On Wednesday, esports company Gfinity announced its acquisition of SiegeGG, a news and esports statistics tracking website focused on the video game “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.” SiegeGG, which operates similarly to statistics-tracking websites for traditional sports, marks Gfinity’s third acquisition since December 2020, and the deal includes the site’s current staff.
Crucially, though, the acquisition also grants the U.K.-based tournament organizer a suite of underlying tech and tools to augment existing sites in its content arm, Gfinity Digital Media, and help prop up new, data-oriented sites in the future about other games.
“[A developer] could announce a game next month, and we’re in a position to spin up a new brand or a new subset of a brand with the capabilities that we have across all of our websites in the portfolio, using all of the tech we have,” said Dominic Needler, digital media manager at Gfinity.
Many specialty sites in esports like SiegeGG serve as hubs for aggregated news, event times, and match and player statistics. This match data, which is pored over by coaches, enthusiasts, live analysts and even players themselves, is usually made accessible by the game’s developer. Not so for “Rainbow Six Siege.” That turned SiegeGG, whose analysts watch games and manually compile stats, into an in-demand partner for tournament organizers and leagues that wanted data for their broadcasts.
“Pretty much whenever you’re watching a ‘Rainbow Six’ broadcast and there are stats on the screen, usually that’s coming from us,” said Spencer Glenn, CEO of SiegeGG.
This made SiegeGG a modestly profitable business. In 2020, the site reported revenue of approximately $100,000, a figure the site has already exceeded in 2021, according to a Gfinity press release announcing the acquisition.
“Most of our revenue comes from our data,” Glenn said. “Generally that means partnering with tournament organizers and leagues, which usually indirectly means Ubisoft, in order to supplement their broadcasts. We’ve been able to sort of make a decent living that way.”
Most of SiegeGG’s traffic comes from users visiting its stats pages as opposed to its news stories. The site’s traffic peaked in May at over 1 million pageviews, though “an average month is somewhere around half that,” said Glenn.
Gfinity, however, is confident that those numbers can be pushed upward.
“The secret sauce is: Are you able to engage with users and create content and products that interest them?" Jonathan Hall, chief finance and operating officer at Gfinity, said. "If they keep coming back to your sites, that creates commercial opportunities — be that advertising, be that sponsorship, be that brand partnerships. We feel that with SiegeGG at the moment, there is a significant amount of upward potential, a multiple of where they are now in terms of the number of users and time on-site that we can help them unlock.”
The goal is knowledge-sharing across sites under the Gfinity umbrella. SiegeGG’s analytical capabilities can be standardized and exported to other properties in the Gfinity Digital Media group. Needler described one possible use case: using the analytics capabilities devised by SiegeGG’s staff to upgrade MTG Rocks, the group’s “Magic: The Gathering” website.
In return, the deal gives the SiegeGG crew — which launched as a passion project three years ago — additional money and resources to enact their vision for the site.
“Several of us have still been either in school or working other jobs and things like that,” Glenn said. “Just being able to go full time will be a tremendous help for us. Certainly we’re looking to expand on what we’re currently doing.”
One thing on which both Glenn and Gfinity insisted: that expanded vision would be guided by the existing staff of SiegeGG.
“We sort of were a little bit worried at first," Glenn said. “A lot of these sort of online media sites might want us to sort of — I don’t want to say ‘content farm,’ but — want us to start pushing out a bunch of stuff. Once we got to talking with [Gfinity], it seemed like our philosophy sort of aligned.”
“What we’re looking at is bringing in sites and people who remain the product owners of that business within Gfinity,” Hall said. “The content, the look, the feel of those sites remains under the product owners. Our intention is actually to interfere as little as possible.”
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