Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of TabletopGamingNews.com, and we hope we’ll still be around to celebrate it.
As many of you are aware, the landscape for online publishers has been challenging over the past year. The rise of AI-generated content has filled the web with repetitive articles, while Google’s search results have become more insular, favoring its own ecosystem and making it increasingly difficult for smaller websites to compete.
These shifts have led to a decline in traffic for small and mid-sized sites, opening the door for industry giants like IGN to dominate. Sadly, this recently led to the closure of Dicebreaker, leaving just a few niche websites like ours to cover the world of tabletop gaming. But we are also finding it increasingly hard to stay afloat.
TabletopGamingNews.com has undergone many transformations over the years. From its humble beginnings as a small blog in the mid-2000s, it has changed hands several times. It was acquired by CMON, and then sold multiple times throughout the mid and late 2010s, before I took the helm as chief editor and part-owner last year.
At the start of 2023, our daily visitors had dwindled to a few hundred, a stark contrast to the thousands we once enjoyed. Thanks to strategic efforts and a bit of luck, our articles began gaining traction on Google Discover and Google News. This led to a surge in traffic, reaching up to 15,000 daily visitors at our peak, allowing us to maintain a small team of dedicated writers and continue delivering content.
However, the joy was short-lived. By the end of the summer, we experienced a significant drop in traffic. Now, a year later, we rely on a few hundred loyal readers who mean the world to us.
The decline in traffic has created a challenging cycle: fewer visitors result in a tighter budget, making it increasingly difficult to maintain the high-quality content we aspire to deliver. As a result, I’ve had to adapt, relying on AI tools to keep the site running. Currently, I’m the sole individual managing TabletopGamingNews.com.
Running TGN isn’t just about numbers; it’s a labor of love. Behind the scenes, it’s just me—a former gaming journalist and editor living on a farm in Norway, juggling family responsibilities and farming duties by day, and working on TGN by night. Writing about games has been my work and passion for nearly two decades.
I will continue to try to keep TGN afloat. Over the last year, I’ve met a lot of incredible people in the tabletop community, and if it weren’t for all the amazing creators and fans out there, I would just shut the site down now. But I genuinely look forward to hearing from everyone who reaches out, and I try my best to help get your crowdfunding campaigns funded and players playing your games.
I’ll be honest: a fair bit of our current content is AI-generated, but it’s heavily edited and fact-checked to ensure accuracy and relevance. This is a temporary measure to keep the news flowing, but I envision a future where TGN is once again a valuable resource for the community. If you have news, want to guest post, or simply wish to connect, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Your input and involvement are invaluable to us.
I will also promise that if and when we recover our traffic I will phase out AI as much as I can. Any profit the site makes will go back into human-made content.
The only thing you have to do to help is to visit the site and read a few articles. If you find something interesting, share it with your friends. This is a problem that is not just affecting TGN but pretty much any small and mid-sized website. So be sure to keep visiting your favorite sites, or we will all go down the way of Dicebreaker-
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Source: Tabletop Gaming News
