Whiskey Media was an American online media company founded independently by CNET co-founder Shelby Bonnie in 2008. It was the parent company of Tested, Screened, and Anime Vice, and the former parent company of Giant Bomb and Comic Vine. Whiskey Media websites were wiki community based, while maintaining an editorial staff. The company's target demographic was focused primarily on males between 10 and 30. The name "Whiskey Media" is a reference to a Kentucky distillery that was owned by the family of Shelby Bonnie before prohibition. Whiskey Media operated in San Francisco, California, after previously being located in Sausalito. On March 15, 2012, Whiskey Media was acquired by Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman's BermanBraun along with Tested, Screened, and Anime Vice while Giant Bomb and Comic Vine were bought separately by CBS Interactive.
History and development
History Whiskey Media was created in 2007, after Shelby Bonnie resigned as the CEO of CNET in 2006, a website he co-founded in 1994. Joining Bonnie and business partner Mike Tatum were former CNET programmers Andy McCurdy, Sean Coonce, Ethan Lance, and Dave Snider. Lance and Snider at the time were running their own joint venture known as Enemy Kite, in which they had created Comic Vine. Comic Vine would become the first Whiskey Media website, complete with a full conversion from the PHP format to Whiskey Media's de facto framework, Django.
Later in the year Jeff Gerstmann also left CNET after being controversially fired from his position as Editorial Director of GameSpot. This began a chain reaction in which Ryan Davis, Alex Navarro, Brad Shoemaker and Vinny Caravella would leave after the incident. This led to Whiskey Media and Gerstmann getting in touch with each other and with Ryan Davis they created the video game website, Giant Bomb, which Caravella, Shoemaker, and Navarro later went to work for.
Giant Bomb and subsequent websites, Anime Vice (launched in 2008), Tested and Screened (both launched in 2010) were designed around the same "social publishing" concept as Comic Vine, content created by tech-savvy communities, while being run by small teams of editorial staff, video producers and engineers. In an interview with The New York Times, Bonnie explained that creating a small staffed company as opposed to CNET was a, "great constraint that forces us to do smart stuff." When asked why they didn't go down the route of blog sites such as Joystiq or Engadget, Bonnie said that, "what blogs figured out was how to create a scalable inexpensive model, but there is not a shelf space for content. Content is hard to organize and it is hard to be a reference. If you think about how you create a community, you have to create anchors for community to congregate around." From March 2008 to March 2009 Django co-creator Jacob Kaplan-Moss worked for Whiskey Media as 'software architect.' Whiskey Media then became his first client in his new job at Revolution Systems, an open-source software technical support company.
At the end of 2009 Whiskey Media raised $2.5 million in funding. Paid member subscriptions were made available in 2010, one of the benefits being that paid members would view no advertisements in the future. For the majority of 2008 through 2010, Whiskey Media websites featured very little advertisements, being against cost per mille advertising and also with Mike Tatum noting that they have been, "incredibly lucky to have had the directive to focus completely on our product over the last few years." Tatum announced that advertisements would take a more prominent role on Whiskey Media websites in 2011. In addition to regular advertising, the websites have been shown to utilize their wiki-databases and the social gaming Quest system to incorporate advertisements that "don't disrupt the audience experience." It was announced that Whiskey Media had entered into a mutually beneficial ad sales partnership with Six Apart.
In April 2011, Whiskey Media was one of the many online media companies affected during the outage of Amazon Web Services, using the cloud computing service for a portion of its data storage. Sean Coonce praised social media and streaming media for providing them with platforms to communicate with and provide live content for their user bases during their respective websites' downtime and stated that the incident had no effect on their use of cloud computing or of Amazon itself.
March 2012 saw the end of Whiskey Media's independence when All Things Digital reported that Bonnie had sold the company to Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun's BermanBraun. Bonnie spoke of the sale saying he "couldn't be more excited for the combination." Of the websites included in this deal, Tested has seen the first immediate changes with the addition of Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of MythBusters to the website and an overall conceptual and design overhaul.
Also announced that day was CBS Interactive's separate purchase of the Giant Bomb and Comic Vine brands, significant for the return of Gerstmann, Davis, Shoemaker and Caravella to the CBS (owners of CNET) building in which they worked for GameSpot. Designers Dave Snider and Alexis Gallisá, and writer Alex Navarro also joined them in the move, though Navarro continued to work from his home in New York.
Products
Websites
Whiskey Media created five websites that focus on video games, technology, comics, anime and manga and movies. Occasionally staff will appear in content on other Whiskey Media websites, whereas full-scale collaborations are rare. One such occurrence was the 'Big Live LIVE Show: Live!', a live streaming event that lasted seven hours, showcasing video content in order to promote the launch of paid memberships.
Giant Bomb
Giant Bomb is a video game-focused website, launched in blog-form on March 6, 2008 and in its complete form on July 21, 2008. Due to the circumstances surrounding its creation and the way it is run, it has gained a reputation as a website that is less business-like and more focused around fun. Its creation came about following the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from GameSpot and many of its staff leaving in turn. Of those, Ryan Davis, Brad Shoemaker and Vinny Caravella joined Gerstmann to create Giant Bomb.
