The Escapist Snags 1 Million Visitors

[Archon]

Thanks everyone for the kind words!

About our relative size, we are quite aware of exactly where we stack up in the taxonomy of the web.... Compete.com shows Escapist (100,000 readers, presumably daily) as being larger than both Gamebanshee (79,000) and Gamernode (59,000) as well as Gamasutra (90,103) and Next Gen (46,000). We are at half the size of Gamershell (219,000), and of course far smaller than giant Gamespot (4MM) and Gamespy (1.4M). But we have grown 1850% in the past twelve months, while Gamespot is down 12%, Gamespy is down 21%, and Gamershell is up only 1.4%.

Additionally, our one million readers have far more demographic similarity to a Gamasutra/Next-Gen type site (well-educated, professional, game dev or journalistic ties; influencers...) than they do to a youth-oriented gaming blog. That puts us in a very happy place.

Put another way: Reader's Digest has a far larger monthly readership than The Economist, but if you asked me which magazine I'd rather publish, I'd take The Economist. We have a similar philosophy with The Escapist...

 

[Archon]

A raise buys more whores. Case closed.

Puh-lease. A raise buys him more *escorts*. Let's not be crass, people.

 

[LyonLee]

Congrats folks,
This place has quickly become my premier site for game news and truly interesting and well written articles. I usually can't wait for new articles every tuesday. I just hope you don't think you can relax and start goofing off.

 

[Lance Icarus]

A raise buys more whores. Case closed.

Puh-lease. A raise buys him more *escorts*. Let's not be crass, people.

Okay, so I guess his *escorts* will teleport into the room?

 

[Jakeb Smith]

Congratulations guys. I've been plugging the hell out of The Escapist in my magazine, in the hopes of raising the profile of intelligent, reasoned debate. You're a glimmering light in a sea of sensationalist pop culture.

 

[Zera]

Excellent achievement Escapist. I'll admit I at first came for Zero Punctuation, but stayed for both. I didnt know such a site like this existed, which looked at video games in a professional perspective. Here's to hoping for the 2 million mark and that this site would reach the masses(or not depending how you see it).

 

[Kronopticon]

Congratulations guys. I've been plugging the hell out of The Escapist in my magazine, in the hopes of raising the profile of intelligent, reasoned debate. You're a glimmering light in a sea of sensationalist pop culture.

in the words of yahtzee, The Escapist "is a beacon of excellent" gaming "philosophy in the dark wild piss-stained swamplands of the gaming industry", again, congrats, there is probably not another gaming magazine with the same kind of philosophy that gets this amount of attention. well done.

 

[Archon]

Brother None, it depends on what you mean by "top-tier". I think we are simply semantically in disagreement over whether "tier" is purely a matter of volume, or if its volume x awesomeness.

If your definition of top-tier is purely based on readership volume, then I see where you are coming from.

But if your definition of top-tier is some combination of number of readers, quality of audience, access to sources, quality of content, and professional reputation, then I would argue that The Escapist is now absolutely top-tier.

Again, as an analogy: If I start a sports-car company and sell 1 car, I can't claim to be top-tier. But would anyone question that by the time you sell as many cars as Porsche, you are top-tier? Even though your sales are dwarfed by Toyota?

And no, Compete isn't by itself reliable, but neither is Comscore, Nielsen, Alexa, or anything else. The very question of accuracy, though, is an interesting one. What exactly is "accurate"? At the end of the day, a server isn't accurately measuring readership either, it's just measuring IPs or pageloads. No one can telepathically measure eyeballs. It's not clear that internal server statistics are the best measure of accuracy, because they can be misled by variant IPs, multi-users from one IP, spiders, and so on. I think of all these sources as radar, sonar, infrared, etc. - each gives you a sensor reading and then you have to use them all to compile a best guess of what's going on.

So for what it's worth, Alexa, Quantcast, and Compete all show Escapist as considerably larger than Gamebanshee. If the folks at Gamebanshee are really twice our size, they should probably consider optimizing to adjust the way their traffic presents itself on public measures, as that's what sells ads. I don't read their site so I can't speak to its quality, access, and reputation.

