2016 Year in Review (Blog Statistics and Notes)

Last year I allowed my production on the blog to significantly diminish. For the first two years of the blog I made a real effort to publish something daily with the idea being that it would make me a better writer. In a lot of ways that effort paid off. My writing did improve greatly; however, in my effort to keep up with the aggressive schedule I had set for myself I started reading a lot of other blogs in our little community and I discovered that 2016 brought out the worst in many of us. So many "role-playing" blogs concerned themselves with poisonous backbiting that they never touched on their main topic: role-playing games. Now I'm not saying that if you have a role-playing blog that you should focus exclusively on role-playing games - God knows that I don't - but that sort of cancerous talk just sucked the will right out of me. We're in a new year now so I'm going to try pushing this blog back out into the role-playing community and see if we can't get a bit more of the conversation going in the right direction. Who knows?

Not me.

Anyway, I read recently that if you want to succeed at a project that you're putting effort into then you need to discuss it publicly. So as part of this process I want to kind of take a note of where my blog is sitting right now and where my goals for the blog are being set for 2017. 

Dyvers as of 12/30/2016 (when I'm writing this)

• Currently Dyvers has a total of 770,256 page views
• Each post has an average of 743 views.
• The most viewed post is The Great Blog Roll Call with 55,651 page views
• No top ten post has less than 1,000 page views.
• No Quarterly Reports posted throughout 2016 so progress throughout the year is murky
• Posts throughout 2016: 22 (lowest production level in history of the blog).
• Reader engagement: Has remained solid despite the reduced posting rate with comments and +1s reaching regular levels.
• Blog Earnings through Advertising on Blog: $5.27 (two lotto tickets in my future kids!)

Dyvers Goals for 2017

• Break 1,000,000 views on the blog.
• Expand reader engagement by being quicker to respond to comments both on Google+ and Blogger.
• Use correct tags throughout 2017 and correct erroneous tagging in 2013 posts to allow for easier exploration of the blog.
• Complete Artisan Toolkits series (14 parts remaining).
• Complete Prelacy of Almor series (5 parts total - planned).
• Complete 2017 Great Blog Roll Call
• Complete 2017 Best Reads of the Week run throughout the year.
• Make it through the year with an average of one post daily.
• Post Quarterly Reports.
• Complete every project I begin this year.
• Post regular campaign write-ups throughout the year.
• Further explorations of Greyhawk.
• Read, and create a teaching series on, Burning Wheel.
• Read, and create a teaching series on, Rifts.
• Double my earnings through the Advertising on the blog (yeah, gonna buy me three lotto tickets).

In closing I just want to say that 2017 has the potential to be an exceptional year not only for my silly, little blog but for our hobby as a whole. Wizards of the Coast has been putting out fantastic adventure modules throughout the last two years and I don't see any reason why this would stop in 2017 (and for me that fills a big part of my role-playing budget). The indie press revolution in role-playing games continues to become stronger as we're seeing a diverse field of games that are capable of producing fun and exciting experiences. Here's hoping that all of us find new favorites in the coming year.