitted even if the use of the work would otherwise be infringing. #Games #Kotaku #News #Commentary #Reaction #Podcast #Comedy #Entertainment #Hollywood #PopCulture #Tech
[MUSIC PLAYING] Now at T-Mobile, get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with eligible traders, all on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of four lines for $25 per line per month without a paid discount using debit or bank account, $5 more per line without auto pay, plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge. Phones would be a 24-monthly bill credit for well qualified customers, contact us before canceling entire accounts to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement to bill credit to end if you pay off devices early, ctmobile.com. Hey, Billy, why don't we tell them what it'll be about, man? So we're here to welcome you to the Madhouse Chronicles. It's a talk show with myself, Billy Morrison-- And me as yours. --this man, Prince of Darkness. And we watch and react to the maddest internet clips. What do we discuss, Aussie? Drugs, rock and roll, aliens, all that kind of shit. Drugs, rock and roll, aliens, and all that kinds of shit. Come and join Aussie and myself, visit ozballmediahouse.com to get special access to-- Come on. What do you say? Do you think it's the wildest show on the internet? [LAUGHTER] Hey, guys. This is the audio edition of Clownfish TV. If you guys are unfamiliar with Clownfish TV, please check out the video versions of these episodes on the Clownfish TV YouTube channel and also on the Clownfish Gaming YouTube channel. Please subscribe for more podcasts. Check out D-Res. That's our other podcast. The episode will begin in a couple of seconds. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, guys. Welcome back to Clownfish TV. This is Neon. I am not dead. But Kotaku Australia is-- we're going to talk about this big news over the weekend. I guess Kotaku Australia is shutting down. They're also shutting down. Vice Gizmodo, Refinery29, Life Hacker. There is a company in Australia that actually licenses the names to these websites and publishes them themselves. Why anybody would want to do that's beyond me. I don't know why they thought these brands actually had value, but they're shutting it down. We're going to talk about it. It does feel like we're getting to end stage Kotaku, right? Here in the US. Now, again, I want to reiterate. This is not the main Kotaku site. This is a spin-off of the main Kotaku site. This happened before. I want to say it was a polygon or IGN or somebody had an overseas version of the website, and it was published by somebody else. They basically paid for the license and they shut that down. But it's not a good sign. It feels like everything is winding down. And if you've been following the situation with the blogosphere-- and we've been talking a lot about it on this channel because we do own websites ourselves-- basically, that scene has imploded. Blogs and geek media websites, they've imploded because Google decided in its infinite wisdom that it wanted to quarantine people to Google. So now when you search for news on the latest Zelda video game or whatever, you're going to get a Google AI search result, and most people are not going to click beyond that. They're going to be like, oh, here's how I beat that boss in that level. That has been catastrophic for sites like Kotaku, which we're already struggling to maintain viewers. And this is why I think they resort to political clickbait because people are searching for that kind of information. So of course, then there's the whole issue with Alyssa Mercante, but she is not-- as far as I know, not associated with the Australia site. But we're going to talk about it before we get into it. Any further, please subscribe for more pop culture news, views, and rants. Guys, we've got clownfish gaming. We do have gaming news out there. We're going to reorganize things. We have a whole lot of issues we had to deal with behind the scenes. But going forward, we are going to be better off for it. I won't go into a lot of detail here on the channel. But things have been kind of weird the last month or two. There's a reason for it. Just going to leave it at that. So we've got to give a hat tip to Tebow minimal effort podcast who put this up. And apparently even the mainstream media overseas is covering it. And we'll go out and see what people are saying after this. This is coming from minimaleffort.com or dot shop, I guess, dot shop, blogs, news. Kotaku Australia shutting down in a move that should surprise no one has been announced via Twitter that the Australian affiliates for Vice-Gizmodo Refinery29, Kotaku and Life Hacker will no longer publish in Australia. Oh, no. Oh, no. This is reportedly part of the plan, the restructure, and cut costs for the Australia-based pedestrian group with dozens of jobs getting slashed in the process. Yeah, again, they're licensees. So who actually owns his websites, for the most part? It's GeoMedia. And GeoMedia has been having a lot of cost cutting on their end, too. I mean, they shut down a bunch of blogs, sold off blogs. They shut down deadspin, deadspin got sued, of course, very famously for defaming a child, claiming that a young football fan was a racist Kansas City chief fan. He was a racist, and he was doing blackface or native American face or whatever. It turned out the kid actually was part native American and belonged to a tribe and everything. It was like, it's crazy, and they got sued, and then they wound up selling the site. Ben Grub says, gizmodo, Life Hacker and Kotaku will no longer be published in Australia as part of a major restructure in cost-cutting effort by nine-owned pedestrian group. Up to 40 jobs are going to get cut. Matt Rowley, CEO of Pedestrian Group, made the announcement on Monday morning. We've made the tough decision to focus on our wholly-owned pedestrian brands, where we control the strategy, the content, the product, the sales, the outcome, the entire business. This will have an impact on roles within the group, and I appreciate the uncertainty this change creates. Translation, your brand ain't worth shit. Kotaku, et cetera, has been just completely devalued, because they hire people like Alyssa Mercante to work at these websites. And all the