Dexerto Media Group launched in 2015 as a gaming publication built by people who competed in the games they covered. Today, the London company runs a full-service agency for brands such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, a network of vertical gaming properties, and a programmatic advertising platform. For co-founder Joshua Nino De Guzman, the publishing foundation is what makes all three businesses work.

Before Dexerto, Joshua was a paid professional player for Team Dignitas, competing in “Gears of War” and “Halo” at a time when few UK console players earned salaries beyond prize money. He and a co-founder later helped build Esports Gaming League, which Joshua says was sold to London creative agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Dexerto was already running as a side project by then and became their full-time focus once post-acquisition obligations ended.

“I’ve been in esports and entertainment now for as long as I bothered not to care about academia,” Joshua says. “Which was pretty much from the start.”

Dexerto’s original editorial approach was sports-style coverage of gaming personalities. Not just match results, but the rivalries, lifestyle details and cultural standing of the athletes behind them. “Dexerto really was the first publication to cover influencers in the same way that traditional publications would cover mainstream celebrities, music artists, sports athletes,” Joshua says. The outlet has grown from a bootstrapped esports site into a gaming and entertainment media group with around 120 employees.

Joshua says the agency arm accounts for roughly 80% of company revenue, running campaigns for clients including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Capital One. In June, he says, Dexerto launched Omnidex, an ad tech subsidiary operating a supply-side platform across more than 3,000 third-party publisher sites spanning gaming, entertainment, sport and other categories. Together, the businesses reflect an operating logic Joshua has applied to every major expansion: commercial revenue as the engine that funds editorial reach.

Gaming Coverage Needs Cultural Fluency

Joshua positions Dexerto’s editorial instincts as its advantage, distinct from what analytics tools can provide. “If you’re reading the data that everyone else is reading, you are a little bit late,” he says. “You’ve got to have a good nose and instincts for something that you think is growing.”

The company’s expansion from esports into broader gaming and entertainment coverage, which Joshua says happened around two and a half years into Dexerto’s run, came from an early read on audience behavior rather than from traffic data. The team noticed interest spreading into adjacent territory: streaming culture, social creators and entertainment franchises. These overlapped with the same community already following esports. “Back then, we were a lot more conscious of this as a new thing,” Joshua explains. “Nowadays, we take for granted what we see and how much of different categories of content we consume in a day.”

Joshua points to the risk of over-indexing on analytics shared across an industry: a publication reading the same signals as every other outlet has already ceded its timing advantage. For a company whose founders were participants in the culture before they became journalists, he argues, that timing window stays open longer.

Vertical Brands Go Where a Flagship Account Cannot

Several of Dexerto’s most-followed properties carry different names. CharlieINTEL covers “Call of Duty”; ValorINTEL covers “VALORANT.” The rationale is that a flagship account serving gaming broadly can achieve reach but cannot serve depth inside any individual fandom without diluting the experience for everyone else.

“The more general brands like Dexerto are great for showing what is hot, what is viral, what is relevant,” Joshua says. “But at the end of the day, if someone wants to go more into ‘Call of Duty’ or ‘Valorant,’ giving a focused channel means that their experience isn’t adulterated by things they may not want to see.”

Joshua points to community-specific humor as something that rarely translates across broader accounts. “Some humor is so specific to a community, it will just never land on an account that is more mainstream and broad,” he says. A vertical brand also carries a responsibility during the lulls between major game releases. When there are no announcements to anchor coverage, the account has to generate conversation on its own terms.

The Publishing Operation Funds Itself Through Agency Revenue

Dexerto has raised very little outside capital. “We don’t have anyone breathing down our back at all,” Joshua says. 

The absence of investor pressure means commercial revenue has financed every editorial and product expansion. “Commercial was an engine for us to create better content,” Joshua says. “If we could sell what we were doing with brands, if we could help brands activate within our audiences and keep them coming back, it helps us fund bigger, more exciting concepts.” 

The agency arm today runs campaigns spanning influencer integrations, custom game builds and experiential activations. Joshua sees the production capability as a natural extension of the publishing operation.

That understanding shapes how he prioritizes new commercial investments. His governing principle: “Invest where you’re already strong. Easier to make money where you’re making money than to try something wholly new.”

Omnidex Turns First-Party Publishing Data Into a Programmatic Pitch

Omnidex, the newest element of the Dexerto Group, is its supply-side platform for programmatic advertising. The differentiator, Joshua says, is selection. Rather than presenting every publisher in the network to every advertiser, Omnidex curates a list based on the client’s specific audience requirements, drawing on first-party data Dexerto has accumulated over more than a decade of publishing. “It’s about creating the right match for clients, because we’re working with the biggest and best, or the most niche, in a variety of different categories,” Joshua explains.

The ad tech business also extends the full-service agency pitch beyond Dexerto’s owned properties. “If we’re going to provide real full-service capabilities, it’s about making sure the client is living where it should live to get the best out of their campaign,” Joshua says. “That doesn’t always mean just our assets.”

AI Will Arrive as an Author Before Audiences Know to Look for It

For the longer-term future of gaming and entertainment content, Joshua has a specific prediction. “There will be a day where we wake up and consume content that we didn’t know was made by AI,” he says. He does not frame this as an immediate disruption to Dexerto’s editorial model, but as an inevitable outcome that plays out alongside human production rather than replacing it.

His argument draws on a distinction between knowing a creator is human and valuing the content because of it. He uses sport as an analogy: audiences watch the Olympics because the athletes are real, not because the performance is theoretically optimal. “I’m not going to start watching an AI Premier League,” he says. “I have no interest in that.” But if the content is excellent and the origin is unknown, Joshua sees no reason audiences will hold back.

For a company built on editorial instincts and proximity to gaming culture, the implied bet is that cultural knowledge continues to command a premium even as production costs fall. “Having a nose for what we think is going to be popular, short, medium, long-term,” Joshua says, “is just part of the skill of being gamers.”

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