Following its sale to CBS Interactive in 2012, the site was later sold to Red Ventures and then to Fandom during the 2020s. As of 2025, the website is independently owned by its staff.
Comic Vine + Comic Vine Editorial Team as of May 2015 Member Position Tony Guerrero Co-Creator / Editor-in-Chief / Podcast Host Mat Elfring Editor / Podcast Co-Host Corey Schroeder Writer / Podcast Co-Host Gregg Katzman Writer
Comic Vine is the oldest of the five Whiskey Media websites, and it focuses on comic books. Prior to the creation of Whiskey Media, Dave Snider, Ethan Lance and Tony Guerrero launched ComicVine.com on December 6, 2006. At the time Snider and Lance were creating websites for others as part of the co-founded Enemy Kite while Guerrero was a high-school math teacher. While Snider and Lance built the site Guerrero began to collect data and convert it into what would become the first Whiskey Media wiki-database. With the creation of Whiskey Media, Guerrero was hired full-time to work for the site. In 2009, community member and contributor Sara Lima joined the staff as assistant editor after moving to California.
Comic Vine reviews comics from Marvel, DC and independent companies using the zero to five scale with increments of 0.5. Editorial features include Guerrero's Off My Mind segment, discussing comic book speculation, the ethics, methods and practicalities of superheroes and supervillains and comparisons of current trends, costumes and story arcs with older counterparts. Between August 2009 and August 2017, Guerrero and Lima hosted the weekly Comic Vine podcast in which Lima and Guerrero discussed the biggest comic news, releases and films, often with Tested comic reader Norman Chan. Notable comic book writer James Robinson was a recurring guest on the podcast, providing a deep insight into DC characters. Lima left Comic Vine in July 2013. Since December 2013, long-time Comic Vine writer Mat Elfring joined Tony and Corey on the Comic Vine podcast as a weekly host, which changed the tone of the show into much more of a light-hearted and fun look into each week's comic books. Elfring was made editor of the site in April 2015.
Video content focused on comic book conventions. Comic Vine established a presence at major conventions such as San Diego Comic-Con and its New York and Long Beach equivalents, interviewing important industry figures such as Stan Lee (on multiple occasions), Grant Morrison and Gail Simone. Former video series include Comic Vine News of the Week, a comic book version of Anime Vice's 3-Minute Expert, Preview Theatre and panel topic discussions.
A few weeks after Comic Vine's launch Michael Arrington, formerly of TechCrunch, recommended Comic Vine for its wiki-database and the ways in which a character's database stats could be applied.
Comic Vine was sold to CBS Interactive in 2012 and eventually combined with GameSpot in 2016. The site was sold to Red Ventures in 2020 and then to Fandom, Inc. in 2022.
Tested
Defunct
Screened Screened was a movie- and television-themed website. Its existence was leaked on the Tested account of Whiskey Media Engineer Sean Coonce in April 2010. Prior to its launch it was confirmed on the 11th of May edition of the Giant Bombcast that former GameSpot Editors Alex Navarro and Matthew Rorie would be joining their Giant Bomb friends at Whiskey Media as the Editors of Screened. In April 2011 Navarro announced his move to New York, remaining as a writer for both Screened and Giant Bomb.
Screened launched on the 12th of May 2010. In preparation for the site launch, several articles and videos were already uploaded, ready to be accessed by the user-base. They included the It Came from my Instant Queue segment and the weekly DVD Release List as well as news featuring a potential Bad Boys 3 movie and plans for Transformers 3. Several trailers are on the site as well as the inaugural Worse or Worser video in which Navarro and Rorie debate whether Lethal Weapon 3 or Lethal Weapon 4 is the worst of the two. Also included at launch was the first Behind the Screened Door podcast, featuring Navarro, Rorie, intern Matt Lopez and Giant Bomb's Ryan Davis.
Video features, produced by Joey Fameli, included The Besties, Screened's hall of fame, Defending Your Movie, a series to showcase movies that may have not gained critical or commercial success, but have aspects that make them worth watching, and Remake Rematch, pitting one or more remakes against their respective originals.
Screened also has articles by freelance writers such as Tom Pinchuk's recurring Welcome To Weird, which range from body horror films like Videodrome to Japanese TV advertisements starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. and Serious About Series, analysing big budget franchises.
With Screened came an upgraded version of the wiki-database system commonly seen throughout its sister-sites. Users who have gained one-thousand wiki points or more on either Giant Bomb, Comic Vine or Anime Vice (therefore allowing them to by-pass wiki-entry moderation) are automatically given one-thousand points on Screened in order to promote high quality entry submitting into the database as soon as possible as well as lightening the load on the Screened wiki-moderators.
Screened was sold to BermanBraun alongside Tested and AnimeVice in March 2012. During the sale, Screened lost both of its editors and its video production team rendering the site community run. Community Manager FinalDasa managed the site after the sale until its closing in March 2014.