About GamesBeat

About Us
About You
How GamesBeat Works
Submission guidelines
You said something about cash?
Contact us

About Us

So, you’re curious about GamesBeat … enough to check out our About Us page. (Seriously, who reads these things? Besides you, we mean.)

As a big part of VentureBeat, GamesBeat covers many different aspects of the gaming world — but not all aspects. Here’s what you’ll find: industry and business news, business reports, analysis, previews, reviews, strategy guides, and stories about the culture of our beloved hobby. If it’s smart, interesting, or funny, you’ll probably read about it on GamesBeat. What you won’t find here: shoddy reporting, inflammatory articles that are just out to get your clicks, or “Top 100 boobs” posts (sorry, you’ll have to look elsewhere for those).

We pride ourselves on intelligent editorial content that has personality, honesty, and integrity. We won’t expect you to read it if we’re not willing to read it ourselves.

About you

Do you have something you want to tell the world about, or do you think you can provide better coverage of gaming than we can? Prove it!

At GamesBeat, we believe in working with the community to produce awesome stories readers can’t find anywhere else. You understand gaming just as much as we do … perhaps even more. So when you register with us and post a cool, original article, we’ll do our best to make sure people see it. You can even make a little cash from it.

We want GamesBeat to be the best place for great content creators to build a reputation and get noticed by their peers, by our staff, and by the big world outside of our website. Which brings us to…

How GamesBeat works

When you post a story, it’ll go into our queue for approval. (Sorry, stupid spammers had to ruin everything.) If our moderators OK your post, it’ll appear in our GB Unfiltered feed. Then, if your article grabs our attention for all the right reasons, we may vet and edit it for quality control (including grammar, punctuation, and fact-checking) and promote it to the front page of GamesBeat to sit alongside our own, staff-produced stories.

In other words, we’re not just giving you a user blog or a little corner of the site. If you’ve got the goods, then we’ll treat your story as one of our own, giving it the attention and status that it deserves.

Note: If you don’t register with your real name, we won’t promote any of your posts. This isn’t a glorified message board, folks. This is a place for good writers to thrive and stand out and for other people to recognize your awesomeness, so we insist on the use of real names here.

If that won’t convince you, how about this? When we did this editorial model before (on Bitmob.com), some of our community members were able to land game-industry jobs because of the stories they wrote on our site. You think that will happen if your bylines read “by PlayStationFoxxyPapa”? Also, we run a lot of contests here for our community members, and you’re automatically disqualified from them all if you’re not using a real name.

We do this because we want to foster a very friendly and mature community environment here. Real names help that out a lot.

Submission guidelines

We’re looking for smart, funny, and insightful content about games. That’s about as guideline-y as we’re going to get. Of course, great headlines and intros, strong grammar, and correct spelling will go a long ways toward making sure your posts get noticed not only by our editors but by other readers.

We delete offensive or promotional stuff.

We discourage stories that originated from other sites, but if you own it and really want to publish it here, you can, as long as you’re not selling anything. Source links go at the bottom of the post.

You said something about cash?

Yup! Google operates a nifty free service called AdSense, which content producers (i.e., you) can use to earn money with targeted ads. By linking your GoogleAdSense account to your GamesBeat profile, any revenue coming from the AdSense ad at the bottom of each story you post will go directly to you.

If you have a Google AdSense account:

Create an ad that fits GamesBeat’s template by going to google.com/adsense, clicking on My Ads, then “New Ad Unit.”

Name your ad “GamesBeat,” choose 300×250 as the size, and select “Image/rich media ads only” as the type. Leave all other parameters as is.

Click “Save and get code.” Close the ad code window that pops up — you won’t need it.

Now find the Slot ID for this ad. It’s the 10-digit number to the right of your newly created ad on the main My Ads page. You’ll also need your AdSense ID, which follows “Publisher ID” in the top right corner of every page.

Head over to your Account Settings page (look for the link in the red navigation bar in the upper-right corner after logging in) and input your AdSense ID and Slot ID numbers. Don’t forget to save!

Start posting stories on GamesBeat! Information on when and how you’ll be paid by Google appears on your AdSense home page.

If you don’t have a Google AdSense account:

What are you waiting for? Head over to google.com/adsense now and sign up. (Note: If you don’t have a personal website, use “venturebeat.com” for the Website URL field.) Then follow the instructions above.

Important: Don’t abuse the system!

Once you’ve set up your account with AdSense and GamesBeat, don’t try to work the system. Don’t use bots to net you extra clicks. Don’t ask your friends to click for you. Don’t clickity-click on your own ad until you’ve earned a princely sum. Google will sniff you out and ban you faster than you can say, “Hey, where’d my money go?” and ban you forever. Trust us — it’s near impossible to get your account back once this happens.