Originally published at: XboxEra 2022 Wrap | A Letter from the Editor - XboxEra
For once, I’m going to be completely self-indulgent, and not talk about games.
Instead, I’m going to be talking about you.
Us.
Our…”relationship”.
I mean, we’re not ‘Facebook official’ or anything, but honestly, when it comes to XboxEra and you guys? Well, it’s a pretty big deal.
XboxEra was launched in 2019 as a small but ambitious podcast, focused on Xbox as a platform, and the games we play. As I look back at the growth we’ve seen across 2022, I’m not only humbled and more than a little proud – I’ve been completely blown away.
XboxEra.com
The heart of our operations, xboxera.com has become incredibly customised over the year, and it’s fair to say our brand identity has been well and truly established, thanks in a huge way to the incredible efforts of the wonderful art and design lead, Predrag. If ever there was an unsung hero of XboxEra, it’s him.
We’ve had over 920,000 visits across 2022, and while that’s great (considering we have zero advertising and minimal SEO training) we firmly believe that is one of our biggest focus areas for 2023.
Over the course of the year, we’ve written over 800 articles and reviewed 197 games. Huge shoutout to the news and review teams across the board, but particularly Jesse, whose efforts have been remarkable and maybe perhaps even inhuman. We suspect he’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil.
We also didn’t lose sight of our purpose – to serve and empower our community – and launched not one but TWO progressive web-apps.
DayOne, our GamePass focused tool went live in June, and of course, Forgera, which launched in November, empowering the Halo community to share, rate, promote their Halo Forge content.
There’s always room for improvement though, and we want to increase our readership in 2023 and we have several plans in place to get even more eyes on XboxEra.com throughout the Xbox community. Watch this space!
The XboxEra Forums
Launched at the request of the community, the forums have just not stopped growing!
Over 12.1 Million page views in 2022 alone (we average 1 million views a month), you guys have certainly been very chatty indeed! Our community has created over 1000+ new topics, we’ve seen membership virtually double, with over 1500 new people joining the XboxEra community ranks, making us over 3600+ members strong.
We see over 8,300 monthly user visits on average, and over the course of the year, you’ve all liked over 288,000 posts! Everything we do is driven by you guys, and we are incredibly grateful for your support.
YouTube, Twitter and our Podcast
What a year it’s been for all our content online!
YouTube, again driven by our video team (Jesse wears multiple hats!) has seen over 1,100,000 views in 2022 alone. Collectively, over 222,000 hours of XboxEra content has been watched – to put that into context, that’s like watching the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy (extended editions, obviously) 20,181 times. Bonkers!
Our Subscriber count on YouTube has increased by 4800, bringing us up to just shy of 16,000 subscribers. We sure do wish people clicked subscribe more! We’re incredibly proud of all the growth we’ve seen – we’ve made over 261 videos and streamed 169 live shows with 26.9 million impressions overall!
On Twitter, we’re now sitting at approximately 17,000 followers, and we love the interaction and fun we can have, both formally and informally across the platform.
Our main XboxEra podcast is enjoyed in over 45 countries across the world, and collectively across YouTube and audio platforms, has been listened to or watched 596,835 times. We’ve had some incredible guests, from our friends in the industry like MVG or Jeff Grubb, to industry legends like Jason Ronald, Ed Fries and incredibly, the head of Xbox himself, Phil Spencer.
Let’s gun for 100,000 on Twitter and YouTube in 2023, shall we?
Wrapping Up 2022
What can I finish with, other than this?
Thank you.
Thank you to our readers, our community, our friends and our colleagues across the industry in what became a pretty challenging year.
Particularly though, I want to thank my team. They’re all here, listed below. I, as has been shared, and I won’t go into it again here, had an incredibly hard, life-changing year personally, and everyone of the people on this incredible team made a difference to me. Helped me get through it. Made me smile. I owe this little remote family a lot of thanks – more than I can comfortably put into words.
It may be vain, but when I look at what we achieved with an incredibly small budget comparatively to our peers across this crazy industry, our quality of output, of effort, of consistency – is on par and often, in my opinion, outshines them in more than a few areas.
It makes me incredibly excited to think of where we’ll be when we close the gaps on where we need to improve. With your help, we can’t fail.
Happy New Year to all our readers, friends and families – 2023? Bring it on.
<3 Jon “Sikamikanico” Clarke
