The State of Racketboy?

[8bit]

I think anyone who reads this will agree... WE LOVE RACKETBOY.COM! We love the in depth articles, guides, retro store, podcast and the forums with it's interesting topics, b/s/t section, and the people who make it a special online place!

While these questions may be best answered by the mods or by Racketboy himself, I am just wondering how things are going website and forum wise. Specially a few questions have crossed my mind...

- How has the web traffic been the past 12 months? Are we trending up or down on the major search engines?
- Is the online shop and advertising still doing well and generating the revenue Racketboy needs to keep things going for the foreseeable future?
- How has the forum new member join rate and participation rate been lately in comparison to past years?
-Do we think we are seeing more quality member join and participate? Do we still see a good amount of "crosstalk" between the likes of other good sites like NintendoAge, System11.org, GameTZ, etc?
- What new articles, guides, and podcast topics can we look forward to in the near future?
- In a nutshell, what is the overall state of Racketboy?

Sincerely,
8bit-Andy

[dsheinem]

What new...podcast topics can we look forward to in the near future?

We kind of play this one by ear and don't have much lined up in advance usually. We're planning to generally continue to alternate on a bi-weekly basis between interview-based shows and shows where John and I talk about interesting news, forum topics, pickups, etc.

That said, I feel like we've had a great slate of guests this year for interview-based shows. We've had:

Dan Geisler - Road Rash creator
Jordan Weisman - Shadowrun and Battletech/Mechwarrior creator
Stoic Studios - ex-Boiware guys doing Banner Saga now
Ackk Studios - guys doing upcoming "Two Brothers"
Dave Welch - lead guy on upcoming "Boot Hill Heroes"
Chris Stollings - YouTube honcho for Operation Rainfall
The Grazianos - well known husband/wife cosplayers
Forum Moderators in a Roundtable discussion

That's on top of a half dozen or so "regular shows" with John and I.

I think that talent attracts talent, and as long as we continue to bring talented and respected guests on to the show, we should have no problems attracting more. Having a good producer (AppleQueso) come on board helps us focus more on the quality of guests/questions/topics, so that has been a big help too.

That said, I feel like we're still this "hidden secret" both here on the forums and in the larger gaming podcast space, despite putting on a show I've felt proud of for almost four years now and that has featured some giant names in gaming history. Not sure why that is...

Anyway, maybe John has some additional thoughts on this. Those are mine.

[ExedExes]

I don't think there's any cause for concern, I see new members here all the time with many of them participating, the podcast is doing well (at least I think so), the store I'm sure is prospering, and I think Racketboy is a best-kept secret with some of the most well maintained forums and calm, reasonable, passionate conversation about what we enjoy doing most, be it collecting or playing. This is just one user's opinion as of being here nearly 2 years.

[8bit]

I didn't meant for questions to come off in alarming fashion... I was just more curious than anything how things have been going for the site in general. I work in the web hosting industry and I see customers cancel their hosting, close their business, etc, on a weekly basis because they are not pushing enough traffic or lose interest in maintaining the site. It was a late night for me last night and it just crossed my mind that I hope that never happens to Racketboy.

[Luke]

I work in the web hosting industry...

And you couldn't find the answers to your questions on your own? Not being a jerk, but that stuff is elementary and as easy as a google search.

[8bit]

I work in the web hosting industry...

And you couldn't find the answers to your questions on your own? Not being a jerk, but that stuff is elementary and as easy as a google search.

Using general whois.sc/, statsbyte, or similar searches wasn't going to answer the majority of my questions... but as usual your thoughtful and helpful response is really appreciated.

[Luke]

Why would you roll your eyes after such a nice compliment?

Sorry if I'm shocked that someone who works in web hosting can't even find web traffic numbers for a site.

[8bit]

Why would you roll your eyes after such a nice compliment?

Sorry if I'm shocked that someone who works in web hosting can't even find web traffic numbers for a site.

The public sites I've used don't give a complete historical reference on the site (i.e. how today compares to 2010, 2008, etc). Plus it doesn't really tell me if that is effectively covering all of the hosting costs, time spent managing the site, or if it's meeting Nick's goals in general. It also doesn't give stats on sales being made through the store, number of new forums members joining in comparison to past years, etc. Sure I could have spent time digging a bit deeper online and analyzing the public data is available but sometimes it's nice to hear things straight from the source and have a conversation.

[Luke]

Sure I could have spent time digging a bit deeper online and analyzing the public data is available but sometimes it's nice to hear things straight from the source and have a conversation.

Understandable.

Since I work in e-commerce I always look for key indicators such as bounce rate, time spent on site, pages viewed, upstream sites, search relevance, and so forth.

I tend to think that upstream sites tend to show a good representation of the people involved in a forum. If half the people on a forum come from "Pornhub.com" (this has happened, even in the craft industry) it's says something about the clientele. That said, if over 90% of the people who visit the site come from Google, it can be difficult to gauge exactly who your customer is.

Looking at RB's stats, everything seems to be above average for the forum, the sales page isn't a gangbuster. Visibility and seo for retro games is really poor on short tail searches.

[8bit]

I tend to think that upstream sites tend to show a good representation of the people involved in a forum. If half the people on a forum come from "Pornhub.com" (this has happened, even in the craft industry) it's says something about the clientele. That said, if over 90% of the people who visit the site come from Google, it can be difficult to gauge exactly who your customer is.

That's a good point. And looking at the data on Alexa I see mostly a variety of traffic coming from a variety of google homepages from around the world, ebay, and amazon. Only gamefaq's shows up in the top 10 as the last page visited before making their way here.