The popular site for enthusiasts of the football game FIFA, Futhead, was updated this week to show a message announcing its closure.
It reads, “Unfortunately we have had to shut down operations. We’re so appreciative of your contribution and engagement over the years and wish you a bright, FIFA/FC filled future.”
Futhead is one of the sites we track for digital goliath Fandom (the #1 brand on our list of 16 companies dominating Google) and was pretty popular if third-party estimates are accurate.
Ahrefs estimates the site was pulling in around 400,000 visitors each month from organic search, compared to 1 million in Semrush.
Similarweb estimates the site received around 2.1M visits each month.
Until recently, the homepage of the site looked like this:
Now, all visitors will see is the following message, no matter which page you visit.
To clarify, all site URLs still exist, but they’ve all been updated to display the same notice.
It’s my understanding that Futhead was the first of its kind when it launched back in 2011. The site offered a database of football players for Fifa Ultimate Team and included features such as a squad builder.
In 2013, gaming company Curse acquired it for an impressive $1.1M. The site became part of Fandom in a December 2018 acquisition, which also saw them acquire Gamepedia and D&D Beyond—the latter of which they later sold to Hasbro.
Part of the reason for the sites closure may be that it was lagging behind similar competitors, such as Futwiz (3M monthly visits) and Futbin (28.9M monthly visits).
I was obsessed with FIFA when I was a teenager but I haven’t played the game in over a decade now so I don’t know if this applies, but as of next year, the game will be called EA Sports FC. I presume ‘FUT’, for Fifa Ultimate Team, will no longer be the correct terminology to use.
If this was part of their reason for closing, it doesn’t totally make sense as other sites are left with the same problem.
How Can You Just Close a Site With Millions of Visitors?
The truth is, Fandom are so far ahead of most other network owners, never mind individual webmasters, that they likely don’t think of these things in any similar way to ourselves.
For most of us, the idea of shutting down a DR 61 domain reaching millions is unfathomable. Obvious options that come to mind include:
- Trying to sell the website
- Putting the domain up for auction
- Redirecting the domain to another project
- Leaving it open to collect ad revenue until traffic truly disappears
To turn every single page on the site into a “Sorry, we’re closed” message would be last on our list. Of course, it’s possible they tried to sell the site in private. If that was the case, I would have expected some kind of message for how people could contact them in the notice.
As I say, Fandom are in a league of their own. Their network of sites receives 800M+ clicks from organic search each month, and they’ve sold properties for over a hundred million dollars (such as the aforementioned deal for D&DBeyond, which Hasbro acquired for $146.3M).
A site receiving 1 million clicks from Google each month, on the high end of estimates, is 0.125% of their network traffic.
To them, closing down Futhead is like most people deleting a single page on their website.
There are other possibilities, of course, like Futhead losing money or creating too many headaches to even consider running, but it seems like it’s a sad day for people in the FIFA world either way. Many grew up with Futhead as the OG website of its kind, but that wasn’t enough to see the brand continue into the new era of EA Sports FC.
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