Since 2 January I’ve been working on an update of my bread and butter product, The Journal.
It’s not done yet.
BUT! The Journal 4.1 is now in testing. So it’s almost done.
I’m really looking forward to this update. I consider it a good sign when I’m adding features I can’t wait to start using. Since these are features that I wouldn’t have chosen to add without user prompting, it probably means my users are smarter than I am.
In March, I will be attending the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. And as I have for most of the last 6 years, I’ll be covering GDC for GameDev.net. I’ll have my nifty-keen Nikon D70s with me and making like I’m some kind of photojournalist in addition to being an indie game dev pundit (and general purpose smartass). Should be a lot of fun.
If you’re gonna be at GDC, let me know. Maybe we can meet up and chat. If they put the indie roundtable at a decent timeslot, I’ll probably hit it at least once.
With The Journal 4.1 and GDC behind me, I expect I’ll start working on the Paintball Net project full time, probably until the end of the year. I had planned to be doing that already, but, like all programmers, I seem to have been overly optimistic in predicting how long it would take me to get The Journal 4.1 into a release-able state. Spencer Boomhower, the lead artist for the Paintball Net project, has been working on the game, though, and doing a damn fine job with concept art and the initial player model. So the project hasn’t been totally motionless. Just my part.
“What’s the difference between RealArcade and Download.com? RealArcade has a list of their visitors’ emails and takes 70% of your money.” –Daniel Kinney AKA “soniCron”
“For the first time, a major publisher is offering a book online at no cost to readers, supported by advertising. HarperCollins is selling the book, “Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own” by Bruce Judson, through Mr. Judson’s site, brucejudson.com. An alert poster at MetaFilter.com noted that the publisher’s page for the book did not mention the free version. Despite the cheesy title, Mr. Judson, a fellow at the Yale School of Management, won accolades from Library Journal and others for his book.”
Looks like he started posting back in mid-January. Jeff’s been around the video game industry longer than most, and been a strong supporter of independent game development since the turn of the millennia.
His latest post is “Five Foundational Steps To Surviving As A Game Developer”. This reiterates a speech he’s given at least a couple of the Indie Games Con’s, but it’s still good stuff. I’ve always been fond of #1: “Right-size your life.”
“THE Internet has become a great place to track down friends — or friends of friends — for advice or for a date. Now you can ask them for money, too. Prosper.com, a start-up company based in San Francisco, started operations last week, offering a mixed brew of eBay, Friendster and the local bank.
“Prosper’s users lend money to and borrow money from other people on the site at what the company says are better interest rates than those available through traditional financial institutions and without some of the risk that comes from typical person-to-person loans.”
Read this example from the article and you’ll see why it piqued my interest:
“…Stephen Russell, who registered with the site during its testing phase, and who is the brother of a Prosper engineer. Mr. Russell, the chief executive of a San Francisco technology company, 3VR Security, has put up $25,000 to invest on the site. He has also started a group to lend money to people affiliated with the Climb High Foundation, which trains women in tourist destinations to become climbing and trekking guides.
“I’m not just optimizing the rate of return on my assets,” Mr. Russell said. “It’s also a way to facilitate lending that’ll help women in developing countries. That takes the lending and borrowing process one step further.”
I can envision a banking group that lends to independent game developers. The jury is still out on how much risk this type of lending investment will involve, but it’s a very intriguing idea.
This month’s Game Developer included a “State of the Industry: Casual Games” article. Did anyone read it who wants to share a summary? I got bored after the first 2 paragraphs.
Which leads to my question for today: Is Game Developer even relevant anymore? Not just to casual game developers, but to any game developer, anywhere?
I plan to attend the Game Developer Conference again this year (another industry tradition in danger of misplacing its relevance). I spotted Chris Hecker’s name as a speaker and plan to attend his session. I fondly remember reading his crunchy programming articles in GD back in the mid-1990’s. It was his articles more than anything else that made me get my first subscription to the magazine.
Now, though, unless you’re a complete industry fanboi, or one of the authors of an included article, you probably just skim the TOC, maybe read a product review, and then toss it on the pile. I’m not sure the magazine could get any thinner, but CMP has surprised me before.
Back in January I described my Simple Plan for 2006, which included the goal “Don’t check my email before 12pm (noon).” Though this sounds like a very specific, obvious goal, the thinking behind that goal might not be so clear, and I wanted to expand on that some.
For me, checking my email means focusing on the present, the right now, almost exclusively. Or to put it another way, each email becomes its own little fire that must be put out.
There’s a wonderful immediacy to putting out fires. An email arrives, you read it, you respond (or you file the information contained), and you check your email again. You never have to move your thinking outside the current moment. You just push the Send/Receive button. Now, if the emails coming in are payment notifications, with each one giving you a rush of positive emotions (money is like that), and you’ve established an addiction pattern.
And that’s why I had to implement my Simple Plan. It’s hard to make long term plans and strategic decisions, when you’re only thinking in the very short term.
I don’t want it to sound like I had become some kind of email crackhead, but I had made it harder on myself than it had to be.
