Hey everyone – this going to be a combination of our June 2015 Patreon update, as well as our two-year anniversary recap.

First up, our spending for the month of June 2015 totaled $300, all of which went towards staff salaries, including the salaries for:

• Chris Gregoria
• Carl Batchelor
• Claude Smith

To be clear, we don’t get the full amount that you see listed on our Patreon, as not all pledges get fulfilled, and Patreon gets a cut of your donations as well.

We’ve shifted over our Patreon money to go towards staff salaries entirely, while our advertising money goes towards the Mika design(s), and our hosting costs. We’re also trying to streamline our Patreon a bit:

We’re going to drop the voting for new Mika designs in lieu of trying to get new designs out every month. Due to lack of or delayed responses, if we can focus on having fun, new designs each month – I think this will be more rewarding for the fans backing that tier on Patreon.

We’re also going to finally roll out our Niche Gamer Digest – however, we’re still not quite there yet. I expect that we should have our ducks in a row quite soon, but I want to make sure we can reliably and professionally deliver a regular newsletter to all of our backers.

Moving onto our milestones in comparison to last year, and when we first started, in the beginning of July, 2013. I managed to broker a deal that got us both the dot com version of our domain, as well as the @nichegamer Twitter handle. I won’t disclose how much either cost, but let’s say that it was a reasonable number, and both are major points that aid us in solidifying our image, as well as our name/brand. This helped us avoid legal involvement, and made both us and the seller happy.

We now own all three major Niche Gamer domains (com, net, org), and despite switching to an entirely new domain in March of this year, we are already below the top 100,000 domains in the world, according to Alexa. It won’t take us long to get back to our previous standings, which were below the world’s top 10,000 websites. Our growth is organic, powerful, and noticeable, because of you – our fans. I couldn’t be more thankful, or more proud, of how far we’ve come in only two years.

Our biggest milestone in terms of traffic was on April 8th of this year, when we broke 40,000 views for the day, with roughly 30,000 unique visitors. In comparison, our biggest day in 2014 was 25,000 views, from roughly 15,000 unique visitors. These are not indicative of our regular growth, however, as we are witnessing consistent growth, month over month. In comparison to our first year, our first and second anniversaries are mind-boggling:

• Year 0 (2013) Biggest Month: 12,000 unique visitors
• Year 1 (2014) Biggest Month: 150,000 unique visitors
• Year 2 (2015, so far) Biggest Month: 250,000 unique visitors

So we’re now getting roughly a quarter of a million unique visitors each month, with each visitor typically viewing at least two articles – this breaks down into half a million views each month. Our numbers are pretty consistently hitting at least 7,000-9,000 unique visitors a day now, which translates into 14,000-18,000 views a day. I want to reiterate that we don’t put money into advertising. We simply can’t afford consistent advertising on Twitter, Facebook, and so on right now.

When I first started Niche Gamer, I’d struggle to make 300 views in a day. It was only myself, while most people I knew questioned how I could ever make something like we have today. We now regularly get at least 300-500 views per article, so the focus on our quality of content and writing has never been greater. I am committed to delivering all of you, our fans, the highest quality content possible. Should we find mistakes, we’ll address them, however our goal is accuracy, quality, and timeliness.

This is all because of you guys – our fans, from all genders, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, ideologies, and countries. We now get visitors from over a hundred countries every day, and our articles cross-posted to our social media routinely get shared frequently. I cannot stress enough that our website’s success, and our success, is all thanks to all of you – the thousands of passionate fans that want a new gaming website that is made by real gamers, for real gamers, for the games that may not get all the attention they need.

Here’s to another two years, and then some. Let’s focus on growing our community, our coverage, and continuing to set a new standard for gaming press! We have a lot of stuff to look forward to later this year, and we’ll be making some exciting announcements as we manage to complete various projects, so please stay tuned, and keep supporting us!