State of the Site Report – 2008

While 2008 was a very bad year for the economy, it was a pretty good year for this site. Traffic doubled from last year with 763,914 pages served. That's really good considering that the number of my posts actually went down to just 50 in 2008 compared to 63 written in 2007. Also, site revenue was up slightly over last year with a total of $313.43.

One trend that has really stuck out to me in 2008 was the large increase in gaming blog traffic overall. In 2007, most of my traffic came from direct searches on Google. Now a sizable percentage comes from links in other gaming blogs. Here's a shout out to the ones who helped me the most in 2008:

• The Lair of the Evil DM
• The Core Mechanic
• The Call of the Dungeon
• Dungeon Mastering
• Troll and Flame
• RPG Bloggers
• Grognardia
• Sham's Grog 'n Blog
• D20 Source

Searchers are still coming to the site mainly for point buy calculators and for the Web 2.0 domain name generator. This has not changed from last year. And a new stat to track- there are 59 subscribers in Google Reader to the rss feed. That will be interesting to watch over the year as Google Reader becomes more popular.

Goals for 2009? I'd love to see the site break a million page serves and while I don't subscribe to the idea of posting just to post, I definitely want to write more in 2009. The biggest reason for the slowdown last year was due to my lack of enthusiasm for D&D 4e. I had planned on doing a lot of creation for the new edition, but it failed to win me over and left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Now I'm gearing up for a new Traveller campaign and have a long list of things I plan to write for it. Hopefully the game will survive contact with my group. Have a happy new year!