Shacknews LoL

Today marks four years since I became CEO of Shacknews. Each year I like to look back at how we are doing and highlight areas where we clearly differentiated our company from the increasingly competitive games media landscape.

Millions of people have visited Shacknews.com this year. Year-to-date, our monthly unique visitors are up 55% compared to the same time period last year. We set all-time monthly unique visitor records all summer, and are poised for our best Holiday season ever.

YTD pageviews are up 59% year-over-year, while Chatty pageviews declined 17.66% in the same time period. Chatty is still the most viewed page on Shacknews.com at the time of this thread, but we have many guides with a ridiculous amount of views this year.

Our most viewed article of 2018 so far is:

Cooking Ingredients and Recipes in Pokemon Quest
https://www.shacknews.com/article/105180/cooking-ingredients-and-recipes-in-pokemon-quest

We introduced Shacknews Electronic Sports to the world at E3 2018 with our first ever Shacknews World Championship. We conducted developer interviews on live stream stages at PAX East and E3. We also held our first annual The Great Quakeholio Tournament at QuakeCon 2018. Our presence at live events will be expanded next year.

From a content standpoint, we have reviewed more games this year than in 2017 and we are producing some of the most spectacular content I have seen since I bought the site. Beneath a Starless Sky is David's latest masterpiece and Greg deserves high praise for his work bringing 24 'Til Launch to life. We have also been streaming with regularity on our Twitch channel. Shacknews has been on the front page of Twitch several times this year and shout out to Chris and Charles for their contributions to our channel.

I have previously described myself as the Inexplicable CEO of Shacknews, but I think after four years in my role here makes more sense. I am keeping Shacknews alive financially every month because that is what I want to do. When I bought this place, it was not built to be self-sustaining anymore. A huge challenge for all websites today is the shift away from display ads to other forms of revenue generation. As our site has hit major unique visitor milestones for our company, my focus shifts to growing our revenues in the next year. I am still acting as editor-in-chief, but I feel that the team I have assembled understands what I expect to the point that I can wear my CEO hat more often than not.

The redesign we pushed in August provided huge functional updates to the front page, and we are currently working on our next development phase. My top priority at this moment is to launch Mercury with a better value proposition for our readers. I have truly pressed the reset button with respects to revenue in the last few quarters, and I look forward to growing our company through a new and easy to use subscription-based model.

Once Mercury has launched, I will turn to the last phase of this current redesign that has been labeled Teal Shack. I will provide Shackers a way to express themselves like never before. I have been deeply involved on all design aspects of the redesign, and this last phase will be one of the biggest things to ever happen to Shacknews. We are still working on some of the bugs we created, and I can't wait to share more with you folks.

Shacknews celebrates its twenty-second year this year. We have set traffic records, but more importantly we have found our voice in the games media. We are going to do cool shit. Period. I have a vision for where we are going, and I am determined to get us there. I want to thank everyone of my Shacknews staffers for being an amazing team. Thanks to everyone here on the Chatty (even you filthy lurkers) for your support. This place needed a Briefcase Man, and I am happy to do it for Shacknews.

https://twitter.com/technosucks/status/1014601365623099397?s=21

Happy to announce that Shacknews has booked a young pancake enthusiast, Marc Rebillet, for an upcoming event at E3 2019.

Holy shit, I'm so excited to share this with everyone! Here is a commercial I am in!! I'm the dude!

https://youtu.be/D0so5KAjH3A

Omg, I've been so nervous about this, but it turned out pretty awesome! It was so much being a part of this, but man, did I feel bad throwing that pitcher of water on that nice girl!

Well this is fucking crazy. The building the shop is in is currently owned by the local hospital. Our property manager who's really awesome and a customer of ours called us this morning saying the hospital is unloading a bunch of the properties it owns and offered to sell us the building and property. At first we were like "uhhh" thinking it was gonna be some outrageous amount, but instead she started off at 45k then quickly went down to 40k then said they just want to unload it so make an offer as long as it's not 15k.

We offered 30k and she accepted it.

That's fucking insane. So if all goes well we'll not only own the business, but the actual building as well.

We've been saving for a house so we've got the funds on hand, so we can buy it outright.

Best part is we could totally sell this place a few years down the line and get way, way more for it than what we're paying. Investment baby!

The [lol] tag is 10 years old today!

On Jan 26, 2007 I was sitting at my desk during my last week working for the industrial automation company that I spent the last 15 years at, and had given notice to a week earlier. I was doing documentation and running out the clock when boring gegtik posted an idea (that he had apparently stolen from voodooraze ... lol).

http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=13730954#item_13730954

I had created a Greasemonkey script called Shacknews Soul Sucker Filter which did the same thing as the [ugh] tag did -- let people downvote posts and automatically collapse them if a set number of people agreed that the story was soul-sucking -- and realized I could take that script and whip up what boring gegtik voodooraze suggested in an hour or so, so between other things and lunch, I threw together the first working version of the script.

Since then, we've apparently smashed that button over 2.4 million times.

Year      LOL      All Tags   Tag Growth

----    -------   ----------  ----------

2007     87,272       87,272      87,272

2008    173,173      182,104      94,832

2009    153,539      178,536      -3,568

2010    162,412      216,850      38,314

2011    158,869      235,565      18,715

2012    236,047      365,840     130,275

2013    332,429      523,610     157,770

2014    347,735      557,375      33,765

2015    386,044      617,217      59,842

2016    372,068      641,151      23,934

      =========    =========

      2,409,588    3,605,520

Crazy. 10 years. :D

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Cancer Update: Remission Edition

I'm officially in remission. I still have another round of immunotherapy, but the path to transplant is clear.

Thanks to everyone who have sent kind words and support.

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I’m just so absurdly excited for this guys!!!

Two years without a drink today 🚫🍺, and I just turned in the last assignment to finish my Bachelor's in Human Services w/ a substance abuse counseling concentration and psychology minor. To celebrate, I'm eating pulled pork and enjoying time with family, and I might even treat myself to some Quake when I get home. Feels good, man!

So many of you were supportive of me through this whole thing, and that really helped to keep me going when things got overwhelming. Thank you so incredibly much!