U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)-When Gunstreamer announced it was shutting down, Hickok45 knew he couldn’t let it die. He invested a lot of time and effort to grow the site and wanted to save it. He knew the right team that was not only capable of keeping the site alive but would be able to let the website flourish.
He contacted the team over at Gun Critic to see if they would be willing to buy part of the site to keep it afloat. The Gun Critic team is not only tech-savvy business people, but they are also Second Amendment advocates. They saw saving Gunstreamer as a great business opportunity that they could use to grow the firearms community.
Without wasting time, the Co-Founder of Gun Critic, Matthew Longley, contacted the owners of Gunstreamer to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. They bought into the site and provided a lifeline to keep Gunstreamer afloat while they could figure out how to make the site profitable.
I was able to speak with Matt about Gun Critic, and why he believes the reward of buying into Gunstreamer was worth the risk.
John: What is Gun Critic?
Matt: Gun Critic is a user aggregated firearm review community. It’s very similar to Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB.com, and MetaCritic but for firearms. We offer product reviews, free gun values, product price comparison, specs, Q&A, joint problems, and deals for all guns in our database (currently about 28,000 firearms).
John: Gun Critic is like the Rotten Tomatoes of the gun world. Did Rotten Tomatoes give you the idea for Gun Critic?
Matt: I got the idea because I frequented these movie review websites and thought it would be an excellent idea for the firearm industry. When reading gun reviews, I did not like that many of the reviewers are very biased and often paid for their reviews. I would much rather see 1000 user reviews about a gun than one critic reviewing a firearm. ‘
John: You and your business partner stepped up to save Gunstreamer. How did that come about?
Matt: Hickok45 contacted us about Gunstreamer. He mentioned that he liked the platform for several reasons, mainly for backing up his YouTube videos, and he wondered if we could get involved. This was about three days before Austin announced that he was closing down the platform. So, it was a bit of a rush, but we thought it was essential to try to save the platform.
John: How do you plan on cutting costs?
Matt: First thing we did with the platform was to dive into the expenses. It appears that a lot of the expenses came from popular websites streaming our videos. We are going to cut back or charge that for now, and it should reduce costs by 50-75%.
John: Do you see a way to make it profitable?
Matt: We have a couple of strategies for making the site profitable. Mainly we are going to migrate towards affiliate marketing.
John: Is the original team staying on?
Matt: Yes, the original team is staying on in some capacity. Austin is still a minority owner of the site and would like to be involved moving forward.
John: Are you planning on integrating Gun Streamer into Gun Critic?
Matt: This is something we are thinking about. There are several ways to join the two communities together. Gun Critic has a video on every product page, and Gun Streamer could feature Gun Critic data on pages that match certain products. So, there are some easy ways to integrate the two platforms.
John: How do you plan on luring people over from YouTube?
Matt: This is the big challenge. Content creators will typically focus on where they make the most money. So, I would say it’s more of a waiting game with YouTube. Eventually, they will cut out monetization for gun videos and maybe ban the channels all-together. The key for us is to have a solid platform positioned for when that happens. If we focus on traffic and revenue for content creators, it will occur over time.
John: Is there a plan to implement streaming on Gunsteamer?
Matt: I spoke with Austin about this feature. He said that streaming for everyone would be very expensive, but it might be possible to allow this feature for some content creators. It’s definitely something we would like to see added to the site in the future.
John: Any other upcoming features of Gun Critic or Gun Streamer you can share with us?
Matt: One, gun values. Gun Critic has quite a few new features coming out. We are making our gun values more real-time and increasing our data sources to improve accuracy. Gun values fluctuate almost daily, so gun value books are out of date before they are printed.
Two, the gun community. We recently built a Reddit style community for users to share content related to the firearms industry. One nice feature of this community is the ability to create best-of lists with voting. We will also have official lists and offer awards to manufacturers and retailers. For example, awards for “Best Shotgun 2020”, “Best 9mm Pistol 2020”, “Best Hunting Rifle 2020”.
Three, a popularity score for firearms. We are currently working out an algorithm to figure out the most popular guns each week. Each gun would have a score based on their popularity, and this will become a search filter on the platform. This will be nice to be able to look up the most popular items by caliber, style, manufacturer, etc…
Four, firearm stats – This feature will take some time to perfect but should be pretty interesting. For about 30 years, video games have utilized stats for users to compare firearms. They typically use stats like accuracy, damage, mobility, fire rate, range, and other similar stats. These stats would be somewhat based on our own algorithms and community feedback. Stats like this will be handy for new gun owners to understand how the firearm would function. It would also be very familiar for most gun owners younger than 50 because many of them grew up playing First-Person-Shooter video games and would quickly digest the stats.
- Readers can check out Gun Critic at www.guncritic.com.
- Readers can check out Gunstreamer at www.gunstreamer.com.
About John Crump
John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. He is the former CEO of Veritas Firearms, LLC, and is the co-host of The Patriot News Podcast which can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/patriotnews. John has written extensively on the patriot movement including 3%’ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias. In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and is currently working on a book on leftist deplatforming methods and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, on Facebook at realjohncrump, or at www.crumpy.com.