“Already? The site has only been live 3 months?”
Yes. FIFA Insider is going away. Kind of.
We started this site in February after years of making FSB most people’s number one place to find FIFA news. We wanted to do what we’d done there again, but better, and the idea behind FIFA Insider was to be able to support the content we were putting together with quality equipment and funding for things we wanted to do . Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you expect.
What we’ve achieved with this site has been incredible to be honest and far surpasses myself and Dave’s expectation for the first year (in 3 months) and I guess in that regard FIFA Insider has served it’s purpose. It’ll be a shame to kill off something we’ve worked so hard on (seriously, the amount of work involved in a site like this is unbelievable) so quickly, but we’ve been presented with an opportunity that we decided we couldn’t turn down.
The site hasn’t been acquired, but Dave and I have (and Toby, don’t panic!), which is weird, but it’s just the way things happen sometimes. We’ll be in a position where we don’t have to deal with any of the drama involved in keeping the bills paid, or keeping the servers up, or making sure that bandwidth isn’t an issue (which did happen once) and be able to keep doing what we do now with a bit more focus.
We’ve struck a deal with another well known site that we have a good relationship with and who we think will make great bedfellows. They’re giving us the support we’re looking for, will help with design and features (things which currently stretch us slightly, we’re techy, but not custom CSS techy yet), will be able to provide us with the equipment we need and will allow us to do things like proper show coverage at gamescom and E3 once things get rolling. In return, we just need to carry on doing what we’re doing. It’s honestly that simple, we’ve done all of the paperwork and we’re both very confident that this is the right thing to do.
We’re not going to be under the watch of any corporate entity, won’t answer to anyone, don’t have any targets, still have COMPLETE editorial control and will be able to continue doing what we’ve done here, but reach our end goal of upping our game and quality a little bit faster than we expected.
In terms of change, you don’t even need to change your bookmarks if you’re lazy. We’ll be doing some funky stuff in the background to move content over (although we won’t be able to salvage comments sadly) and redirecting fifainsider.com to the new homepage. Our twitter account will be rebadged and everything will just keep on rolling. We did plan a much smoother launch for all this, but the next gen reveal tomorrow threw a bit of a spanner in that.
Obviously no sites exist without readers, so we’d like to thank everyone who has read the site and supported this little project since February, every page view, comment, like and retweet is very much appreciated and we’re looking forward to increasing those numbers as time goes on.
Thank you again for reading and please continue to do so at news.futhead.com.
Lots of love
Tom & Dave.
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