Good Morning Friends! Today is the first official day of Blaugust and we are already starting to see a great number of posts trickling out into the ether on the #Blaugust2022 hashtag among other sources. If you are curious about what Blaugust is, you can check out the official announcement page. However, if you don’t want to click through at its core it is a festival of blogging designed in part to spur folks back into regular blogging. It began its life as a challenge to try and get people to blog 31 times during the month of August. Over the years it has morphed and changed as needed and now is more a general stirring of activity with the hopes of keeping the fires of blogging lit. Every year we get a new think piece talking about how blogging is dead, and we serve as an anachronistic wall attempting to keep it all live.
I know for me my blog ceased to become something I did for others and now is something I do for me and my own sanity. My blog is effectively a daily journal of what is going on in my life and helps to serve as a temporal anchor. So often every week looks like every other week, but when I commit my thoughts to the blog, I can always go back in time and find out when this item happened. From there I can often reconstruct a matrix of sorts of events that happened in sequence near each other. Generally speaking, if something was significant, I probably wrote about it. So this blog started in 2009 and captures the death of family members, the arrival of new pets into my life, and all sorts of other key events that I might want to remember at a later date. Which I guess is weird considering all of this started its life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog.
I often listen to YouTube videos as though they were podcasts while doing other things, and last night I listened most of the way through “The Truth About MMO Content Creators” by Josh Strife Hayes. In the video, he gets a good number of YouTubers that over MMO content to sit down and answer some questions. Towards the end of the video, he tackles the concept of whether or not to specialize and this really hit home for me. This is a topic that I see coming up almost every Blaugust, especially as folks start new blogs. Essentially there is a double-edged sword that if you specialize in a specific MMORPG or other game, you are likely going to inherit a baked-in audience of folks who are interested in content about that game. If you really get engaged with that community it might even open up other opportunities for special content creator events or maybe even further down the line… some sort of official community management position.
Those of us who have been at this blog game for a while have known MANY bloggers who have eventually found their ways into the ranks of a specific game company that they were covering. It is absolutely an exit strategy from blogging that can and does happen. However, I took the other path because I knew that as my own interests changed if I was going to keep a blog going… the blog itself needed to change with me. The life of a generalist however is a weird one, because people have to essentially stick around because of you… instead of the content that you happen to be creating at a given time. I have a massive bounce rate among my readers because I tend to go through periods where I hyper-fixate on a specific game and create a significant amount of content for it.
So if we take Outriders for example as a random game that popped into my head. When I have been going through one of my periods where I am playing a lot of it, I might legitimately write something about the game every single day. During these periods of fixation, this means that someone might stumble across my posts and follow me because they too are super interested in this game. However, when eventually I move on to talking about something else, it can lead to a pretty jarring experience when I randomly shift to talking about building things in Minecraft for example. To the consumers of your content, you are often viewed as a monolith attached to a specific topic that they first engaged with. I’ve seen this play out not only in my own audience but in the audience of countless YouTubers that shift between games.
A prime example of this playing out is something I have seen with the YouTuber Demone Kim. I originally started following his content when I was super into Genshin Impact and then as I lost interest in that game I stopped clicking through to his videos quite so much. I know when he too fell always from the game he got a good deal of backlash from the Genshin community for abandoning the game that made him popular. When he shifted to New World and I eventually caught back up with his content, it was a regular occurrence during his live streams of someone popping in to berate him for not playing Genshin. Then again when he shifted from New World to V Rising… the same happened but this time with New World fans. The more tightly you associate with a specific game the harder it is for you to eventually pivot and move away from it.
I went through my own version of this when I stopped playing World of Warcraft for the first time and transitioned in a big way to Rift. I know my Twitter account lost what felt like half of my followers when I started talking about how great of a game Rift was. At this point, I am some thirteen years into this journey and have come to the realization that if someone is still reading my content, it means that they are here for me. If they wanted to jump away I have given them countless reasons over the years to stop reading. I realize that I will never reach the level of saturation that a devoted blog might get, but I also know that my content will effectively remain evergreen for those who are interested in it. So essentially the choice between being a specialist and being a generalist is that you are either pinning your fate to the success of a specific game or franchise, or you are taking a chance on folks sticking around for you the person behind the screen tickitytacking away at the keyboard.
There is also the distinct possibility that folks stick around here for the eventual adorable animal photos as well. So with that, I welcome you all to Blaugust. As always if you want more information about the event then check out the announcement post or the media kit page that has all of the relevant links. I am trying to keep my blog roll updated with all of the folks running in the event but given that there were four signups while I slept, I am certain to be lagging behind. There is still plenty of time to join in this nonsense and I look forward to seeing the overwhelming flurry of posting. Thanks to everyone who shows up and makes this event interesting each year. You, fine folks, are Blaugust and I am merely the person who lights the fuse each year.
My writing output swings between reviews and opinion, to what is essentially a form of online therapy. But that’s fine. If the hat fits, wear it.
Over the years, I’ve done both.
I think arguably I had more success (as measured by viewership/engagement metrics) when I was dedicated to WoW, writing things like UI setup guides and the Warrior tanking guide in shifting from Wrath to Cata and what it meant for stats, even had that latter one linked to from WoW Insider and I’ve never seen viewership like it, nor will I probably ever again.
But when my interest in the game inevitably wanes — it generally led to the demise of the blog in my case. My first ‘major’ blog was called Tank n Tree — not only specific to WoW, but Prot Warrior and Resto Druid specifically. But over Wrath was my main time being hyper interested in alts!
I learnt my lesson after TnT though, and my next blogs were more general. I was certainly happier with them as a writer, but yup… Definitely sacrificing the access to the built-in audience of the game by heading down that route.
I think ultimately, my advice on this would be, even if you want and intend to focus on a singular game — give your blog a name that would allow you to expand its content in the future should the need arise. (Because eventually, if you go on long enough, it will. ;))