What kind of year has 2023 been? – Part 2, The Site

It’s the second part of me looking back at the year! This time we are taking a look at how the site is doing, our finances, what attracted attention and all those numbers that are often behind the scenes on a site like ours. I like doing this to provide info to others who might be looking to do something similar to ourselves. 

Site

It is easy to live and die by the stats on your site and my advice is always ‘make what you want and numbers be damned’. That said it is still an interesting thing to look at:

Last year: 36, 646 views and 21, 536 visitors

This Year: 46, 635 views and 28, 854 visitors

These are the stats off the jetpack stats counter attached to the WordPress site. That’s a good jump in visitors and views over last year where I saw a bit of downturn as the Arkham Horror Card Game began to wane in popularity. That said those articles still bring quite a bit of traffic to the site. The top 10 articles from last year were

The three Arkham guides have fewer views than the previous year, but are still driving traffic to the site. The How To Play guide for Blades is doing good numbers and I think is also responsible for keeping the Player’s review and Scum & Villainy in the top 10. I’m surprised to see Eldritch Horror rate so highly and it is a curiosity that Circle Undone above any of the other campaigns pulled in a good number of hits. Darkest Dungeon I wasn’t that surprised to see there as there were very few reviews coming out once the KS started to hit. Although it is only a first thoughts piece it attracted some attention.  

I was delighted with the response to my Tears of the Kingdom piece. I just wanted to write about it and thought it was too far away from the release to really attract any attention. All those views came in about a week and it still gets the occasional hit. I think the Discovery algorithm on Google picked it up which is why it got so big so quickly. 

All in all I am pretty happy with how the site performed this year, especially considering that I was not writing as much as I wanted to. It will be interesting to see how things go this year as I get back into the flow of writing again. 

Podcast

Brainwaves ticks along as it always has. We brought Oliver Kinne on this year as a third chair and it has been great having Oliver as part of the team. They have really brought a different perspective to the cast and it has allowed individual members of the team to miss a cast here and there and still put out a show. 

2022: 4.8k downloads

2023: 5.1lk downloads

That’s not a big increase but enough for me to be happy with. We are a niche cast, and that will always be the case. We did put out less work than 2022 so it is gratifying to see that the numbers actually bumped up a little bit.

It is not a surprise that both the casts featuring two of the largest stories from the year have done the best over the course of the year. I would have liked the Spiel cast to have done a bit better. The interview with Martina Fuchs was really good. There isn’t always a good reason I can discern why some episodes do better than others. Some stories catch on and people follow them to the cast. Others fizzle and the cast just has its loyal base listen to it. 

Financials

Of course nothing comes for free. In our case our outgoings are very small but we do need somewhere to host the cast and site. Rather than sorting out hosting myself, the Giant Brain is hosted by WordPress itself. I know this is a more expensive route but it means I don’t have to deal with updating WordPress and similar annoyances. The stability has been good and I haven’t felt a need to change the way we do things. 

The Giant Brain Financials

The finances are pretty healthy at the moment and you can see from the 2024 tab that if all the Patreon money stopped tomorrow we would be good for hosting into 2025 on both the cast and site. It would be nice to add a few more patrons this year to put us into the position of buying the occasional game for review, divorcing us completely from a reliance on relationships with publishers. 

In addition to the above money we have $26.49 in DrivethruRPG affiliate money. I do want to do more RPG work this year so that will likely be used to buy products to  review. 

What did I buy?

I said in last year’s update that I should keep better track of what I buy and that is still true. I didn’t though. Here is everything I can remember buying

Haven’t got around to playing Wreck this Deck or Tigris yet, though I’ve played the latter a lot on BGA. Looking forward to seeing the Lords of Vegas and Deathmatch Island final products. Planning to run and play a lot more RPGs this year. I’ve already run Brindlewood Bay once and looking forward to a campaign of it.

Resolutions

So what does 2024 bring for the site? I’ve started off strong, getting back to writing and making some decisions about what I want to do with the site and where I want to show off my work. 

I am in the process of shutting down the Substack. This was an attempt to have somewhere smaller to post off the cuff pieces. It sort of worked but I felt towards the end of the year that I was splitting my focus too much. To that end the First Thoughts pieces will be moving back to the main site. The On The Table and Critical Roundup pieces I was writing will move to Patreon. This has the double effect of meaning I am not in multiple places and makes the site and Patreon feel a little more used than they have been over the course of the last year. 

In the 2022 version of this post I had the following objectives for 2023

1. Posting more regularly about my work, new and old, on social media. I’m bad at promoting myself at times and I need to get better at that. 
2. Learn more about search and best ways to promote The Giant Brain
3. Writing every day just to get back into the habit of it. 

I did get the first two done. When I’ve had the energy and focus for it I’ve been using the knowledge gained to update some of the older pieces on the site so they are more easily discovered by readers and search engines. I did not get to writing every day as I just did not have the energy or enthusiasm for it.

What will I look to do over the course of 2024? Here are some things I would like to do:

1. Write every day, even just for ten minutes free form 
2. Play more games
3. Do more RPG work

Final Thoughts

It has been a rough year for me personally and of course I can’t predict what 2024 will hold. I left my job at the end of 2023 and have just started looking for a new position. This has given me time to decompress from a stressful period of time and start to focus again on what I want the site to be and how it should be seen. You’ll see some changes as I improve the look of the site, work on how the cast is put together, and hopefully write a lot more than last year.

I and the team would like to thank you for all your support over the year, whether that has been just reading and listening to our work, sharing an article or two, or even giving us some money. Without your continued support it would be a lot harder to be where we are.

We wish you all the best for 2024.