Well, 2023 is behind us now. I suppose this is as good a time as any to look back on my blog for the past year and think about the way ahead in 2024.
2023 blog numbers
- Views – 36.6k (down ~5% from 38.5k in 2022)
- Visitors – 19.5k (down ~20% from 24.5k in 2022)
- Likes in 2023 – 867 (up ~20% from 722 in 2022)
- Comments in 2023 – 246 (up ~29% from 191 in 2022)
- Total Posts in 2023 – 239 (up ~70% from 141 posts in 2022)
- Most Popular Posts
- TTRPG Roll 23-6: The open death of Cepheus Engine, January 18, 2023, 586 views.
- Boardgame Bulletin 23-6: Reconstructing COIN with Robotech: Reconstruction (Strange Machine Games, 2023), February 28, 2023, 449 views.
- Wargame SITREP 230310 N3 Ops: Essential Harpoon? Naval Command: Modern Naval Wargame Rules (2021 Edition, Rory Crabb), March 10, 2023, 370 views.
About them falling numbers
Looking strictly at the view and visitor numbers one could say you see a blog in decline. As the one running the blog I would argue that the real condition is (unsurprisingly) more complicated. While overall views and visitors are down by as much as 20% as compared to 2022, the engagement by those fewer is up by nearly 30% by one measure. Put another way, the 24.5k visitors in 2022 generated only 913 “reactions” (Likes or Comments) for a “reaction rate’ of just under 4%. In 2023 the 19.5k visitors generated 1,113 “reactions” for a reaction rate of about just under 6% overall but up 50% over the previous year.
In retrospect, I directly attribute the decline in gross views and visitors to the end of automatic dissemination of postings using Twitter/X. I would like to say that the decline is also in part because of a general turn away from X by the gaming community but my numbers (as I will show you below) don’t necessarily support that conclusion.
Social media engagement
Going into 2023 one could set up a WordPress blog (like this one) to automatically share a post on Twitter. When X changed their API that free autosharing capability ended.
In mid-December I tried a bit of an experiment. On December 17 I published a Wargame SITREP on Blackhorse from Tiny Battle Publishing to four different social media feeds at nearly the same time. In the time since this is how that post has fared on each site:
- X (@Mountain_Navy; 1.6K Followers, 534 Following (~3:1); manual posting) – 3 Replies, 0 Reposts, 10 Likes, 347 Impressions, 35 Engagements, 4 Detail Expands, 0 New Followers, 0 Profile Visits, 17 Link clicks.
- WordPress Blog (rockymountainnavy.com; 102 Following, 121 Followers (~1:1.2); followers can have email sent on posting) – 148 Views, 5 Likes, 12 Comments.
- Bluesky (@rockymountainnavy.bsky.social; 71Followers, 97 Following (~.8:1); manual posting) – 0 Replies, 0 Reposts, 3 Likes.
- Mastodon (@rockymountainnavy@wargamers.social; 166 Following, 117 Followers (~1.4:1); automatic posting) – 0 Replies, 1 Reposts, 1 Likes.
While I don’t have hard numbers to show you here, the anecdotal evidence I will share with you is that most of the engagements across the three social media platforms are from virtually the same group of people. In other words, the user base of X, Bluesky, and Mastodon that engage with me on each platform are very similar. That leads to the question of what benefit is gained from sharing across multiple platforms. More directly, what are the advantages of efforts to post across three social media platforms when only one is needed to reach the audience?
Looking at the year ahead, while it is now a manual process I still am committed to posting links to my articles on X. In 2024 I will push to Mastodon (easy as this is done automatically by WP) but, to be brutally honest, at this point I don’t see much value from Bluesky and am very likely to confine my activity there to the minimum, if at all.
Blog plans for 2024
Sustain
Continued support to Armchair Dragoons. I support Brant and his mission over at Armchair Dragoons to spread the good word of wargaming. In addition to supporting with monthly #UnboxingDay posts, I also want to contribute at least one major article monthly if possible; in the past many of my History to Wargame articles have actually been posted at Armchair Dragoons.
Improve
Return of History to Wargame. I want to write at least one “History to Wargame” post each calendar quarter if not once every two months at a minimum.
Return of Weekend Family Game Night. This suffered for the past year as RockyMountainNavy T and myself adjust to RockyMountainNavy Jr. leaving the gaming clan as he went away to college. Both RMN T and myself are committed to renewing a weekly gaming event against each other. Of note, RockyMountainNavy T took up bowling with a vengeance in 2022 and I am committed to occasionally joining him in 2023. This likely means that whatever “time slot” the wargame/boardgame family game night occurs might need to compete/share with bowling. That said, my acquisition of smaller, lighter filler wargames may enable more games to be tabled during the week making up for a missed weekend gaming session. Hmm…
Return of Game of the Week. Previously I tried to bring a wargame off the shelf weekly and commit to a deep dive examination and play. In 2023 I hope to expand into using more boardgames and even an occasional tabletop roleplaying game. While my original objective was to do this every week (less holidays and vacations) the reality is twice a month is likely more realistic.
Return of wargame practitioner. Yes, I am still a frustrated wargame practitioner—somebody who really wants to be in and of defense wargaming but always seems adjacent (at best). In 2024 I want to write more “exposures,” i.e not necessarily reviews of wargaming practitioner-related articles or games but posts to draw attention to them.
Stretch
I have a growing shelf of shame for my model building hobby. I really need to get a few of those models worked off!
In 2023 I made the barest of starts on a SHADO/Space: 1999 tabletop roleplaying game using the Free League Tabletop License for the Year Zero Engine. As I don’t own any IP this is not a for-profit venture but more a way for me to explore the Year Zero Engine from a designer’s perspective.
Feature image “Space: 1999 Wargames” courtesy tenement01.deviantart.com
The opinions and views expressed in this blog are those of the author alone and are presented in a personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Navy or any other U.S. government Department, Agency, Office, or employer.
RockyMountainNavy.com © 2007-2023 by Ian B is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer 
Great results, fantastic engagement. And I admit, I enjoyed the “Weekend Family Game Night” reports very much – please put them back!
Thanks! Weekend FamilyGame Night is back in the plan for this year!
Getting that many page views on a blog is not easy these days. In the days prior to about 2007 I had a skateboarding blog that got 40,000 page views PER DAY. But getting people’s attention and getting them away for a social media outlet is really a challenge these days. So congrats. Those are great numbers.