I do my best work when I can focus almost exclusively on the task at hand, usually for at least 60-120 minutes. Email, though, arrives at any time, and email software has a myriad of ways to inform you of new messages–or even that it’s in the process of checking. And over the course of 2005, I had let email become a distraction, one that was affecting my productivity and even having an effect on long term planning.
So far in 2006, though, I’ve done pretty well. I generally don’t launch my email software until noon, when I take my lunch break. And during the afternoon, I just close the software when I need to focus (like while I’m writing this).
In a way, this ties back to the Accumulation is Necessary for Investment post, as well. Because pissing away your productivity each day doing nothing but fighting little fires, one after the other, or waiting for the next fire to happen, is much the same as spending/consuming every dollar of income. Either way, you’re sacrificing the long term for the short. Both investment and strategic planning require that you have a bulk of resources you can bring to bear.
And just to mention it, the other part of my Simple Plan for 2006 has also been working out pretty well. For some reason, getting up at 7am is much, much easier for me than getting up at 8am (my old goal, which I consistently sucked at). Go figure.
January 2006, as nearly every January before it, saw record new sales of The Journal. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that new sales were only 4% higher than January 2005 (versus 45% growth in January 2005, and 36% growth in January 2004).
This got my attention.
A Bit of Background
Historically, January is the best month for The Journal, as it rides the wave of New Years Resolutions to get organized, lose weight, finally start that novel, and so on. In fact, here’s the typical annual sales curve:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
January is the peak month, with February just a hair lower (the 45-day free trial period spreads purchases across a 2-month period). Sales slump into summer, where they are traditionally at their low point, and then begin a slow rise in August with the back-to-school crowd. This rise continues throughout the fall and into December.
In December 2005 I had early an warning that January 2006 might not see the same growth as previous years. For the first time in 5 years, sales from November to December actually fell (by 16%, comparing November to December) instead of rising or staying roughly even.
So, a bad December followed by a lackluster January. Ouch.
Yah, you can be assured I was doing some thinking this morning. Serious thinking, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.
Think, Think, Think
Being a programmer, my first thought, of course, was to look at the software. Maybe I had futzed something up and just didn’t know about it, something that Really Pissed Off new users such that they didn’t even bother to ask me to fix it. Or maybe I had waited too long to implement some requested feature(s). Or maybe I just needed to add one more really cool feature, one that would hook new users immediately and send sales through the roof!
Ah, daydreaming.
That wasn’t it. Not only has The Journal 4 proven very stable since its release in November 2004, but I’ve added my typical number of snazzy new features with each update. No, The Journal wasn’t dying from unknown killer bugs or lack of attention.
So I switched my programmer hat for my business owner hat and started looking at Web traffic. And I immediately saw the problem: From October to November, Web traffic to The Journal’s pages had dropped nearly 20%. Traffic had risen from November to December, about 10%, but that left traffic in December still below October, and at a time of year when traffic is usually approaching its peak. August had been good, and September was on par. October had been better. And then…plummet.
The hell?
The next question: Where was I losing my traffic? The answer was obvious immediately. The number of referrals from Google in November versus October showed almost the entire loss of traffic. Google referrals had dropped by 33%, and taken 20% of my traffic with it.
Damn.
And so then I start thinking and remembering, and after a quick search of The Journal (yah, I eat my own dog food; it’s good, really; I’m eating it now, as I write this post; <munch> <munch>) I had confirmation.
“You bit the hand, Marty! You bit the hand!” –Alex the Lion
I had started cutting my advertising budget on Google Ad Words, starting in late September, and continuing on through October. I had ramped up in August (back-to-school, remember?), but then started stressing the monthly costs come September, and so began inching back.
As the Governator once said: Big mistake.
Remember that 45-day trail period? And how it spreads purchases across a 2 month period? It spreads other things across a 2 month period, as well.
November kicked ass, showing a whopping 73% growth compared to November 2004. Evidently, November cashed in on the advertising I had paid for in August and September. And then December tanked, as the effects of the reduced traffic from Google really sank in.
In December I started ramping up my Google and Overture bids in preparation for the January rush. That, I think, is the only reason I saw any growth in January at all. On the plus side, it’s possible that February 2006 will beat January’s new record.
Conclusion
So what does it all mean? Besides the fact that Google and Overture seem to own about a 15%-20% stake in my business?
First, I think I need to diversify my traffic a lot more, and stop relying on search engines almost exclusively. In December I overhauled The Journal’s Web page to make it more modern and to improve its search ranking for the terms I pay for. That did have the benefit of reducing the cost of search engine traffic, as having a listing in the search results as well as in the sponsored links means that at least some of your traffic is”free”. That reduced my dependency on sponsored links, but didn’t help with the search engine dependency angle. I’ll have to work on it.
Second, I’ll try not to stress over the money I invest in increasing my traffic. I’ll budget more in the months where it makes the most difference, but the expense will always be there.
Third…I don’t know. Maybe there’s not a third that doesn’t relate back to the first: Build traffic independent of the search engines. Of course, I’m also open to suggestions from my readers.
