Since missing out on buying a website recently I been thinking about creating one my self. The site would be mostly based on retro gaming but still have an element of current gen stuff. I want it to use as an engine to promote my up and coming show for retro games and to have a bit of a community and news pages. The big question is there really space for yet another website based on this? Also what do you want in an ideal gaming site?
You will need a lot of content, and/or a pretty huge community (which takes ages to build, FYI). I have a pretty niche corner, with some pretty good content I think, and I still don't get that much traffic. Well, looking at my stats it looks like I have some more. On 12.02 I got about ~450 hits in English, and about 120 in Japanese.
I get a few hundred hits depending on the day and how my updates are going I have 0 community though which makes it interesting (and difficult). Been printed twice so far though hah. Edit: Google reports 800 hits for the 2 days of this month, that assumes that the googleads show up, without counting all us firefox users blocking it Actual page hits are at 35k I think, which counts every file that was downloaded
I get in a week what Gajin gets per day, perhaps a wee bit more. It would probably increase if I spent more time on the site than I do. Anyway, thing is there's room enough on the intertubes for everyone's opinion. So what if you cover games that other people have already covered, just do yours better. I'm a firm believer that if you make something, someone out there somewhere is going to like it. There's an audience for everything, the challenge is getting it into your audience's hands. Yeah no kidding. It took me 7 months to get the first pay out. One thing I notice is that klicks seem to jump whenever I update. But it has been slowly increasing with time. Yeah that's the tough part, just gotta keep hacking at it. My community is still extremely small, but all you need is a few dedicated users to keep things alive until you can grow it. You don't just make a site and have five thousand posters right off the bat.
Exactly, its not a complaint persay, its just what it is Its fun, and its what Im planning on doing for a good portion of my life (journalism / gaming journalism), so I take it as a great experience. And hey, people are reading and looking, and I love seeing a nice influx of people due to someone posting a link. And having something printed in +N plus Play magazine (never got confirmation that this one was printed, someone check out their magazines to see if a big FF7:CC feature was ever printed, should have a link to my site since they were to use my pictures). And Ive been on all the major gaming blogs. I just need to get a job or something so I can keep the unique features coming...
Every one is right about it taking time to build up a good rep. When my site was first launched I only got about 160'000 visitors in the whole year. In 2006 I got 1.8 million ! so far this year I've had just over 2 million ! Now that may be small compared to the likes of the big boys out there but for a site set up and ran by one guy, me, I'm very pleased :nod: I say go for it ! Try and find something to add to your site that no one else does such as Hawanja's collection of clone hardware all in one place or Borman's hi-resolution video clips or my cover scans and comments for every Saturn and Dreamcast game released in Japan (well that's the goal). Yakumo
if you can have some kind of "web 2.0" page it would rock... i mean a way for registered users to upload pics of rare/old console or games (until you have enough) and also a section for submitting reviews of old unknown games/imports... guess you got the idea, right? try to make a webpage that people feel it's missing or that is good enough for then not browsing to others
A retro-centered podcast would be freaking A+, especially with a stellar site to accompany it. There's definately a niche for it. Oh, and unbiased reviews submitted by the community
My site already allows for submitting of anything, just log in and hit submit news. I have to approve it, but I can do that just about anytime with my iPhone. If you guys would seriously use a gallery, I can do that pretty quickly.
The problem w/ this is that it the internet is filled with ass clowns. gamengai has the code to handle user-submitted write ups. I never implemented it b/c I didn't want to keep up w/ the users and whatnot. Maybe I should get it going. Kind of busy w/ other shit.
