Animal Crossing: New Horizons Villager Tier List

Fanbyte was a growing gaming outlet competing against entrenched legacy publications with far larger audiences and resources. The challenge: find angles that dominant players like IGN and Polygon weren’t willing to touch and own them before anyone else did.

• 15.2 million pageviews
• 06:52 average time on page

Rather than compete on breadth or speed of guide coverage, areas where larger outlets had a structural advantage, Fanbyte looked for gaps: formats considered too informal, questions the audience was clearly asking that nobody was bothering to answer.

A villager tier list was one of those gaps. Major outlets weren’t publishing purely subjective character rankings. The audience demand was there, the competition wasn’t. By being willing to treat an “informal” content format seriously, the piece captured a massive search opportunity that legacy sites had left on the table.

• Identified the content gap through audience and competitive analysis
• Conceived the format and angle – a fully subjective villager tier list – and made the editorial case for publishing it
• Wrote and published the piece in its entirety
• Sole author from ideation through final publish