Since this contest is in the spirit of sharing and learning, it makes sense that my first post should report on our launch traffic, and how many users will come back to read more. We primarily reached out to people on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook and Twitter and saw varying levels of success.

Traffic

We use Google Analytics to watch traffic, and we noticed about 300 visitors on the site at any given time at peak. The totals for the past 3 days are as follows:

• Pageviews – 44,394
• Visits – 16,317
• Uniques – 15,191
• Top Referrers – Hacker News (14,088) and then Twitter (1,012)
• Top Countries – US (53%), UK (6%), Canada (6%), Germany (4%)

As expected, all traffic came to an abrupt stop:

Growing a blog is hard, and it will definitely take some entertaining and quality content to get people to come back. I can’t get too high with the high or low with the lows.

Twitter

Twitter appears to be the front-runner for growing a blog these days. Back when I was a part of Particletree, measuring RSS traffic and incoming blog referrals was everything we looked at. Now, the trend seems to be a quick tweet and then on to other things. Time will tell if this is accurate or not. Anyway, the raw data:

• mentions and retweets – 39
• New followers for Ryan – 131
• New followers for Chris – 139

We received a lot of help from friends who were happy to spread the word, so thanks to them for that. Interestingly enough, we saw no tweets or likes from people clicking the social media buttons at the bottom of our blog posts. For that matter, very few people made it through past the home or individual blogs to the posts.

Communities

Hacker News is by far the best community for this site. A large part of that is due to our past with them. Our previous product, Wufoo, was part of a Y Combinator seed investment so the users of the site are familiar with us. As a result, we made it to the 2nd highest post and stayed there for a few hours. There was also a bit of discussion, which hopefully results in engaged readers.

Reddit, on the other hand, is a new beast to me. I’ve been a reader since Reddit launched, but not much of a poster. I submitted this site to /r/gamedev and /r/indiegaming and had very little success. I imagine when you make it to a subreddits front page the traffic is great, but that appears easier said than done.

The other aspect of community is blogs within the gamedev circle. For example, it was a pleasant surprise to be featured on Gamasutra’s updates. That article resulted in 20 or so tweets and a couple hundred visits. But the short term results aren’t the exciting part. Instead, it is nice see awareness raised so we can have a conversation with them, or other bloggers, in the future and be part of the community.

Subscribers

Aside from Twitter, the two main ways to stay in touch are RSS and our individual mailing lists. RSS is somewhat prominent throughout the site, while mailing list forms are only visible on status updates.

So how many new followers to these formats did we receive?

• Ryan RSS – 85
• Chris RSS – 79
• Ryan Mailing List – 0
• Chris Mailing List – 2

The mailing list numbers are about where expected. The form won’t show up on RSS feeds, and it is only visible to people who read the articles (about 5% of traffic). If we decide that list is important, we’ll move it somewhere else on the site.

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All said and done, I had a great time launching this site. And 2 days in, it is already a ton of fun learning how to make games. Now it is just a matter of fighting the uphill battle to stay relevant and entertaining while simultaneously creating a game that I am proud of.