An Inside Baseball Look at RPG Blogging

Back when the RPG Bloggers Network was started, it was pretty easy to get people to visit your blog. Pop over to the site, which had a feed of every blog on the network (updated every half hour or so, if I recall), and you could get all the latest news and opinions in one click. However, as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ rose to prominence it became less centralized. The RPG Bloggers Network eventually collapsed. An alternative, the RPG Blog Alliance, also steadily faded away, shifted over to Google+ and is now dead, as far as I can tell.

So, when I look at the monthly blog stats for Dice Monkey, numbers are very different than they were 6 or 7 years ago. In addition, blogging has fallen out of prominence in favor of YouTube. I’ve had a few companies tell me they don’t want me to just post reviews, but would want videos as well. I’m not in a spot at the moment where I can make good video reviews, so sometimes I don’t end up getting review copies for some books. There just isn’t enough of an audience. When I ask to review a book, I will often make sure they know that I also post reviews on RPGGeek, which gets a lot more views than Dice Monkey does. That seems to help a lot.

It’s a lot of work to keep the site up and running. If you’re looking at two posts a week, it takes about an hour or two to write up an opinion or resource post. In the past, I would write these posts responding to others blogs, now they come up from questions I or someone else poses on Twitter. For reviews, those are done out of my collection, or are provided from companies. Occasionally, I’ll have smaller companies contact me and send me games for review. A lot of the games I review that are prototypes for Kickstarter are done this way.

So, what does a ten year old site look like? (Keep in mind, this is my own blog. Other bloggers may have a completely different experience.)

In February of 2012, the site had nearly 13,000 views in a month! Right around that time was a big boom, and over the years, it’s steadily dropped off. It was at its lowest in 2016 and 2017, dropping to only about 1000 views a month. In 2010, nearly 117,000 words were written in 244 posts. Posts dropped down to 38 in 2015, but were up to 98 in 2018, which is nearly two a week.

Back in in 2018, I scheduled out posts for a few months, a few a week, and ended up with about 1000 views a week. This year, I decided that I’m going to try posting at least two posts a week, and I’ve kept to it. This has led to 2547 views in January, and 8252 in February, the highest number of views the site has gotten since February of 2016. This is drastically smaller than the views we would see back in the 2012’s, but that’s the nature of the current blogging scene.

With the Patreon, once we hit $20 a month, I will be posting five times per week, at least. My hope is to provide more content, which will increase our readership.

Dice Monkey has always been very eclectic. I don’t focus on a single game, and kind of drift around to where my whims take me, inviting other writers in to write about all kinds of other games as well. There’s never really been a “theme” to the site, which I think makes it harder to keep regular readers. I don’t plan on changing that, but I hope by providing you with more content, I can increase readership.

For a little further behind-the-scenes info, the front page has that central scrolling area, which are posts categorized as Featured, which is any post that I wouldn’t consider “News”. News posts show up next to that, in those smaller boxes. I try to have my featured posts be at least 500 words. News posts are shorter. I schedule my posts to go up at 8AM PST, so that they’re caught by people on both coasts, and Europe at a reasonable time.

I don’t know what the future of blogging is. I hope that the collapse of Google+ will bring more bloggers back to writing. If you yourself are interested in blogging, I encourage you to give it a try. I’ll give you any help you need to get off the ground. Hopefully we can see a resurgence. We’ll have to see.