craddoke said:
My point, I suppose, is that this series will probably never click with the core demographic of the escapist magazine and that's not really anybody's fault. If the site managers want to keep the series here for personal reasons, I totally appreciate that and will be a loyal viewer for as long as it lasts. Hopefully less and less people will feel the need, though, to announce publicly that they're not the target audience by denigrating either the game to which they owe their digital fun or Zac and his friends who probably get more than enough shit from people for their day jobs.
I want to leave aside any discussion of the dungeonmastering, video editing or film-making of the show - which I leave to people with more expertise than I -- and just respond to this point about whether this will "click with the core demographic". The Escapist is growing at 2-3% per month. Our 36-month growth rate is over 700%. That means the core demographic is constantly changing. The core demographic who visited the site from 2005 to 2007 is different than the visitor from 2007 to 2009. The visitor today is different than the visitor in 2009. Many of our 2007 hardcore audience complained that we were ruining the site when we added Zero Punctuation.
When we launch new types of content that is different from what we're already delivering, it's not because we don't understand our audience. We knew, for instance, that the same audience that liked ZP would also like Unskippable. But reaching the same audience has its limits. The Escapist already serves more page views per user than virtually all of our competitors. The Escapist's readers already spend more time on site than virtually all of our competitors. Our hardcore users already complain that we have too much content, i.e., they don't have anymore time to spend with us.
So with "Axe," we aren't necessarily trying to reach the people who are already coming here. We're trying to reach new people with something we think is cool. People that are coming for ZP... are already here and watching ZP. Sure, some of those folks will like the show, but we want to reach the people we aren't reaching but who might dig this show.
And it's not a zero sum game. When we grow, we get more resources to do more shows. We have more content now then ever because we keep growing our audience.
It's thus ironic that while some forum-goers here are trashing I Hit It With My Axe because it's not for them, the show has gone on to have the strongest premier we've had in over a year, and the first show we've ever launched that has more traffic off-site (embedded and virally circulating) than on site. We didn't do any marketing for this show on The Escapist. No teasers, no ads, no banners. Instead, this show is going viral on dozens of blogs all over the web. It's being enjoyed by folks who hadn't heard of us yet. That's a good thing, an awesome thing. Meanwhile, 0.6% of the people who saw the video are on the forums, i.e. not even 1 in 100 folks.
So, if you don't like D&D, or reality shows, then the show is probably not for you. No worries. Just like if you don't have a 360, our 360 reviews are probably irrelevant to you. That's why we have something like a dozen shows a week, so there's something for you somewhere.
