Hey guys, it’s Brandon, the main guy behind Niche Gamer. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a direct message on here because we’ve been inhumanly busy most of the time. I wanted to combine this as both a Patreon update and an overall update for the progress of the website.

First, some statistics: Our numbers have been higher than they ever have been. We’re now in the top 70,000 websites in the world, and the top 27,000 in the United States. Daily, we get roughly 8,000-12,000 unique visitors, which usually translates to two article views per visitor, or 16,000-25,000 page views.

I want to make a point in saying that we have always had gradual, healthy, organic growth on the site – all because of you guys and our constant, regular updates and original content. We don’t chase after clickbait like content, and we typically don’t see huge spikes in traffic.

This next bit is going to be about our Patreon, our advertising, and the current state of things. I want to keep this as brief as I can, so please let me know in the comments if there’s anything you’re wondering about.

We’ve been banned from Google Adsense and most major advertising networks (outside the larger private ones) for awhile now. This is mostly due to us previously covering pornographic games, and allowing our users to literally post and say whatever they want. We had a few occasions where we got in trouble for even having Senran Kagura images on articles (with no actual nudity).

Please don’t take this as me saying us losing advertising is your fault – this is far from the case. Before I brought on Michael (our media and marketing manager), I was handling literally everything for the site. I made a lot of dumb mistakes, and I thought we could just do whatever we wanted.

Now that we’ve lost all viable forms of advertising, we’ve become totally reliant on our Patreon, and to make up for the difference in revenue, I’ve even started using my own money to help keep the site going. My personal situation can’t really enable this much longer, as I’ve been strapped for cash as it is with all of my bills and the income from my day job.

I’m here to tell you that the way in which we operate will continue, you can still browse the site as you have, but I’m hoping you’ll consider backing us on Patreon. To help reduce our costs and simplify things, we’ve removed all previous rewards and consolidated everything into a $3 advertisement-free browsing tier. We think this is reasonable and gives people unwilling to browse the site with advertisements an alternative.

To reiterate, we’re making almost no money on the advertisements we currently have, so if you can back us on Patreon, it helps us immensely. All of the money raised goes back into the website, not to pay my rent, buy us food, or anything like that. We’re all doing this for free more or less, and it’s been a struggle to keep up with our costs now that we’ve lost real advertisements.

Now that we’re getting caught up with our E3 2017 content, we’ve had a chance to look back at what’s working and what isn’t, and now we’re trying to focus on what you guys like the most. Please know that we’ll never take a stance against our community at large, and that my goal has always been to provide the latest, most accurate news and fun original content too. We’ve expanded our video content, our original content, all on a shoestring budget.

We wouldn’t be as successful as we are without your support, and I always hate to bug you guys for help, but we really need it now more than ever. We tried to offer reward tiers through our Patreon but we could never really keep up with the costs outside features on our website. If you want to see us keep growing and develop new features, please consider donating even $1 to our Patreon. You can check out our Patreon here.

Please keep supporting us, tell your friends about us, and remember:

Don’t believe in yourself. Believe in me! Believe in the Brandon who believes in you!

I love you all.