Where is Everyone?
So…
There’s a widget here on our site that gives people the opportunity to subscribe via e-mail so you know when we post new material. According to this widget, we have nearly six thousand subscribers.
Twitter tells us we have almost three thousand followers. On Facebook, that number is just over two thousand. And over on the SciFi4Me TV side, we’re sitting at a little over twelve hundred.
Today, we’ve had ten page views.
Ten.
Somewhere, the math doesn’t work. Now, I’m not complaining about those ten. I think it’s great that we have people visiting our site. I think it’s great when people stop by because maybe we have something worthwhile to offer (because we absolutely do). Like Charlie Daniels said, you play to the people who showed up; you don’t worry about the empty seats.
But still.
Ten.
James Keller said, “A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.” In this case, you won’t lose anything by sharing us with others. In fact, you may gain from it, because now you’ll have people to share the experience. You can discuss what we post. You can debate about it. You can rake us over the coals for it.
Please feel free to be a candle. You won’t lose.
When you think about it, you’ve moved. Your content seems to be primarily Twitch and Youtube. This website doesn’t deliver much utility when it comes to content delivery. And, as we’ve discussed, the website isn’t very effective to directing me to content. To the extent it does, it directs me away from your website: to Twitch, or iTunes, or Youtube, or Tunein. If your content is elsewhere, why would you expect people to visit your website?
To the extent content resides on the website, it’s commonly dated or archived content. For example, your podcast tabs I find links to the H2O podcast archives. Cosplay Diaries has bits from a 2015 event, and redirects to Twitch. Under this editorial’s “Related” content, there is an interview from 2016, and two opinion pieces, one from 2015 and one from 2012. Under “You May Also Like” are articles from 2014(Harlan Ellison Sufferes Stroke) and 2015.
As you know full well, a static (or worse yet stale) website doesn’t get visitied. If updates are only occasional even your most loyal follower only has to visit it occasionally. If new content is buried, or consists of news blurbs followers will have seen elsewhere between their infrequent visits to Scifi4Me, or is hosted elsewhere, there’s not much to draw people to the website.
No one opens the door to an empty cupboard except to see whether the cupboad’s still empty.
If I look at the content itself, it’s settled into a focus on comic books, cinematic universes, and the larger SF/Fantasy/Comic Book Hero television franchises, and not much of that. Your video news/commentary content is limited to Star Wars (Salacious Crumbs/Rancour Pit), Doctor Who (Tardis Sauce), Walking Dead (Zombopocalypse Now), and Two Guys Talking and Drinking Coffee While Sitting In Chairs (H2O). Setting aside H2O, which occasionally departs from the relentless drumbeat on superheros, jedi and zombies (Oh, my!), it’s a pretty bland and monotonous body of content.
So if you want hits on the website, you need to restock the cupboard. And you need (oh, so desperately need) to stock it with something other than the same old.
Good points. And we’ve talked a number of times about how to best organize the dot-com to present our content better and keep it a relevant piece of our operation. Perhaps we start with the menu and make it category driven a little more than it is.
Definitely some things to ponder. Thanks for the feedback!