Blizzard Watch: The state of the site as we head to the end of 2023

It’s been a tough year for Blizzard Watch, particularly in the last half of the year when reduced advertising revenue forced us to drastically cut down on posting. You’ve probably noticed that we’re only doing a couple of posts per day, because that’s all the budget allowed. But as we head to the end of the year, things are looking pretty good for the site — and that’s thanks to you, our community.

You probably read our call for Patreon support to keep the site running, and I wanted to update you on how things are going now. With your generous help we’ve managed to boost our Patreon to $4,781 per month which is a little shy of our $5,000 per month goal, but will allow us to increase our daily post count and write more long-form articles. While news is usually light through the holiday season, you should see more posts on the site during December, which we intend to maintain into 2024.

But we aren’t just relying on Patreon. We’re also working to boost our ad revenue, which I hope will bring the site back to where we were before we hit this crisis. For more details on what we’ve been able to accomplish over the past few weeks, I’m going to hand things over to Dan O’Halloran, who has worked alongside us at Blizzard Watch and WoW Insider before that. You don’t see his name on the site except to post our podcasts, but he handles behind-the-scenes business and administrative functions for the site. Here’s Dan:

A deeply heartfelt thank you for everyone who either subscribed to our Patreon or increased their subscription tier. That increase in monthly Patreon money will help us keep afloat while we work on acquiring new ad partners. Also, I know many of you were not in a position to contribute monetarily and we very much appreciate the kind messages of support you sent us.

As you might have seen, we have a new ad partner in place for the site. We are very glad to be working with them as they specialize in ads for the gaming community. There will be a few hiccups as our ad partner tries different configurations so if you see anything odd or out of place (i.e. autoplay video ads with the sound on) please let us know. We have also signed up with an ad provider for our podcasts, which we hope will offset the costs of producing 8-10 podcasts a month.

We will be keeping an eye on the ad loads vs. user experience so let us know how we’re doing anytime.

Thank you all for your support: it’s literally what will allow the site to continue into the new year. Whether you back us on Patreon, listen to our podcasts, hang out in the Queue, or just read an article here and there, I’m so glad you’re here with us. Thank you for reading.

If you have feedback or you’d just like to chat, please join us on Discord or reach out by email at [email protected].