Caffeineforge: Year One
On August 12th, of 2012, the first post was made on Caffeineforge. Though that would mean Monday is our one year anniversary, regular readers will know that that particular day is booked pretty regular. I feel like the anniversary is a big deal, though I know it is really just a number. Unlike the first couple months of its existence, today I would say the blog only takes a couple hours a week to keep up to date.
But sometimes it seems very hard to find those couple hours a week.
It is my opinion that not many blogs reach it to this particular milestone, but I had trouble finding any references to prove or disprove that notion. I did find that:
- According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned.
- It is estimated that within one month of creation, 60% to 80% of blogs worldwide are either abandoned or infrequently updated. This means that the average lifespan of a blog is equal to that of the common fruitfly.
- Perseus claimed that the average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days, with some 132,000 blogs being abandoned after a year or more. The oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days.
Want to see how we’re doing one year in? Read on.
The last year has been a mostly good year for Caffeineforge, and the statistics bear that out. We have had:
- 37 thousand views, with a one day high of 700 views (thank you David Gaames)
- 1033 Comments
- 251 Posts
- 13 guest posts
Looking at the above chart though, it doesn’t paint nearly as rosy picture as the above numbers suggest. In fact, a casual glance might suggest the blog is dying after a great start. I assure you this is not the case.
When sign posts are added it makes a bit more sense. As Mr McDonald can no doubt attest to, running publicity for a Kickstarter is a full time operation. For the 5 weeks Wardenclyffe was live, it was very nearly a full time job. Every single day was spent chasing leads and creating buzz in an effort to find our elusive readers. Also, for the first four months of the blog we were posting at least once a day. These two activities combined drove a lot of traffic as you can see, but once that was over, we relaxed into a more manageable five day a week pace until the spring. It took perhaps 6 hours a week to research stories and line up interviews during this time period, and was totally manageable.
At least until my job changed, and I found myself living out of a hotel for 3 months. Chris’s job isn’t exactly sedate either, and with increased professional responsibilities we had to dial the frequency back even further. As you can see, after we went to three days a week, traffic really started to trail off. Once I finish moving in to my new place, it is my hope that I can get the pace back up to a daily weekday schedule.
So what do these traffic stats mean?
Alexia isn’t perfect, but I think the above stats show that over the last year we have achieved the status infrequent resource about Kickstarter. Over the next year I would like to move away from that a little, and write more posts above comic books, story telling, and the business adventures of trying to get Wardenclyffe into the hands of our readers, but we will see – only time will tell.
Kickstarter posts have been far and away our most possible reads, with people returning time and again to read about Kickstarter vs Indiegogo, or Funding Trends, each of which make up 3% of our total views.
It’s been a good year, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re just getting warmed up.
Caffeineforge 
Congrats! Keep up the great work! 🙂
Thank you Joe, keep up the good work.
I can definitely attest to the full-time job of marketing a Kickstarter, which is fun when you have a full-time job that you’re supposed to be doing. 🙂 Still, we’re over the 100% funded mark and coming up on the halfway point in the project, so I don’t begrudge it the time.
I have to say, when I was blogging, the hardest part, by far, was motivating myself to actually get stuff done. Partly because I’d plan on writing a paragraph and wind up with 3000 words EVERY DAMNED TIME. And being the only person writing and damned near the only person reading (I think I had maybe 20 views as my best), motivation was hard to come by. Congratulations on keeping yours going.
If you ever get a burning desire for a guest post on a subject appropriate to this blog – you know who to get ahold of.
Good luck with seeds.
Congrats! I’ve greatly enjoyed reading the blog over the course of the last year. Great job consistently creating such interesting material.
Also, have you heard of the graphic novel/series Saga? I don’t read many graphic novels, but I’ve loved it so far.
I hadn’t heard of it, but I looked up. Definitely on my reading list; I’ll get back to you when I have time to read for fun again.
Thank you for your readership, and commentary. We couldn’t do this without involved readers like you.
Haaaaaaaaappy Birthday, Caffeineforgeblog!
Congratulations on your Anniversary!
Thank you! I see you have started doing some blogging yourself.
Thanks for the info! It’s always interesting to see other blog results and compare them to what I’ve been able to do so far.
Happy to help. It is a shame that there is so little information out there that isn’t self aggrandizing.