Hey guys – it’s Brandon here, the owner and EIC of Niche Gamer. It’s been quite a busy summer since our last backer update – if you’ve been following our social media, you’ll know how much we’ve grown since then.
Our community and readerbase has grown considerably this year, and we’re sitting comfortably around the top 40,000 global websites on Alexa. Our social media has gotten even more popular, and we’re regularly breaking our own records consistently with shares and views.
First – the biggest news, we launched our own official store! It only took me like six years to get this thing running, but the response has been nuts! We’ve already sold enough to support the upkeep for the store, for many, many months. We’ll be introducing more merch with new and exclusive designs, and we’ll be offering freebies to you guys as well.
Our next project is a direct Patreon to Niche Gamer account system, which we’re already implementing and testing right now. The goal is for all backers to automatically get an account on our site, and for our site to disable ads so long as you maintain the ad-free backer tier.
That’s right – no more overhead on our end, no more waiting for pledges to be updated on our end, you get instant access to backer rewards on our site. We’re also going to be announcing some backer-exclusive rewards for our store, and periodic giveaways to backers as well!
For now, these features are likely only going to be for our Patreon, so we’ll be managing our Subscribestar backers manually with their accounts and similar rewards.
If you’re currently a backer on Patreon or a new backer and don’t have access to ad-free browsing on the main site here, simply go to our login button via the main menu (under community) and click “log in with Patreon”. From there you’ll be prompted to login, and both accounts will sync. If you’ve had an account on our site already, to sync your NicheGamer.com account to your Patreon account you simply need to log into here first, then log in via the Patreon button from the login in our main menu – this will connect both accounts.
Again, if you haven’t considered backing us – you’ll get ad-free browsing, exclusive Discord server titles, 24/7 exclusive chatting to our staff, alongside the above new features we have coming. You can also do a one time donation – over on our Donate page.
We’ll be offering a direct, Paypal-based subscription service just like our Patreon system. Stay tuned. This will also be rolling into the next project I want to talk about: our long-awaited anime/Asian culture sister site.
We’re finally preparing the final stages to roll out our anime and Asian culture website. You guys have been asking for it for quite some time, and the response to us running anime or Asian culture stories on Niche Gamer has been completely nuts!
We’re really excited to expand that coverage with another site directly connected to Niche Gamer – which your ad-free browsing pledge will cover too! That’s right – your login will connect to both Niche Gamer and our future anime / Asian culture site.
We’ve also been building a comprehensive backer / membership program platform that we will expand and add more value to over time. This will also be launching very soon, alongside the anime / Asian culture site, and will tie into your existing backer tiers. The more you support us, the more we want to give back to you with awesome new features and cool freebies, every month. Stay tuned as we finish this project up and reveal it shortly.
We also launched a new advertisement platform for our site, and as we fine tune things and work on pushing all of our content further – alongside the goodwill we have from the fans – we’ll keep growing. We’re getting more traffic, shares, and comments than ever before – regularly blowing passed our competition, both corporate and of similar budget to us.
We’re shuffling staff around right now, but we’ll be hiring a new wave of staff for both Niche Gamer and our anime / Asian culture site very soon. We are extremely choosy in who we hire, and we have an extremely thorough onboarding process as we always want to maintain a small, tightly knit, and passionate creative staff.
Again – we can’t do any of this without your love and support. We keep doing this and building upon what we have simply because we enjoy doing this, every day, even though none of us can do this full time yet. We’re hoping that can change soon with how much growth we’ve had this year, and how much support we’ve received from you all!
-Brandon Orselli
Founder, Editor-in-Chief
