I am Jim Springer, the developer and leader of Geeks Lab, a Sacramento—based digital media company that runs a website with the same name. When people ask us about who we are and what it is that we do, all our team members usually have similar answers. In essence, we are geeks who embrace the subculture and don’t try to be something we are not. When we created the website, we knew exactly what we wanted, a place where our fellow geeks could converge from all over the Web to have a good time. We wanted a little slice of the Web to ourselves, and once we achieved that, we figured you guys would join in on the fun. This was only a couple of years ago, but it feels like forever. We put an insane amount of hours into the development of the site, all in the name of sweet geekiness.

Our Team of Geeks

We have some really talented people in our team, and everybody has his or her role. That’s right, we have some female geeks too, and we are quite proud of them. Back to our origin story, when we started this journey – I hope it’s not pretentious to call it that -, we knew that we would have to divvy up the workload in order to reach our goals. Even at the beginning, when our team only included a couple of members, we were already planning to develop our own content. Everyone on the team was on board with it, and we knew that this was the kind of creative work that would eventually propel the site to reach its current status.

The Geek Content

We stream our own shows about movies, video games, gadgets, technology, and anything and everything geeky that interests us, and therefore our audience, our friends. We discuss the latest news in depth, and we are present at the most important expos to broadcast the latest happenings live. We organise games and interact with our friends on the site on a daily basis. In addition to that, many team members have daily or weekly vlogs where they show another side of them to their fellow geeks. In essence, we create content to a community that we ourselves are a part of, and this makes our job that much more fun, because in a way, we create content for ourselves. We believe that this is the definition of a dream job.

Our Website Model

Naturally, everything on the site is free, but we do have advertisers, and we do frequent product reviews. These, however, are not biased, we simply work with brands that we like and have a familiarity with. If and when they drop the ball, we let them know. Although we monetised the site – hey, we have bills to pay -, we were conscious about ad placement and regularity. Anything that would have compromised the content and the geek experience had to go.

We can safely say that we will never have annoying pop-up ads, and the ad placement will never compromise the website in any way. We don’t need to resort to these gimmicks, because we are making a good living at the moment and the site is doing extremely well. The most important thing is to stay true to our audience. After all, none of this would have happened without them taking an interest in us. This is also the main reason why we have high interactivity on our website – we want our friends to be able to reach us, because we built this thing together. Their feedback is worth more than any advertisement, because it allows us to reach new heights and become one of the better entertainment platforms online.

The Geek Blog

We had a surprising success with the Geek Blog. When we started out, we weren’t sure if it would be a hit with our target audience, but these concerns turned out to be unfounded. We write about the happenings of the video game and tech industry frequently. These are the topics that interest us during our daily lives, which makes the research process that much easier and fun. We feel we already accomplished a lot with the blog, but we do have future plans for it. We want it to be another platform where our fellow geeks can interact with us, perhaps in the form of guest posts. How this will shape out we don’t know yet, but we are quite confident that we will find a way to make it work.