Granted, when I was approached by AOL I thought they really weren’t much of a player in the online world any longer but learned my initial impression was way off base. Games.com currently receives about 11 million unique visitors on a monthly basis and ranks in the top 1000 websites in the U.S. and top 3000 in the world. Excerpts of our articles will be appearing on their site as TTG will be a featured news provider. The complete articles won’t be available, so visitors will have to come by TGG to read the entire piece.
I’ve been spending the last few days working on optimizing the site, on a variety of levels, in preparation for the massive increase in traffic we’re going to see.
That said, it really is a big deal and to respond to some inquires I received by email this doesn’t change anything as far as how we go about things here at TGG; what you’ve come to expect you’ll continue to receive. We’re still the small fry underdogs on the gaming scene regardless of how many people may stop by to check us out and the mentality of trying to do things a little differently and a bit snappier remains. In other words, all editorial control of the website remains in my hands.
What the partnership does do is provide a touch more leverage as far as what we’ll be able to cover in depth. I’ll be honest, there are plenty of companies and titles I’d love to be able to review which I just can’t due to mainly financial restraints – the same goes for all the guys involved with TGG – we’re working Joes so funds have to go to paying the real bills. There have been some companies in the past who, rightfully or not, looked upon TGG as minor league because we don’t pull in a million people a month to the site. Thankfully though there have been a whole lot more – and we’re not only talking about gaming – who take a look at the website see it’s pretty sharp looking and the content we’re providing the public, along with the opinions and reviews we’re putting out there, is something they’re very willing to support.
These are the companies who will still receive full focus from TGG because they’ve been in our corner all along! For the other companies where the reporting has been slim or non-existent, we may be able to get some more traction in order to bring along more coverage of their releases where we haven’t in the past.
I’m not going to fathom a guess what the AOL/Games.com partnership is going to end up in terms of visitor numbers. Truth be told, I’m a little scared because, as my friend Alan Emrich at VPG has told me more than once, success can kill you just as fast as failure. I really understand that line of thinking as while TGG has grown over the last two and a half years so have all the behind the scenes requirements to maintain the operation of the website.
As I mentioned on The Daily Dope yesterday, much of my free time over the last week has been spent on recoding much of the site and implementing changes to how the server operates in order to speed up the load times; I know if someone’s coming to the site, and it takes five to ten seconds for the site to load, they’re going to bail out and head somewhere else. At this point I believe I’ve got the loading time for returning visitors down to around two seconds; I swear I feel more like a web designer now than I ever have before!
While this new partnership will lead to some growing pains – mainly due to all the extra traffic to the site – this is going to be a boon for TGG in the long run. All I can ask is our followers stick with us on the occasions where keeping the site up and running smoothly takes precedent over getting the hottest news, reviews, audio or video right in front of your eyes.
This is pretty exciting stuff and the summer is going to be very interesting to say the least!
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This is great news, Jeff! Good luck to you and TGG.
Hermann