On the homepage of Dexerto, a seven-year-old gaming-news website, staid posts about competitive esports commingle with screaming headlines about online gossip.
Dexerto — pronounced "desert-o," "as if the x was an s," the cofounder and CEO, Joshua Nino, said — was founded on "sport-style esports coverage."
Today, dexerto.com attracts 30 million monthly visitors, it said — a formidable sum, though less than 30-year-old stalwarts like IGN and GameSpot, which clocked 98 million and 69 million monthly visits in September, according to the web-analytics firm Similarweb.
Direct-ad sales account for about half of revenue, with programmatic ads (30%) and social monetization (20%) making up the rest.
Nino said Dexerto had been mostly bootstrapped — aside from about £257,000 in seed funding — and had been profitable since 2016.