Seamus Byrne interview
Seamus Byrne from Kotaku Australia on the evolution of Australian video game websites.
Seamus Byrne is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster covering the future of technology, video games, and digital culture. He was previously at Allure Media where he served as managing editor for the Australia versions of Kotaku, Gizmondo and LifeHacker.
I want to start with your time at Internet.au back in 2003. What are your memories of the internet back in those days? Were there any Australian specific gaming websites at the time? Or were we entirely reliant on overseas sites?
“Amusingly, Internet.au was purely a magazine with no website. The early sites I remember from that time were very much overseas sites. Gamespy was a big one for me. They used to do great retrospective articles that filled me in on a lot of game knowledge I'd missed – big moments in history that you just might not know if you hadn't been buying game magazines for the previous two decades!”
Broadband was quite late to arrive in Australia, what sort of impact did that have on the establishment of a local online media presence for video games?
“I remember writing an article there about the heady promise of 'ubiquitous wireless broadband' and how one day soon we could have the internet with us all around the house and eventually wherever we roam. Even Wi-Fi was nascent at that stage. At that time games coverage was still very magazine centred. Big glossy pictures, previews, and reviews because websites struggled to present games with all the energy and excitement that a magazine could. It's easy to forget websites were still pretty minimal on graphics, let alone video.”
“Those first days of broadband also meant speeds that were 'amazing' if you were paying for 1.5Mbps ADSL. We were comparing ourselves to 56K dial-up, which I still used until around 2001. So, yes, before then there were plenty of passion blogs out there, but few of those live in my memory, sadly. When I started working on Internet.au I worked alongside teams from Hyper and PC Powerplay – also very much print-only. Hyper had a forum for its community and that felt pretty advanced at the time.”
Social media didn’t start to really emerge locally until the end of the 00s, what sort of impact did that have on websites and what they offered readers. Did publishers like Allure see the value in this new medium and try to cultivate it?
“MySpace and Facebook didn't do much for websites when they first launched as they were very focused on personal connections. The big boom moment for websites getting traffic from social media was Twitter. That was the first time, while at Allure, when we would see real-time bursts in site traffic because we'd just posted an article. Real-time traffic systems like Chartbeat emerged at that time too so we could have a dashboard showing us the real-time traffic arriving and see where it was coming from.”
“Back then (circa 2007-2010) we didn't start 'SEOing' stories to serve a search or algorithmic audience. We just wrote stuff we thought was cool and might connect with people who cared about tech or games, and it felt more like an art or gut instinct to know how to approach a story and find a unique angle that would catch attention.”
Let’s talk about your time at Allure. Can you give us a quick overview of how the licensing deal for Kotaku, etc., worked, and what that meant on a day-to-day basis as far as content and publishing schedules
“Early days with the licensing deal was really about the local company knowing it could sell high quality ads to a well targeted audience. They knew how many Aussies already went to the US version of the site, so they had a good idea of what they had to sell and then get an editorial team to grow that. The US sites couldn't easily target Australian premium ads so it was good money, I guess, for them to do the license deal and get whatever cream they got without extra effort.”
“We had no relationships with the US teams, though that grew more on a personal basis than anything official. The license meant we could reuse all content from the US site. If the Aussie site ran a great story the US editor would sometimes ask if they could run it on the main site – that always felt nice to get that kind of respect.”
“We made a big effort to have people repost the US content to the local site early in the morning so that Aussie readers never felt like they were missing out (because they were forced onto the Australian domain). At first that was manual! Totally copying the US stories into the local site by hand. Eventually the local tech team built automated import tools to make that much more efficient.”
Kotaku Australia shut down in 2024, but I assume you could see the writing on the wall far earlier than that. Was there a moment when it became obvious that company’s were tightening belts and struggling to earn a buck online.
“I think when the ads shifted to become dominated by programmatic ads from Google instead of premium local ad campaigns it felt like time was running out. That meant the benefits for the US were probably falling (they could run their own Google ads everywhere by then too) and the editorial team costs were probably catching up to the ad revenues when the CPM rates were falling.”
“But my understanding is that it was still profitable to some extent in the later days. Can't say I really know for sure, though. But I did think if it was the license that was just becoming annoying as a slice of a shrinking pie they could have done more to create an 'off ramp' to create a new local brand and bring the existing audience with them.”
What about tone of voice and attitude? Did you find that Australian media had a different take on the video game industry and the way news was reported vs US and other overseas outlets.
“Yeah, I'm trying to put my finger on it. From the magazine era I think we had a good grasp on creating in jokes and being pretty parochial. That probably carried over to the web. I think Aussie writers have been good at taking serious things lightly sometimes and taking light things seriously. Fun was always front and centre, but when we decided to be serious it could really hold weight.”
When it comes to websites I assume it’s all about page views = ad sale rates. Given Australia is such a small market, did digital publishers ever find a way to make the numbers stack up for a locally produced video game site. Or were they forever loss leaders.
“I think it depended on the company. I worked with some sales teams who were really good at understanding the product we offered – a window of access to cashed up game buyers who love to play and enjoy their social time who didn't watch other forms of media very often at all. When those sales folks nailed their pitch they won great premium ad campaigns.”
“I think a lot of places just didn't have those kinds of game savvy sales people. So the games sites ended up becoming a 'value add' to other campaigns.”
“But you're right, it's a small market so if you don't know how to win the premium ads for this very targeted audience then you're going to struggle on a pure CPM basis.”
What’s something most people don’t know about the history of Australian video game websites?
“I'm stumped on this one! Maybe people underestimate how good they've been at advocating at a political and cultural level that games are for adults and not just kids.”
….