Raptors Republic was acquired by Better Collective last week marking an end to my involvement with the company I founded in 2008 alongside Sam Holako,

Closing the Raptors Republic chapter of my life | Zarar's blog

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2024-10-30 14:30:07

Raptors Republic was acquired by Better Collective last week marking an end to my involvement with the company I founded in 2008 alongside Sam Holako, Brandon Larabie, Scott Phillips (rest in peace) and Josh Budd.

Our expenses (primarily salary) were too high and we simply didn't have the capital and revenue to sustain it. It would require an investment at a medium-term loss for us to continue producing the level of quality that readers were accustomed to seeing. The paywall did keep us afloat for the last two years without which we would have folded two years ago. However, it doesn't do enough to cover the plans we had for growth.

There was very little desire to dive into gambling products to make up for the lost revenue due to the industry-wide decline in display ad rates. We experimented with The Score and Fan Duel for short-term lucrative partnerships and are thankful to those companies for trusting RR to represent their brand. However, for us to truly make money using that approach we would need to have pushed gambling products/betting much more than we did, and I alongside others did not feel comfortable with that. I am a Muslim, and gambling is explicitly prohibited for all the obvious reasons.

I started a new company, jumpcomedy.com and this has taken up all my "free" time. I simply can't do justice to two major things in my life. Though I haven't created much content for RR over the last couple years (I did nail the Dick pick), the maintenance and management of the site still took up time that I didn't have. Something had to give.