So here we are on October 5th, almost a week past the "official" close of Winter Is Coming. I know there one or two more articles on the way, which I will post with all due haste as I receive them. But by and large the festival has wound down.
First off, I want to send out a huge THANK YOU to everyone who participated. There's no way this crazy idea would have worked without the time, talents, and effort of those of you who stepped up and volunteered to make something out of nothing. I can't thank you enough.
For everyone who has retweeted, blogged, signal boosted, or otherwise talked up the Festival, THANK YOU. I can't thank you enough for generating interest and getting the word out to people who may not have heard of Winter Is Coming in any other way.If you've posted something about Winter Is Coming and you don't see it on the Media Mentions Page, please let me know and I'll link to you. If anyone wants to do a review about your experiences with the Festival or an overview of the entries or even a critique about the festival as a whole, feel free to publish it and let me know about it. I get near-instant notification of comments, and email is always an option (jim AT twwombat DOT com).
And now for the statistics.
As of 05 October 2011 at 07h45 Eastern Time, we have had 27 participants in the Festival, contributing 43 pieces (39 text and 4 image entries). Just over half (22) were guest blogger entries hosted here at the Gaming Den of Iniquity, though 3 of those were cover articles with a link to the main meat of the post.
UPDATE: As of 17 October 2011 at 07h50 Eastern Time, we have 45 pieces (40 text, 5 images) from 29 participants, of which 24 are guest blogger entries. I think these will be the final numbers.
I didn't track the time I spent reading articles, giving feedback, formatting guest posts, and adding entries to the main page. I tended to do one round in the morning on the train (about an hour), read articles in dribs and drabs during the day, then do a big update at night (usually 1-2 hours). I posted a couple of untested links which were fixed as soon as I knew about them, and I think I only missed one emailed guest post until Saturday.
As for traffic, the month of September saw 5145 hits. For comparison, that's 6.5x more hits than my previous highest monthly hit total. The main page got 1572 hits, followed by the Intro Post (561) and the participant sign-up page (509). The two highest hit articles were the Night's Watchman Theme (152) because I experimented with listing that one directly on reddit, and the Winter Elf Race (109) since it was the first guest post to go up. I don't have a clear view of statistics for every article at the moment, but I'm fairly confident everything got at least 20 hits.
Moving Forward
I'm going to delve further into the outreach effort and specifically the lessons learned for next time in another post. I've also got some random notes that I've been typing up as a sort of "behind the scenes" post - if you're interested in seeing that post please comment and let me know.
Also, please consider writing and submitting something for Ice in the Margins. This is a low-key after party involving quick descriptive text hooks for GMs to use in their winter-themed games. If you're interested, take a look!
Thanks to you all for reading and helping to make Winter Is Coming a reality!
See the entries in the Winter Is Coming RPG Blog Festival.
From my point of view, the blog festival was an amazing success. It got some of the lesser known people in the community, and people who I don't read particularly often to step forward and get noticed, which is great.
ReplyDeleteThe quality of the entries was superb, and some, like the Endless Winter adventure went above and beyond the call of duty to support the event.
As the one with the initial guest post that kicked TWWombat into action, I too want to mirror his sentiments, THANK YOU!
I'd love to see a behind-the-scenes post, just to have an idea of what all went into it.
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