Three years ago GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT was dead. Abandoned. An online ghost town. And it had been that way for a long time. When founder and owner Josh Tyler sold it back in 2015 it was with the expectation that the new owners would take the site and run with it. That never happened. Instead GFR sat there, unmanaged, unused, and without new content.

That changed in 2019 when Tyler re-acquired the site. By then it had been more than four years since GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT had posted anything new. The staff was long gone, there was nothing left but tumbleweeds. The site was so barely visited that it didn’t even rank amongst the top 500,000 most visited sites on the internet. Three years later and not only has GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT been brought back from total deactivation, it’s bigger than ever. According to SimilarWeb, giantfreakinrobot.com now ranks as one of the top 7,000 most visited websites on the internet.

In the United States specifically, where most of GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT’s readers are, the site ranks in the top 2000 most visited sites on the internet. Gobally, that ranks GFR far above Valnet owned sites like dualshockers.com (#23,047) and movieweb.com (#10,168), GAMURs group owned wegotthiscovered.com (#8,178), and other long time fixtures like indiewire.com (#10,030). It also puts GFR neck and neck with industry leading sites like WhatCulture.com (recently acquired by Future PLC) and CINEMABLEND.com.

So what brought back GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT from the dead? Walk Big CEO and GFR founder Josh Tyler says it all comes down to experience. “When I first started GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT back in the early 2000s, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just a nerd with a dream. Now, decades later I know the online media space inside and out. In that time what I’ve learned is that ultimately it all comes down to your team. And when I relaunched GFR I did it with one goal in mind: to put together the best team. When you do that, the rest follows.”