The sale of FanFooty

News finally came through today that the transaction has cleared. I no longer own FanFooty, the business I created 21 years ago.

I wrote a post on this blog commemorating the fifth birthday of FanFooty, and the Australian football fantasy industry peaked at around that point in 2009/10. While it plateaued for a good few years, recent trends has been more alarming with registrations for AFL Fantasy and AFL Supercoach down. AFLF operator FanHub Media sold out to Genius Sports in 2021, and Pete Jankulovski sold his Supercoach business to News Corp in 2025.

FanFooty has been a solid business for a couple of decades. Traffic and revenue peaked in 2012, at levels I only ever dreamed about: 125 million page views for the year, and over six million in some weeks, which translated into revenue far beyond what I ever got as a journo wage-earner. After that, however, things dropped off significantly. Most of the change has tracked the downturn in AFL fantasy games in general.

If you look through social media chatter about FanFooty, several themes reoccur. First, people complain about dated design. This complaint has happened constantly across the past 15 years, even after I updated the design and added new features. Second: dead features. On that one... yes, those features were allowed to wither on the vine, but that's because they were never popular enough to justify further investment.

I have had a number of tyre kickers size up to FanFooty over the years, with varying levels of seriousness. I had a meeting with the Zavoses from The Roar in Sydney once, at which I presented a figure I thought the business was worth, and they stared at me as if I had laid a steaming borrie on the table. A joker with a comfortable family business in pharmaceuticals - totally legit! - was bored with managing a warehouse with money-printing machines that go brrrr... but he wasn't prepared for multiples asked for in online. And some other chancers, even less reputable!

Why did I sell now? It was a combination of revenue dropping to unacceptable levels, and the realisation that this would probably be my last opportunity to get an exit. As a founder, the exit is a huge emotional achievement. Plenty of people in my position had to quietly shut down their site for lack of demand, with no pot of gold at the end, or an archive fire sale for a minimal amount that didn't cover their expenses at all. I was the buyer in a couple of those situations over the years, and I watched legends like Charles Happell have that happen to them.

I am not under NDA or non-compete, so I am free to talk about the FanFooty acquisition. The following is a message I sent a couple of weeks ago to a listserv (yes, those still exist) full of grizzled old technology journalists, most of whom got laid off (like me) after the dot com bust.

I have been in talks with a bloke representing a company which engages in parasitic SEO. I am not under NDA at the moment, but I suspect I soon will be, so I won't name them.

Parasitic SEO is an example of the modern concept of enshittification: cashed-up investors buying out solid businesses with proven track records, and proceeding to gut them and sell them off for parts. The valuable organ in this case is Google ranking.

The strategy is to buy established titles, not tell anyone, employ content farms to replace their writers, then gradually introduce more lucrative content which is only tangentially related to the original point of the site. They do this to fool Google into linking to their content - until Google eventually wises up and deletes the enshittified site from their search results. By that time, the parasite has extracted its value, and moves on to the next host.

This is what journalism is reduced to now, with traditional advertising suffering a seemingly incurable malaise, and the only assets worth promotion being part of the casino economy. I am staring at spreadsheets, and I can't fault the economic logic. I really should sell up. The parasite doesn't even want a non-compete clause.

If I sell, I will have people say to each other, and to me, "Oh yeah, your site sucks now, that was a shame." I would be able to start up a clone of the old one, but would have to build a new brand from scratch. With ad rates in the toilet, there's not much point to that. I still have tens of thousands of visitors every week, but the numbers aren't enough to pay a living wage any more.

This is enshittification: inexorable economic repression of successful properties until you give in and take the money, to salvage something out of the wreckage. It's not my fault this is how the economy has evolved. Would I be a fool to hold the line?

Reader... I did not hold the line. Several of the journos on the list expressed support for my decision, even though they may not have made the same one. One of them was nice enough to say I would still be "one of us" regardless. I didn't realise how much that meant to me until he said it!

It will become clear if you look at domain registration shortly that the buyer was Clickout Media, a Maltese firm of some infamy. I presume they will not invest the time and effort to resume the AFL liveblogging that was the heart of the site in future seasons. Their strategy is simple, brutal, and ruthless.

As if the footy gods were toying with me one last time, mere days after I had agreed with Clickout's representative on a sale price, a young man who runs one of the clone AFL liveblogging sites contacted me about a revenue-share buyout. Of all the times for the lad to strike! I had to turn him down, even though it would have been the best way to maintain the legacy of the title and would have given me much more personal satisfaction. Numbers were too stacked against him; I have a family.

As it is, when I talk to people about FanFooty in future, I will wear the ignominy of selling out to reavers.

Due to the lack of non-compete, I could set up exactly the same service on another domain and resume liveblogging as if nothing had happened. I am choosing not to do that, and will leave it to younger models. The main reason none of my many competitors knocked me off over the past couple of decades is because none of them treated it like an actual job where they performed acts of journalism. Perhaps my absence from the field will encourage them that they can make it work as a going concern. There is still a lot of demand for footy liveblog content, not just among fantasy coaches.

I am too young to retire, and I have two kids approaching high school. I have been working on reskilling as a game developer, and have my first title Mr Football aimed at a December release on Steam, iOS and Android. It is a highly ambitious title (see the wiki), one I have been working on for a long time, and is finally ready to publish after a few more polishes.

I don't know if I will return to footy media. I think I have a particular set of useful skills, in which nobody else in the industry seems to have specialised. I will shop myself around to a few places where I think I might fit.

Journalism is a tough gig these days.