Gaming Articles Suck!

It's been a while, so I figured I should post some observations about the web pages and traffic. Things work differently than I had expected, though honestly I didn't know what to expect anyway.

The biggest surprise so far is that all of the articles we've written and put up over at the Mudding and Gaming Articles page are worthless.

Ok, not completely worthless; in fact, there's a huge amount of good information in them, ranging from general gaming hints to specific strategies for advanced players. But in terms of web traffic, they've so far shown to be worth substantially less than I expected. The obvious impact of the articles on the overall site, from the standpoint of driving external traffic, seems to be minimal.

Take for example the heaviest hitting articles:

1) [48] The glossary of mudding terms;
2) [45] The muds and mudding faq;
3) [37] Alternative mudding clients;
4) [30] Equipment optimization;
5) [28] High level attack strategies.

The number out front is unique pageviews per month. The heaviest hitter has 1.5 views per day, while the main AA pages have over 100. Note that even fan fiction, artwork, and the historical archives beat several of these. Further, an eyeball's estimate places the -total- hits from the articles pages at approximately the same value as the new player mudding guide. In short, one of the more time consuming aspects of the web pages, article development, has virtually no obvious impact on the overall site quality.

[Note - 'no obvious impact' is not the same as 'no impact'. The pages have definitely improved the site in other ways. It's just not obvious.]

I can think of a couple of good reasons for this. One might be that the articles are buried, and having to click through two layers to get to them is a real hindrance. To unbury the articles, it would be simple enough to have an 'article of the day' show up on the main page, if I can find screen real estate for it.

The other, more obvious reason is that the articles don't have wide appeal. They are for the most part written for a very narrow audience of Alter Aeon players. The search engines seem to be reflecting this, in that the most general of the pages, the glossary and mudding FAQ, are the only pages with nonzero page rank.

Wider scope articles that still sell AA are more problematic. Adjusting some of the existing articles to have broader gaming scope may help. Even so, there's a limit to how broad an article on turning the undead can be.

On the plus side, each article contributes some non-zero amount of traffic to the site, and helps give it breadth and depth.

As a side note, this blog is equally boring as a source of information for people. I don't post anything overly controversial or interesting to the general public. Because the site is so narrow, and because my prose is so mechanical, the Alter Aeon Mob Factory drives virtually no traffic as well. It probably doesn't help that the layout is still the basic default.