As my internet journey continues, I have started to notice some small increases in traffic on the various platforms. None are a major size change – I will not be stopping my day job any time soon – but all are notable from my own limited perspective.
The biggest increase seems to be on YouTube. As I continue to post a rather steady stream of videos, although most are much longer than anyone cares to watch, the audience seems to have grown quite a bit. I post a game session video typically twice a week, and very rarely other topics, and have a very large backlog of videos from past years. It appears that our recent Warhammer efforts have been the most interesting, and we have managed to add another 5 followers over the last week. This brings the channel to a current 42. Definitely not burning down the internet, but for a “boring” gaming channel, I am rather happy with those numbers, and I welcome anyone potentially interested.
On Twitch, the audience is a bit more limited – I am currently only clocking a single follower. I do have 5 followers on my 3d printing side channel, but I recently opted to drop that one and combine on the main channel instead. Followers do not auto-transfer. In comparison though, we do have a steadily growing number of participants during the live streams themselves, some of which are interactive and involved. Typical videos are viewed 30-40 times before they roll off and are removed after 2 weeks, and we have seen up to 3 people joining the stream itself during the game. I am considering options for improving that interaction, though unfortunately the nature of the format is that my focus is on the group itself, rather than the audience.
The third main metric I track is this website itself, and the visitor metrics. Individual articles typically are viewed 20-30 times in the first couple of weeks, and the number of visitors to the site has steadily increased. I typically record about 700 visits to the site per day, and about 80-100 visitors. Some of these may be bots and automated scrapers, but there are at least a few people that find the site in various searches. Unfortunately, comments are almost non-existent, so there is very little engagement – although I record hundreds or thousands of comments, 100% of them in the last 6-12 months have been marked as spam.
