In a farewell posted on their site yesterday afternoon, iFanboy confirmed that they will be ceasing all of their day-to-day reporting and blogging, and turning the site’s focus solely on their podcasting effort.

ifanboy

Taken from iFanboy.com – writers Jim Mroczkowski, Conor Kilpatrick, Jason Wood, Ron Richards, Molly McIsaac, Ali Colluccio, Chris Neseman, Josh Flanagan

iFanboy has been going for over 13 years, and moved from fan-run site to funded enterprise impressively quickly. The site was noted for having a conversational tone in articles, with writers including Chris Arrant, Jim Mroczkowski, Molly McIsaac and Paul Montgomery among the many who made a name for themselves there over the years.

The site was also well-known for having a tremendously loyal and vibrant fanbase, both in their forum and in their comments section. Many comic creators and critics took to Twitter to pay tribute to the site, including Declan Shalvey, Jamie McKelvie and Mike Norton.

Earlier this year it was announced that co-founder Ron Richards had been hired by Image as their director of business development, followed by the news that the site would subsequently split with owners GraphiclyWriting on the site yesterday, fellow co-founder Conor Kilpatrick explained that the decision was made to take the strain off the site’s writing staff:

After five years spent running iFanboy.com as our primary jobs, we had to transition back to running iFanboy part time after Graphicly handed it back to us in February of this year, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to focus on everything we need to focus on in the manner that it deserves to be.

All old content will be locked and kept online for posterity. Although the website itself is going to cease daily operation, the regular podcasts will remain on the site. It’s well worth having a read through their farewell posts, which you can find here.

11 COMMENTS

  1. As the article states, I think it’s worth to note that the podcast is still going strong, and is well worth a listen. Highly recommended.

  2. Why are they posting a farewell if the site is still running. They’re changing their focus, but not going away.

  3. The site is still up. Their podcast is still ongoing. They’re still soliciting memberships and donations. So…

    …this is basically a way to spin “We’re firing all our staff and getting part-time jobs ourselves” into a big going away party, except they’re NOT going away?

    They were so much better before Graphicly made money such an issue for them. Actually, I liked them more before they even did a podcast. But recently…? Well, I will miss that Jim guy’s columns, which had gotten so snide and full of ongoing oneupsmanship with himself that it seemed like he was arguing for and against every viewpoint simultaneously.

  4. I will miss a bunch of features but I never really went there for comic news anyway. I certainly won’t miss McIsaac’s contributions.

  5. You could tell they were falling on hard times when half of the articles were press releases and the others were Plato’s Cave-like musings on the Big Two.

  6. if you visited the site on a regular basis, you’ll understand why they are saying goodbye to a giant aspect of their identity. The daily content, especially the editorials raised thought provoking points and had some incredibly vibrant and interesting conversations about comics, with creators occasionally jumping in. It was good times and mostly well behaved. It was important to a lot of people.

    Running a medium sized pop culture website is rough. A full time job for almost no pay and ad revenue is…what it is. End of an era for a great community.

  7. I found it hard to have a discussion on that site that wandered out of the realm of nostalgia or seriously questioned a writer on his/her piece. Conor was really heavy on editing/deleting people’s comments, especially with Molly McIsaac’s article(s), and the community was a cult of personality around Ron/Josh/Conor’s fixation on corporate comics.

    Give it a few months. There’ll be another site where a group of “read’em since I was a kid” “experts” with a “DC guy” and “Marvel guy” “discuss” comics.

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