Four Years

Well, another year of blogging has come and gone. Well, not "gone", because all the posts are right there, but you know what I mean. I'm always proud of making it another year and this year is no different.

Long-time readers know this all started as a place to post my stories for what I believed was about 20 guys who read them on Bard's story group. There are a few more readers than that now with thousands of views every day (I can officially move from saying hundreds to thousands that now that I’ve consistently surpassed an average of 2,000 daily views for the past few months).

Why is this tweet leading my anniversary post?
Read and find out!

There’s a lot more here than stories, but they are still the backbone of everything. I think they’re what makes this blog unique from others and they are the purest expression of my passion for wrestling and heroes (who also wrestle). When Bard posted my first story seven years ago (Encounters: Flag vs. Flag) and it got no response, I'd never have guessed being here now.

As I've said before, it's lucky that I'd already completed The Cave 1: Meet the Bat, otherwise I would have just moved on. That was meant to be a trilogy, but comments led me to continue it and everything since then is all because of a few guys who took the time to say that they liked something. There's a lesson in there for everyone. I'm not saying that you should pretend to like things you don't, but especially for new writers and bloggers, you might want to be more forgiving of mistakes and more encouraging towards them.

The Cave might not have happened ...

... because my first story ...

... didn't get any response.

In terms of commenters, I appreciate all of you. Sean Pford is king of story commenters. He holds the record this year for commenting on every single story. Now that's dedication. I'm not sure every story was comment-worthy, but I'll take it! Next up were FricksSexyPics and Tom Ironranger, followed by JS, Axel, Phil, Mike, Muscle Lover, and Sharlin with multiple story comments. I also received 13 anonymous comments, plus Butch Angel, Gel2000no, mrider, Unknown, and Wrestestud all chimed in on a story, too. Amazing, guys. Thanks so much.

Year four has ended amazingly well. The comments on both January stories were amazing and a little overwhelming. To have anyone think my 165th story is my best ever is definitely motivation. In fact, the Beau vs. Keith sequel drove views of the original Beau vs. Toby story, propelling it past Cody vs. Buck to firmly claim the number one spot for last year. Cody will have to settle for second for 2018.

The reaction to Steve after the final chapter of BIGBeast: The New Guy is a great example of the life that these characters have taken on. It is remarkable to me, but very satisfying. I've created over 160 characters. For everyone who sees them as real people and reacts to them as such, you can only imagine how I feel. I like these guys. Even the jerks. Actually, as unreliable narrators, the jerks might be my favorites. Of course, many characters are based on real people that I know, but my affection for them is a lot more than that now. It’s definitely harder to make them suffer or do bad things or make bad choices, even though they kind of have to or there's no story.

A re-match inspired views of the first
battle, propelling it to #1 for 2018.

The power of character ...Steve's final
match increased his popularity.

As the characters have evolved, so has my focus. This isn’t Family Guy where the characters constantly change to serve a particular scenario. The plot and wrestling now exist to serve the characters. Of course, I do realize the primary reason most readers read the stories, but I think the success of both of Beau’s most recent stories show that strong characters make things hotter.

The years we've spent with guys like Xaq and Cody
makes every story with them better.

What’s New for Year Five?

This blog will mostly be the same. But I did think of one thing to try. So far, the only posts on this blog not by me are the incredible Fan Fiction posts. That 'might' change. It's still going to be my blog, of course. The vast majority of the content will still be created by me. But maybe there's room for the odd outside perspective.

Brody and Ram got some much deserved
love in their five-part Fan Fiction meet up.

In addition to providing a welcoming and supportive platform for my stories, Bard gave me my start with blogging. He let me share my thoughts as a guest blogger on Sidelineland. I really appreciated that, even though I found it very difficult and didn’t think I had much to say about anything. I wondered about doing that myself, so I took a small step in that direction.

Via email, I’ve invited eight different producers to share their thoughts, if they’re interested. The topic and content would be theirs to decide. The tricky part here is that I’m ceding control on my own platform. As much as I can put a disclaimer up (the views expressed here are not necessarily my own), I’ll take heat for wacky stuff that’s said. And so, I did set out a few guidelines, but I’d prefer their unfiltered perspectives as much as possible.

We’ll see where that goes. A few expressed interest right away, which is very cool. Hopefully that’s something you’ll enjoy if it happens. I don’t think I’m very good at interviewing people, based on the three Q+A’s I’ve done, but this would remove me out of the equation and maybe give us some interesting thought pieces from industry leaders.

The Numbers

It’s tradition that I share some data in the anniversary post. And so, here’s how things stand as of January 31 2019. Growth netted out at 10% year over year. Not exponential, but growth is growth. I should pass two million views in April, so that's kind of exciting. The second million will happen almost twice as fast as the first million.

Growth has slowed dramatically,
but settled in at a nice pace.

Demographically, not much has changed. The biggest shift is on the gender front where Google thinks 15% of my visitors are now female, up from 5% in year one. Now, this could be a function of the algorithms, which could be mis-identifying people due to their binary gender definition and stereotypes about behavior, but maybe there are women who like hot men wrestling, too.

There have been some changes on the visitor country list, but nothing major. The US is the source for over half of blog visits. The UK (6.4%) has passed Canada (5.7%) for number two. Australia's share of visits has more than doubled (5.1%) to be a strong number four. And Asia now places two countries in the top ten - #6 Philippines (1.7%) and #9 Singapore (1.3%).

On the technology front, more of you are accessing via smartphones. That percentage has doubled since 2015, mostly at the expense of desktop visits, although tablets have dropped as well. And of those smartphone viewers, more of you are coming here via iPhones, which make up 50% more of my mobile views than in 2015. In terms of mobile devices, iPads have the largest decline while Android share of views have dropped about 10%. I'll need to think about how that changes the experience.

I create horizontally, but more and more
people are experiencing The Cave vertically

I share updates in two places outside the blog. I still post links to new stories every 1st and 15th at Bard's old Google Group where all this started and I post about new reviews and such on Twitter profile (@AlexWrestler68). I'm up to 1,200 followers. That's pretty small in the big picture, but Twitter is now my largest single traffic source outside of Google.

Not surprisingly, the most viewed tweets are those that are shared. Muscleboy Wrestling has the strongest Twitter presence followed by Wrestler4Hire, so their tweets do best. BGEast and Thunders Arena have no Twitter presence, so my tweets about them rely only on my own following and the wrestlers involved (guys like Derek Bolt or Ty Alexander, for example, both re-tweeted me in 2018 and have more followers than MBW and W4H combined).

So, instead of posting my top viewed tweets which are all MBW (congrats), I decided to highlight the top tweets for engagement. Engagement rate includes things like re-tweets, likes, comments, link clicks, and media views expressed as a percentage of total views. As an example, my tweet on Derek Bolt vs. Quin Quire is my best with 1,500 engagements, 147 likes and 22 re-tweets, so that's huge for me, but it also has over 40,000 views due to Derek and MBW re-tweeting it. In comparison, my Cason v Cap (Custom) tweet has over 800 engagements, including 75 likes and 24 re-tweets on only 6,400 views.

The best Year Four tweet in absolute terms.

The best Year Four tweet for engagement.

Cason kissing a bicep was just very engaging, obviously. I know that I liked it. Interestingly, the next top five Year Four tweets on this engagement metric are all specialty content, not reviews.

Thanks for all your support, guys.

Alex