I've recently been asked by a few people to do a repeat of an
old thread detailing how dakka is doing and how other wargaming communities are doing. I agree that it has been quite a while (2.5 years) since that last post and dont mind doing an update.
In short, traffic-wise, dakka has been doing extremely well. Any month that there is a major
40k release we see a boost of about 15% or so across all major metrics, and with the current release schedule
GW have taken on, the past year has seen great numbers. Saying that though, our strong community, good infrastructure, good tools and solid moderation has ensured that we have never seen a single month in which traffic has decreased year-on-year, with this past year being close to averaging 20% increases in readers year-on-year.
As before, all opinions that are not about Dakka are my personal conjecture and are to be taken as drunken rambling rather than anything factual. I do have limited (volunteered) access to data from other sites but have no permission to share it so stay quiet on those fronts.
First and foremost is the most significant of the graphs. This graph indicates the total average posts per day over a month for each site listed. I started collecting stats for Dakka when we launched the current version of the forum software to make sure I was not going to screw anything up, and monitored a number of other websites so that I could see the overall traffic trends for wargaming, and to ensure dakka could replicate anything that was especially successful elsewhere. Here is the graph:
Sawtooth patterns down to 0 then up above the average generally indicate the site being unavailable on the day I tested it rather than 0 posts that month. If a site hits 0 then comes back up around the same rate, it means it was down for a good chunk of that month or period or they removed posts from their database in that month, leading to a negative post rate overall for that month. Major events of note include Heresy Online getting hacked around Sep 2012, the general decline of the posting rate on warseer, and the impressive stability of posting rate at wargamer AU despite the
GW trade embargo occurring over that period in Australia. As before, you can see the pattern of Tau Online being bought out in early 2010 and dying promptly under the new management, before coming back as second sphere (who use odd statistics so I cant really track much accurately there for the purpose of this graph).
The forum choices are a bit odd in my graphs and I've added a few more each year. The reason for the choices is varied and I'm too lazy to go into it for now, but basically it comes down to sites that were doing something interesting that I wanted to watch or were some of the first results in google for warhammer or
40k forums at the time. Not including other forums (even if they are large) is not a personal thing, just that I am only after a general overview of the community, not every single forum.
The next interesting graph is a computed average showing an average post rate across major forums over the same period: This covers wargaming in general rather than anything specific, and as you can see, the community as a whole is posting less than it was in 2011 (about 70% now from that peak), but still more than 2007. I have no real concerns about the health of the online community, baring in mind that social networks and other sites have matured and taken away a decent chunk of the posting population from most forums over the last few years (reddit, 4chan, facebook, minor twitter, blogs, etc). Our traffic graphs indicate the community continues to grow at a healthy pace and you'll see them later. Here is the average rate on forums:
I've been tracking registrations as well but that is such a loaded figure it counts for almost nothing. Here is the graph for average number of signups per day (with negative numbers zeroed):
You can see in the above that there is all sorts of funny business going on that makes it hard to compare directly. The first heresy online spike was caused by them making registration mandatory to view the forums after reading a few posts. The librarium online spikes are generally the same thing (they also have aggressive search engine optimisation which gives them big boosts until google changes the way it parses websites at which time they plummet down again). The second sphere spike was an anomaly. The recent
BoLS spike was caused by downtime on their blog from an accidental takedown by google, forcing people to talk in the forums instead. I think the miniwargaming spike was because of their indigogo campaign but cannot recall the exact timing and am too lazy to look it up right now
To copy/paste the notes on the above from last time as well:
- Spam registrations vary a lot from site to site. Dakka can be as many as 5 per day sometimes! (Note, this is down to 1-2 per day at max now)
- Some sites require registration to be useable (librarium online) which obviously causes a massive increase relative to traffic/other sites.
- Some times will report the user total as registrations, others will only report it as users who verified their email address after registering, giving quite a wide gulf. For every 10 users who sign up with us, 1-2 will not verify their address for whatever reason and therefore are not valid users.
As such, the above graph is not useful for site to site comparisons, but is useful to see site specific trends. Dakka had a big spam problem in mid 2009, and while spam posts were not too bad, we had a lot of problems with spam registrations. As we cut down on it the registration rate dropped but more normal users were signing up so the community was actually growing faster.
Dakka is now the largest wargaming gallery by miles. Coolmini or not has roughly 192,250 images. Dakka has 479964 as of me typing this, and this increases at a rate of roughly 350 per day. Our images take up a crazy 652GB and we store all the thumbnails and tiles pre-generated as well so that bulks up the storage requirements by a quite a bit. Luckily storage is dirt cheap these days. As per last time, the absolute number of images is the only thing we can compare as coolmini and dakka could not be more different. They are a great site with a fantastic gallery and a much focused painting community than our more general community (not to say we dont have some great painters too), but most importantly they are doing their part for the community very well doing things like sponsoring crystal brush and helping lots of small companies succeed with great kickstarters. Our gallery is about getting as many wargaming images as possible so you can see something as a
WIP, a completed model, on the tabletop, etc. whereas theirs is just showing the best things people have done so we both fill different niches and are complementary rather than competitive.
Now, with a confidential axis hidden, here is our traffic graph since well before Yak and I took over. This is the real measure of success and as you can see we are doing very well:
You'll note that pattern is quite different from what is reported by alexa, compete, etc. The above is the true pattern of our traffic and shows consistent growth, with last month being our best ever. The numbers are private, but they are big! The graph shows our unique visitor rate.
Some things have changed a lot recently too. As mobile devices have improved, more and more of you are browsing dakka while pooping, and as such we now serve to a mobile device 25.77% of the time. We primarily serve the English speaking world, with German, French and Dutch users being the next largest audience.
We set up a
facebook feed here a little while ago and that continues to grow at a good pace and has been quite a decent builder of traffic. Likewise with our
twitter feed. Please like/follow us on one or both if you dont already!
Finances continue to balance out expenses, but we make very little profit. This continues to be a hobby for yakface and myself, and as such while we could plaster the site in adverts and rake in a pretty penny, we are quite happy keeping things running as they are. Our
DCMs pay for a decent chunk of our expenses, with our limited advertising making up the rest. We have a reasonable war chest in case of anything unplanned happening, but have still never taken a penny out of the site for personal usage to date - everything is there to be reinvested in the wargaming hobby in some form.
As for future plans - we are working on a hell of a lot of stuff at the moment! I'm dabbling with some alternate gallery interfaces and a good player finder and event finder right now, so they will probably be the next major features to see the light of day.
Finally, as always, thanks for enjoying dakka and making the large amount of time that myself, yakface and all the moderators spend on our hobby worthwhile. Without knowing that so many people are enjoying our labours, it would much harder to work through the memory leaks, maintenance and other boring tasks that fill our time!
and anything non-
