State of the Union – the stats of Shoryuken

Posted by Kevin in Articles, Microsoft, News, Sony | 7 comments

Every now and then I send off a mass-mail to all the boys and girls who do a bit of writing for this here web shizzle. It’s usually rapturous, long and filled with self-complimenting rubbish that even the Oscars couldn’t touch. So today, I’ve decided to share some stats with you – the (very, in a lot of cases it seems) reader.

Hoo-rah, folks.

Yes, folks, it’s my first ever public state of the union address to the public of shoryuken.ie – strap on your boredom hats.

The history of this site is as bland as the history of some sort of vegetable. I registered a cool domain, and was shocked I got it from the EIDR (Irish domain registrar). My plan was to start a video game blog. No reason or rhyme to it other then to spout my crap about gaming, because I’m a fan. A lifelong one (so far) at that. I do enjoy my gaming, and I have every single bit of equipment necessary to play them. From consoles, to PC’s all the way to the big fancy TV and surround sound system. All barely ever used for anything other then games. But then along came some lads who ran other game sites in Ireland. They were pretty awful. I say were, because for the most part, these sites are gone. They asked people on forums and the like if people wanted to write for their awful sites.

So then I decided to copy them, except do it right. And a few good men willing to deal with the stresses of writing for a game site later, we had shoryuken “properly” launched in April to a few hundred visitors for the month. May came and went, and we doubled our hits. Then June, July & August doubled those numbers recursively. Then September came, and blitzed it. And now in October the stats show thousands of unique visitors popping on – and most of which come back! 65% of our hits come from direct links or bookmarks, which is amazing.

The boring stats are that 75% of you use Windows, ahead of Mac OS X at 16% and a load of random stuff afterwards – including some people using iPhones and PSP’s to visit, with a total of 35 hits since April via Sun Solaris operating system. The most popular browser is Firefox, closely followed by IE (most IE users are using IE6 – which indicates a lot of readers looking while at work!). All in all, pretty average stats!

Comments are harder to track because I changed the system during the summer – but there are a fair few comments to say the least. I would like more, of course, to spur on the creation of a dedicated forum – but I’m a patient man.

Anyway, I want to thank all of the readers who pop on and read our spooge. Most of us are untrained writers (hard to tell, I know…) and do this out of a passion for games and enough of an opinion to write to the masses. I’ve always said I want this site to be – above all – honest, and I think we are. Negative reviews have garnished some hate, strange stat patterns (my bad Need for Speed review, for example, had a huge number of hits from the developers’ forum) and importantly – debate.

We’ve gotten good relationships with PR people in Ireland. It’s a shame more game companies don’t come over and push their wares on us, but the ones who are here have been incredibly professional and a joy to deal with.. so as much as we need to honour our writers and viewers, the folks at the bold face of the industry need to be thanked too. They make it easier to do a site like this!

So the future, what’s that hold? Well, it’s likely the site will grow even more – we’re no longer doubling hits, we’re quadrupling them monthly which is a scary thought. We don’t generate any money (despite the google ads) but are having fun so the server costs are worth it. Hopefully we can move on to create more of a community here and I’d love to host events locally and get some charitable stuff going on as a way to use the site’s celebrity for good. I also expect some of the guys writing for the site to move onto bigger and better things within the games or journalism industry. Some talented folk write their stuff here. None of which are me, incidentally. I also expect myself to make more effort with the facebook page (I apologise for that!).

Anyway, I really wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved. Readers, writers, industry-folks and so on. As we come into Christmas this site will blow up even more, I hope & expect. Stick with us as we blow up, and hopefully give you all some good fun along the way. We will keep it honest, interesting and regular – you just keep showin’ up