I'm not sure what to say about Gamespot. It struck me as anomolously large as well, but on the other hand, editors don't always know their own traffic. But when it comes to something as big as Gamespot, does it really matter? When someone says "The Death Star is as big as a moon" do you care if the moon they mean is Luna, Io, Europa, or Ganymede? The point is, it's big enough that you have to aim for the thermal exhaust port.

 

[Russ Pitts]

Stay on target.

 

[Archon]

I'm in range! Target's coming up. Almost there...

 

[Archon]

You think my definition is muddled? Hmmm. Think about this: When we launched The Escapist, a lot of people told us we'd never reach more than 50,000 gamers per month. "There just aren't that many smart gamers who want intelligent games journalism." And, as good as we might be, at 50K readers per month it's hard to claim that you're in the top tier.

But when you take that same quality and reach 1 million, I think the equation changes. If that seems muddled to you, well, since you so kindly granted us top tier status on quality anyway, I don't feel I need to worry about that much.

 

[Kronopticon]

You think my definition is muddled? Hmmm. Think about this: When we launched The Escapist, a lot of people told us we'd never reach more than 50,000 gamers per month. "There just aren't that many smart gamers who want intelligent games journalism." And, as good as we might be, at 50K readers per month it's hard to claim that you're in the top tier.

But when you take that same quality and reach 1 million, I think the equation changes. If that seems muddled to you, well, since you so kindly granted us top tier status on quality anyway, I don't feel I need to worry about that much.

i like the idea that gamers arent smart, a lot are, unfortunately, i have to agree that there are also a lot of gamers who think their smart, no offence to anyone, but some aren't, although most of these people seem to have been singled out and blocked form this site, which causes me to congradulate The Escapist further, as it runs a fine ethic boundary, singling out those who take this website for granted. Or for idiocy.

 

[Russ Pitts]

Just a few more seconds ...

 

[Girlysprite]

I got lured in by yahtzee (by the heavenly sword demo) and stayed because I noticed the forum where it was possible to have more or less intelligent discussions.

 

[WanderingTaoist]

It doesn't seem that long ago when I stumbled across the very first issue of The Escapist. Ever since then I'm looking forward to Tuesday afternoon (GMT timezone). So glad you are still alive, well and thriving.

 

[hickwarrior]

I think your success is thanks to yahtzee. But that's just me.

Also, your articles are a but hard t oswallow for me, which makes me feel rejected by it. Then again, i just finished high school, or whatever you guys call it.

Oh yea, i come from the netherlands and just came for zero punctuation, which, i think, is what i have registered for(to comment, cause any other thing is kinda pointless).

Also, you say you have all the info that's on this site, is in a magazine? Then i have never seen it(must be because i live somewhere else then in the UK or whatever english talking country there is.).

and i don't think i get the philosophy of this site. Is it to make gaming discussions of sorts? kind of confused here. Or am i in the wrong thread?

Anyway, keep up the good work and hope you'll keep growing(in favor of ZP ).

 

[Kronopticon]

I think your success is thanks to yahtzee. But that's just me.

Also, your articles are a but hard t oswallow for me, which makes me feel rejected by it. Then again, i just finished high school, or whatever you guys call it.

Oh yea, i come from the netherlands and just came for zero punctuation, which, i think, is what i have registered for(to comment, cause any other thing is kinda pointless).

Also, you say you have all the info that's on this site, is in a magazine? Then i have never seen it(must be because i live somewhere else then in the UK or whatever english talking country there is.).

and i don't think i get the philosophy of this site. Is it to make gaming discussions of sorts? kind of confused here. Or am i in the wrong thread?

Anyway, keep up the good work and hope you'll keep growing(in favor of ZP ).

youve just finished high school...? im still in high school(for my last year mind you), regardless, i understand these articles perfectly well, then again, we're all different arent we, the philosophy is intelligent "game/gaming industry/gaming culture" discussion, although, i might be wrong, basically, its a place for smart people to make smart comments about smart things, smartly, and i must admit, some sections are quite sketchy and elusive, you just have to keep brushing up on your vocabulary.

Yes, kind of the wrong thread to explain things like that really, but meh, we all love The Escapist for these very facts. Oh, and by the way, i believe The Escapist is australian?

Well done, again...