Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Out of the limelight

A reader wrote me to tell me that I *didn't* make Massively's top 10 MMO bloggers list, in spite of the fact that there are 31 MMO blogs on that list. Interesting. First I wondered who Shawn Schuster is, and what I did to piss him off. But then I realized that actually that suits me just fine, I've always been bothered by the negative consequences of the popularity of this blog: The trolls, the spammers, the entitlement kids, the people wanting to censor me.

In related news, I confirmed the secret of successful blogging by applying it in reverse: By moving away from a daily publishing schedule I lost a third of my daily visitors, with Google Analytics showing a strong correlation between number of posts and number of visitors. Again, this is working as intended. Contrary to the generally held belief about websites, I am not actually better off with more readers. I would rather have a smaller community of people willing to intelligently discuss MMORPGs, than a larger, noisier, and much less intelligent crowd. As I don't really monetize this blog, apart from the failed donation experiment, being out of the limelight has only advantages for me. It gains me the freedom to express my opinions when and how I want, without attracting mobs with torches and pitchforks bothered about something "blasphemous" I said about their favorite game.

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