online drama, who the hell would want to license a Kotaku name? I wouldn't, I'd be like, it's toxic. There's no way in hell. You know, and if you're doing all the work anyway, I'd be like, yeah, let's just put all of our efforts into a website that we actually own. But tells me that they're probably scaling back altogether. Among the people, let go, is managing editor David Smith Runwards on Twitter, who has landed himself a spot on the popular YouTuber Smash JT's Kotaku-detected site. I haven't really looked into that too much. I know a lot of people have been following people that have worked at Kotaku, and they all have smug face. Do you ever notice, like every one of these people, they have the same smug expression? Like, it's like, dude, you're not endearing yourself to gamers. It's like, I'm better than you. Yeah, most noteworthy was it's called to have gamers' hardware band for saying things in voice chat that could be construed as abuse or harassment. Have their hardware banned guys like this for life. I don't give a shit. Hardware ban them and ban them for life. Men have to start speaking up when we hear this shit in game or nothing will ever improve, lead by example. Usually when people make their personality attacking men in their mail, they're doing it to overcompensate. Senior game, I'm just saying, Google that situation. There is a pattern. I'm not saying he is doing those things. I'm just saying there does tend to be a pattern when dudes throw other dudes under the bus and be like, all men are bad, except for me, I'm one of the good ones. While there are likely many good people who work for these companies that must now start to search for new employment, this is undoubtedly a step in the right direction for games journalism as a whole. Kotaku has been in a lot of war against gamers. Yeah, they want gamergate too. And they started over Sweet Baby Yank. They tried to start it last year over Hogwarts Legacy. And it didn't take Hogwarts Legacy actually sold like 23, 25 million copies. It didn't work. And then the Sweet Baby Yank thing really ramped it up. And they went after Cabrutus and then that just spilled over. But this is desperation. Like these websites are failing. They're all failing. And some of it's their fault. Some of it isn't their fault. Some of it's just circumstances outside their control. But when companies start to prune the trees, they're going to cut off the dead branches first, right? And Kotaku is a dead branch. And you can have websites like this when times are good. And the ad revenue and the venture capital is freely flowing. But as soon as that dries up and it has dried up, as soon as that dries up, you have to become self-sustaining. And I don't think Kotaku has ever been self-sustaining. I think a lot of these websites, they basically bounced from owner to owner. And that owner would have a fresh round of venture capital. And then they'd get to a certain point. They'd grow it to a certain point. And then it'd sell it off to somebody else. Now, it used to be that it was almost like a pump and dump strategy where they would pump up the numbers and flate the numbers on these websites. And then they would dump them off. Now, every time they sell one of these websites, they lose money. They're devalued with every new owner. Look at CBS. Look at what happened with CBS. They bought a whole bunch of video game websites. I think it was like a half a billion dollars they spent on this stack of video game websites, including Giant Bomb and I think GameSpot and some other ones. And then when they sold them, they sold it for $50 million. They lost like 90% of the value. It's crazy. And that's probably what's going to happen with Kotaku. If they don't shut it down, it's just, it's going to be completely worthless anyway, right? Or if somebody buys it, they'll probably buy it for a song. They sold Jezebel. They shut Jezebel down at first. Then they sold it to another company because I think they wanted to juice it for as much political advertising as they could this year. But like, it's not going to be worth anything. Who the hell wants Kotaku? Australia doesn't even want Kotaku. Nobody wants Kotaku because it's poison. Kotaku is a poison brand. Old man, Grim says Alyssa Mercante is Frost 2.0. Just a reminder that his word's not mine. Just a reminder that this smug, narcissistic bitch, that his word's not mine, is 100% indicative of the types of freaks, feminists, and weirdos. They compromise, they have compromise is the right word. They comprise the entirety of the activists who make up the modern video game industry. And they hate most of us old school gamers. Yeah, and they'll tell you as much. And that's the thing. I think what happened was they got who they could get for what they're willing to pay. Now remember, a lot of these journals don't have a lot of other career options, right? And they all think that they're on their way to work for the New York Times. And that is not the case. New York Times is even laying people off. So they get what they can get. And the same thing happened in comics too, as they lowered the page rate, in my opinion, as they lowered the page rates to sub $100 at the major publishers, I'm not even kidding, for like more than, some cases more than a full day's worth of work. Sub $100, they get what they can get and they get a lot of people that want the clout, they wanna use it as a step stone. They think they're going to Hollywood, they think they're gonna work in comics, they're gonna get a Hollywood deal or something. You know what I'm saying? And that's not really how it works. And that's not how it works anymore. A lot of these activist type shows, a lot of these activist type employees, when the chips were down, those were the first people that Hollywood started getting rid of. And we're going back to merit. And Kotaku doesn't justify its own existence anymore, right? It's worth noting that Kotaku is still searching for an editor in chief, someone who would be directly in charge of the activists and ideal logs who've been running the insane asylum. I would not want that position at all. But Grums put up a post, Luke Plunkett worked, I believe he worked for Kotaku. I think he was the one, if I'm not mistaken, he's the one who made the post about Nintendo that got them