Hasta La Ideas

Launched in 2011, The Mary Sue, a leading genre entertainment site for women, must now make do without its founder. That”s because Susana Polo (pictured) has chosen to move on to Vox Media’s video game vertical Polygon to serve as the site’s first entertainment editor.

“We’ve been covering entertainment for a little bit,” Polygon EIC Chris Grant tells FishbowlNY via telephone. “We’ve dabbled. There’s a lot of adjacency. Batman isn’t just a game, it’s also movies and comic books.”

“What we’ve never done is spend the time to formulate an entertainment coverage strategy,” he continues. “What are the boundaries? Which movies do we cover? Susana’s expertise and experience of covering and managing that beat will help us properly answer those questions.”

Polygon was founded in 2012, a year after The Mary Sue. According to comScore, year-over-year traffic increased 137% between January of last year to this year. The Vox Media site has taken flight at a time when so-called nerd culture is also crossing over to the mainstream, via TV series like The Walking Dead to Game of Thrones. and much more.

Grant says a recent hint of his audience’s appetite for entertainment came via a pair of Polygon posts about Joseph Kahn‘s 14-minute R-rated Power Rangers deboot Power/Rangers. “Our first item quickly raced past a million page views,” Grant says.

Polygon has a full-time staff of around 20, including one London based senior reporter, and uses very little freelance content. Grant, previously with AOL’s recently folded Joystiq, says that on a monthly basis, no more than one or two pieces are outsourced.