Yearly Review & Stats — How far we’ve come on our Mane Quest

As the year draws to a close, I want to take the opportunity to share some site stats and insights as well as a bit of self-indulgent rambling about this website and what it means to me. Last year, I did just that to celebrate TMQ’s first birthday in October. And then despite every intention of doing that again for birthday number two, the last several weeks have not permitted me to spend much time on TMQ work at all, due to personal and family matters.

So let’s catch up on that now: what has The Mane Quest been up to in 2020?

The Numbers

• There were about 200k unique visitors in 2020, twice as much as in 2019.

• Since its launch in late 2018, The Mane Quest has been visited by over 300’000 people, making up for over half a million page views. 

• April and May 2020 were the most active months on the site ever, with about 26k unique visitors each. I trust that the pandemic (lots of people sitting at home with not that much to do) was a big reason for these spikes.

• The rest of the year was quieter, with about 10-14k monthly visitors between June and December. It’s worth noting that that’s still a Year-Over-Year increase of about 50% in traffic, in the calmer months. 

Overall traffic on TMQ so far, since the site’s launch in Fall 2018

• TMQ’s traffic in 2020 still comes in large parts (about 43%) from the United States, followed by the UK with 12%, Canada with 6% and Australia with 5%. Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden make up ranks 5, 6 and 7, followed by Poland and Czechia. My home country of Switzerland has dropped to rank 25, making up for only about 0.5% of the overall traffic. 

• My most popular article by a wide margin remains the “Best Horse Games 2019” list with about 78k views, while the updated 2020 version hasn’t managed to catch up, with only 14k views. My article about Horse Isle 3 and its dubious community management has garnered almost 20k views, making it my second most popular article of the year. The Very Far Away Horse Game explanation article comes in third with a bit over 14k views, followed by my Horse Riding Tales review at 11k views. 

• The most popular search term this year was “very far away horse” with about 8k clicks, followed by multiple variations of “horse games”, “best horse games pc” and the like. 

• I got about 300 clicks from people searching for the term “homophobic horse game” and landing on my HI3 article, which I find absolutely hilarious even as I wish the situation with the game were different.

• There is now a total of 84 articles on The Mane Quest. I seem to have slowed down a bit this year, particularly these past few weeks. I hope I can make it up in quality over quantity. 

• TMQ’s main demographic are young adults: the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups make up for about 35% of page traffic each, according to Google Analytics. GA does not track underage users, but in the Facebook group we can see that about 15% of members are in the 13-17 range. I’m not sure how representative the group membership is compared to the site readership though.

• All in all, TMQ’s visitors are 51% female and 49% male. (Google Analytics does not account for non-binary genders)

• Many of my articles have slightly more female readers than male ones, with the Very Far Away Horse article being the big exception (80% male readers)
  

Traffic sources throughout the year. That pink referral influx in Spring was due to my HI3 article getting shared around on tumblr.

Age and Gender of visitors in 2020

The Community

• The Horses & Video Games Facebook group I started in late 2019 has grown to almost 6000 members and runs smoothly solely thanks to my wonderful mod team. Katie, Mirja, Breanna and Sarah, you are and remain my heroes for your tireless efforts in removing countless off-topic posts about whether or not someone’s laptop can run Red Dead. 

• Our Discord server is significantly more contained with a bit over 550 members at the moment, but the discord format allows for a lot of nuanced discussion that the facebook group cannot compete with. Our server regulars are a wonderful community for all sorts of talk whether it’s about horses or not. Once again I am grateful to my mod team: Sophie, Agent, Kalma, you’re the absolute best. 

• The /r/GamesWithHorses subreddit remains our smallest community branch with just about 330 members and relatively low activity. I do still share every article there, so if you’re a redditor it’s a decent way to stay up to date!  

Community Articles: In September, I launched a call for community content. I’ve received quite a handful of interesting pitches, and have been in contact with a bunch of you for outlines and drafts already. Unfortunately this too is taking more of my time than expected, and I’ve had to delay the actual launch of the “community section” that I’ve been planning. Stay tuned for updates on this in the new year. Things are happening, I’m just a bit slow.

The Progress and Opportunities

Last year I wrote of my intentions to start visiting more game conferences to represent and report for TMQ. As you can imagine, the whole pandemic situation made that impossible, with events getting cancelled left and right, including my planned visit to GDC in March 2020 which would have let me meet some of our valued community members in person for the first time. Fingers crossed that we can have in-person game dev events again some time in the coming year. 

Despite the lack of personal interactions, a few opportunities did come up: I have been in talks regarding potential consulting jobs for horse games. Unfortunately, I cannot yet make any promises for what will actually happen – game projects are always fickle in their pitch and pre-production stages. But what I can tell is that these days, if anyone researches the horse game market, they will inevitably find The Mane Quest and the work I do. 

I also know from one publisher that my critical review of their game played a significant role in a business deal of theirs – my voice is definitely starting to get heard. There is an audience here that wants content, and I have a decent overview of what these people want and what they usually get. I hope that in the coming year, that fact and the realization that there’s profit to be made here will gain further traction among game industry decision makers.  

I like to think that the “main quest” that my punny site title alludes to, is to demonstrate to publishers and investors in the gaming industry that there is untapped potential in horse games. Thanks to the growth of this website, its readership and the surrounding communities, there has definitely been progress on that front. 

An absolute highlight for me in terms of TMQ starting to make a name for itself was getting hired to write an article for Polygon. In case you missed it, you can find my article about the state of the horse game genre and the ingenuity of modders right here. 

I'm shipping out the first batch of Keychains tomorrow! I can now promise keychain + 3x stickers + 3x buttons + shipping worldwide for a total of 15$, paid via PayPal. DM me your address if you would like one, and I can send you a PayPal link. 😊 pic.twitter.com/WCesUUpA00

— The Mane Quest - Horses & Video Games (@TheManeQuest) March 26, 2020

Last year, I mentioned the possibility of launching a Patreon (crowdfunding subscription) to support the site financially. I have not made any more concrete plans on that front because having paying readers also increases the pressure on me in terms of regular output and giving people what they’re paying for. 

If 2021 brings more opportunities for paid writing or consulting though, I may be able to justify TMQ’s unmonetized existence as a promotional outlet for my expertise, so to speak, . 

My plans in that regard remain a bit vague to be honest – and that’s fine for the moment, thanks to my main job at AirConsole / N-Dream. 

I did start selling merch this year though, so if you want to get a shirt or mug (or socks!) with the TMQ logo on it to support the site, do check out our Redbubble store. I also still have plenty of enamel keychains to sell, more info on that here.

The Feelings

I don’t want to just repeat anything I said on this same subject last year, though everything is still very much true: I love the conversations and opportunities that running this website has lead to. I love all of you who hang out on the Discord regularly, those of you who teach me about real life horse matters and those of you who keep giving me insight into your own horse game niches and individual communities. 

Cheesy as it may sound, this website and the community surrounding it have quickly grown into something that feels more and more like a calling, a purpose. Something that needs to be done and I am glad I can be the one doing it. It’s a lot of work too, or course, and the bigger it grows the more I risk feeling like I’m not living up to expectations (my own or those of my readers) when my article output slows down. But I would not want to give it up for the world. 

Thank you, my lovely readers, my fellow Manequestrians, my friends, for being on this journey with me and supporting me along the way. Here’s to another year 🥂