This blog and WoW

Sorry for being a bit late this week answering the questions from the open Sunday thread. So I'll dedicate this day to just posts giving the various answers.

First point: Will the popularity of this blog suffer if I don't play WoW any more?

First of all, me not playing World of Warcraft doesn't mean I'll never post about WoW again. WoW is the dominating MMO in the western market, and there simply is no way to discuss MMOs and pretend WoW didn't exist. Every new MMO will be compared to WoW, various MMO news will be about WoW, and World of Warcraft being practically known by everyone makes a great starting point for discussion of game design theory.

The second fallacy is to automatically assume that I would want to maximize the number of readers of this blog. I don't. Quality is more important than quantity, because I do appreciate feedback and intelligent discussion, but have banner ads etc. up which would convert visitor numbers into cash.

Having said that, of course I do know that a WoW blog can get higher visitor numbers than a general MMO / gaming blog. Which is mostly due to the way Google, and other search engines, work. I could write the most brilliant post on MMO game design, and people wouldn't find it, because they are unlikely to search for the keywords I'm using. But if you write a WoW Warrior Guide, that is a keyphrase that a lot of WoW players are likely to search for, and thus end up visiting your blog. The more specific your subject is, the better is the chance to be found via Google. But if you tried to make Google give you a list of every general MMORPG blog, you'd be out of luck, because they might not all use the term MMORPG or MMO, and instead you'd find a lot of sites that aren't really blogs or are just fake blogs that just want to sell you gold and copy content from other sites to get Google hits.

I don't care. I created this blog to have a place to express and discuss my ideas, not to make money or to achieve some "highscore" of visitor numbers. If my interest in WoW temporarily wanes, that means I'm not only less interested in playing it, but also less interested in talking about it. I won't create WoW posts just for the purpose of attracting visitors. I will create posts mentioning WoW when appropriate as a point of reference for whatever I do want to discuss. There is no WoW boycott going on here, not like for "Game-That-Must-Not-Be-Named".
- posted by Tobold @ 10:00 AM Permanent Link