This has been an unusual month, so let’s see what the numbers look like.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($498.00)
Art: ($313.93)
Advertising: ($52.00)
Paypal Fees: ($0.43)
Donations: $40.00
Ad Revenue: $1.14
Book Sales: $14.19
Total: ($826.09)
QTD: ($1,168.21)
YTD: $858.29
All Time: ($6,654.28)
As per usual, I try to list costs for art and stories under the month that the stories run on the site rather than when I pay them. I also cover Paypal expenses when paying authors and artists.
One of the interesting things for this month is that we did a crossover thing with Kerberos Productions. They were Kickstarting their new game, Kaiju-a-Gogo. We’re always excited when someone seeks us out to participate with something fun. In the interest of full disclosure: they offered to pay us, but we declined. It was something we would have done for free anyway, so it felt weird asking for money. One of the producers ended up donating money to us anyway. I’m not too proud to accept it.
Submissions
In May, we received 27 regular submissions, 8 of which are exclusives for the special call. Since the submission period hasn’t ended for the special call, I won’t include that in this month’s percentages. Of the 19 regular submissions, we accepted 8 (42%). It appears that as we’ve gotten more visibility, we’ve ended up with more submissions, but less submissions that we accept. Our all-time acceptance rate is now at 53.76%.
This gives us enough content for the site through early March 2015.
Social Media/Mailing List
I thought I’d include a new section this month. We have a lot of avenues where we try to make news of new stories available, and it’s always a little exciting to see them grow. Here are the numbers as of May 31st.
Facebook: 826
Twitter: 271
Google+: 37
Tumblr: 21
Mailing List: 18
The big takeaway is that it is stupid easy to advertise on Facebook. Twitter is finally catching up. The rest I haven’t taken the time to figure out.
Traffic
We’ve had an interesting increase in traffic. With the Kickstarter done, I figured that our traffic would actually drop. I’m guessing the money spent on advertising through Twitter has paid off. We had a total of 1,888 visits. Our traffic consisted of 1,222 users and 3,552 page views. Our highest daily traffic was 151.
Also, the changing terminology that Google Analytics uses kinda drives me nuts.
May’s search engine phrase of the month is “strategy of avoidance.” It’s a useful skill for mad scientists.
That’s all for this month.
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