blacklisted by Nintendo because he was making off-color jokes about World War II in Japan. Nintendo did not appreciate that. Grums says, "Ataku, "Australia closing may nuke much of the main website." Kotaku may lose most of their archive content in tons of images as recent as 2019 due to closing in Australia. Former Kotaku reporter Luke Plunkett reveals that the Australia site was the only place where older articles were stored for some reason, many images. Why? Is it because it was cheaper? It was cheaper to host all that stuff. There's anyone who used to work at Kotaku Australia who I haven't reached out to. I'd like to say a word or two about the site for something please DM me. Extra super fucked up thing about Kotaku Australia closing is it threatens the archives for the main site too. Most pre-2009-ish Kotaku blogs were lost years ago and only preserved on the Australia site, not for long, I guess. And look, these companies don't care. Like they shut down MTV news, the website and they got rid of all the content. I mean, we were talking decades of news content. They just purged it. They just hit the delete button. They're like, yep, we don't need this. We don't need these news stories from 15, 20 years ago that would put a little bit of a historical context on things or we could see what people actually thought about XYZ thing at the time it was happening. No, no, no, just hit the nuke button on that. Same goes for a lot of images. Geo and their infernal ineptitude blocked almost every image ever posted on the main site from before 2019. But lots lived on in Kotaku, Australia. Servers are dead. Oopsie-dope-see, AI Emerald Apple says more dominoes will fall as ESG investment money dries up. That's it, BlackRock and other ESG heavy investment groups lost too much money recently and are pulling back. Good rins. Yeah, they're coming for web comics now. They're going after manga and web tunes. Nothing of value was lost as EF comics. The traffic had been there. This never would have come to fruition. That's true. Basically, if you can justify your existence, they're not going to get rid of you. It's a lesson of the main site. Hopefully, closing soon will not learn. They will not learn this. You need to make money. The truth is they are loud, but they're still minority. And the public on the whole does not want their crap, whining takes, activism does not. Does not, she just does not pay it, does not. If you actually, if you go out to their YouTube channel, you will actually get a better idea of what the general public thinks of Kotaku because they're not watching their videos. That's for damn sure. Oh, they haven't even, they haven't even posted anything. Oh my God, that's not good. They haven't even posted anything in two months. Damn, that is not good. That's right. If they fire a whole bunch of their video people, two months ago, 3,000 views, 932 views, less than 2,000 views, 1.6,000 views. And this looks like, I mean, these are, this is allentutic. This is like a professionally produced video. Less than 2,000 views. Nobody's watching Kotaku on YouTube. They don't care. The only time they care about Kotaku is to point and laugh at it. Why do I suck? 'Cause you're working for Kotaku. That's why. The Steam Deck videos were getting some traction now, they're not. Yeah, hardly any of their videos get more than 1,000, 2,000 views. And they laid off the video staff. I can't imagine why. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about Kotaku. And it's gonna be gone soon. It is gonna be gone soon. They're looking for an editor, I think, to try to, I guess, course correct, at one last ditch effort, or they're looking for an editor to be. This is very possible. They could be looking for an editor to be the bad guy. This actually happened to me one time. I've always got these stories of, "Oh, bark on my day." But no, this is a true story. I worked for a newspaper where they, and I wasn't there super long, I didn't put on my resume. I was there for a couple of months. They brought me over from another newspaper. And this is, as in my 20s, they brought me over from another newspaper to clean this weekly paper up, to get it ready for the new actual editor. I wasn't actually the editor. I was the cleanup crew. I was the guy that came in, changed the design, fired the people they wanted, fired. I was the bad guy. And then they brought the new guy in, who was like 20 years older than me, and had all this experience. And most importantly was friends with the publisher, golfing buddies with the publisher. And I got to be the cleanup crew. It's very possible that whoever is gonna be the editor of Kotaku is the cleanup crew, that they're gonna bring them in to fire people and get the site ready to be shut down or sold off or something. Because there's no way this site's viable. I mean, we've been looking at the numbers and traffic has been taken a hit. And we know firsthand what the ad rates are like right now, banner ads on websites. They're not good. Nobody's spending to advertise on blogs anymore. They're all putting their money into video and to influence their sponsorships. That's where all the money's going. It's not going to your shitty, shitty activist video game website. So they're not getting paid. I can guarantee you. Actually their best chance at getting paid was to do YouTube. But hot goat mommy only got 1.9,000 views. And that's not gonna work. That's not gonna work when you have a production team and all that. So anyway, I'm gonna wrap this up. We're gonna watch this space. It's gonna be really interesting to see what happens. Please subscribe for more pop culture news, views, and rants. We'll talk later. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Thanks again for listening. More news and videos are available on our website at www.clownfishtv.com and on our YouTube channel, clownfishtv. You can buy official merchandise, clownfish, comic books, and more at shopclownfish.com. If you like this show, please consider subscribing and leaving us a positive review on iTunes and other podcast platforms. If you're looking to help support this show financially, go to clownfishsupport.com. If you'd like to sponsor an episode of this show, send us an email at business@webrief.io. 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