The Mane Quest Celebrates its First Birthday!
The Mane Quest website was launched on October 23rd 2018, exactly one year ago today. The site started out with 10 articles, many of them much shorter than most that have been published since.
In the past twelve months, the site was visited by thousands of people, from those merely looking for the origin of a fake game cover, over those interested in learning more about the movements of their Red Dead Redemption mounts, to those excitedly awaiting the release of a promising horse game.
For The Mane Quest’s first anniversary, I want to share some interesting site statistics, tell you all a bit about what this project means to me, and to ask you for your feedback.
A Year in Numbers
It has proven difficult to find other niche gaming websites to compare my visitor numbers to. I share insights into the TMQ statistics not only because I find them very interesting myself and am proud of what I’ve achieved, but also because I hope that these numbers might be useful to anyone trying to gauge the general public’s interest in horses in video games. And who knows, perhaps the next person to start a very niche gaming blog will at least have TMQ to compare themselves to.
In its first year, The Mane Quest had about 84 000 unique visitors who made up about 140 000 page views
The strongest month was September 2019 with over 12 000 visitors
Average weekly visitors have grown from about 500 in Fall 2018 to 2000-3000 in Fall 2019
There are currently 49 articles on The Mane Quest, averaging almost one post per week.
65% of TMQ’s traffic comes via search engines, 19% are direct visits and 14% comes via Social Media
The search term that has brought the most traffic is “very far away horse”, followed eventually by “jason kingsley”, “alicia online” and only then by “horse games”
The most popular article is Dressage Moves in Red Dead Redemption with just over 20 000 views, the runner up is Best Horse Games 2019 with about 11 000.
The least popular article is the Christmas 2018 post, which has become understandably irrelevant.
A bit over 40% of TMQ’s visitors are female, almost 60% are male. (Google Analytics offers no data outside the gender binary). Gender stats for individual articles vary drastically: The readership of the Very Far Away Horse Game article is 22% female, while the Equestrian Dev interview had 77% female readers, for example.
Almost half of TMQ’s visitors are in the 25-34 age range, with another 25% being under 25.
Over 40% of traffic comes from the United States, another 10% from the United Kingdom. Canada, Germany and Australia follow with around 5% of traffic each, with the Nordic European countries making up the rest of the top 10. My home country of Switzerland follows at rank 13, making up just over 1% of TMQ’s traffic. People from over 100 countries have visited the site.
A Year in Emotions
What these numbers do not convey is how much The Mane Quest has grown to mean to me. In many contexts, telling people you run a website about horses in video games comes across as at least a little bit silly. But for those of us who have had an interest in this subject our whole lives only to be constantly ignored and underserved by the gaming industry and gaming media, The Mane Quest is magical.
Over the past year, I have received dozens of emails, Discord introductions and Twitter DMs from people telling me some variation of the phrase “I have finally found my people!”
Considering how both gaming and horses are incredibly popular hobbies, it should not come as such a surprise that there is significant overlap between the two. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, there has never before been any sort of general community to bring these people together and let them know they are far from alone. It brings me immeasurable joy to be part of building up such a community and to get these reactions from people feeling right at home with us.
Even though the concept may sound a bit funny to some people, I feel immense pride and joy whenever I tell people about the website and the community.
If you are a reader of TMQs articles but not yet a regular on the Horses & Video Games discord server, I wholeheartedly invite you to join us and be part of this magic.
Funding
Although my work on TMQ is incredibly rewarding in many ways, it is at the moment financially unrewarded. I would love to make this website a bigger part of my life, to spend more time on it and publish more regularly, but I cannot easily justify reducing my job hours for a hobby that does not pay.
I am hesitant to consider adding advertisements to the site for various reasons, but I have been toying with the idea of launching a Patreon for The Mane Quest.
For those unfamiliar with the site: Patreon is an ongoing crowdfunding platform, where people can donate small amounts of money per month, or per piece of content, and get certain benefits in return. I have some ideas for possible rewards for patrons, such as getting to vote on which subjects I cover next or getting their names and pages linked on the website.
This is where I ask you, readers, friends and community members, for your opinion: would you be willing and able to support TMQ financially with a dollar or two per month if it might mean getting more regular posts in the long run? What factors would matter to you in order to consider such a commitment?
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments, on social media or send your opinion to alice@themanequest.com.
Outlook
When it comes to what’s next in store for TMQ, I always have a myriad of ideas and very little time. My lists of games to review, developers to contact and horse game trends to analyze is long and grows ever longer. Apart from articles I want to write, there are various related projects and ideas that keep resurfacing in my mind, such as allowing guest posts by other writers, putting together a proper horse game database, attending events and conferences for TMQ, and producing video essay content for YouTube. As always, my readers are more than welcome to let me know what type of content they’re particularly interested in!
For Year 2 of TMQ, I intend to keep writing and updating as often as time allows, while maintaining the quality I am happy with. Running this site, being part of the community on discord and reading your comments and opinions brings me incredible amounts of joy.
I still have every intention of proving to game developers and publishers that horse game lovers are an underserved audience, that we want and deserve good games about the subject matter we love, just as much as anyone who enjoys sports, car racing or gunplay.
Thank you for being along for the ride. Thank you for joining me on The Mane Quest.
Here’s to another year of good, good horse game content 🥂