Site Update 10/2: New Writers, New Server, and Patreon

Greetings Nerdites! Your friend­ly EiC, Admin, and gen­er­al do-er of things here with an­oth­er site up­date for SuperNerdLand!

I know it’s been a good two months since the last meaty up­date. Not that there hasn’t been things go­ing on around here — far from it. I have the work­load to prove it! Jokes aside, we are con­tin­u­ing our growth, and I want our love­ly com­mu­ni­ty to be in the loop with the ex­cit­ing news! It would just be a very short up­date to say, “It’s busi­ness as usu­al.” So I try to keep things rel­e­vant to ac­tu­al growth rather than say­ing “Yup, we are still chug­ging away” at set intervals.

So, with­out fur­ther ado, let’s get into the meat and bones of what is go­ing on around these parts!

First I want to in­tro­duce a cou­ple of new con­tent cre­ators knock­ing around the neigh­bor­hood. We’d like to wel­come to our il­lus­tri­ous ranks one Cate and one Toal Fact!

Toal Fact has come on as a more gen­er­al writer, and you can ex­pect some Nerd News, Editorial, and Opinion pieces from him. Cate comes to us to write about, and show­case, some of the nut­ti­er com­mu­ni­ties that are found around Tumblr’s way. If you see her lost in that labyrinth then at least of­fer her a glass of wa­ter, and try not to point and laugh too much at her lost sanity.

The sec­ond bit of news hap­pens to touch on that growth I men­tioned ear­li­er. As of the start of October, we have switched over from a reg­u­lar ole web­host­ing ac­count to a ded­i­cat­ed serv­er! Well, tech­ni­cal­ly a VPS off that ded­i­cat­ed serv­er. We were want­i­ng to grow our ca­pa­bil­i­ties to serve great con­tent with as lit­tle mid­dle­man ser­vice agree­ments as pos­si­ble (one of the many rea­sons we are ad free), and we got of­fered a deal we just couldn’t pass up!

So since October 3rd, the site has been served off a ded­i­cat­ed serv­er we share! We are shar­ing ded­i­cat­ed serv­er costs with Highland Arrow, and it’s been grand so far. On that point, it is of note that there is no ed­i­to­r­i­al, or man­age­r­i­al con­trol of one site to an­oth­er. We are just dig­i­tal neigh­bors in vir­tu­al du­plex, so to speak. It has been great so far too, and the 1 Gbps port we have is so damn nice.

That ac­tu­al­ly segues nice­ly into our next an­nounce­ment! You may no­tice a gen­er­al theme of this up­date. That of growth of con­tent and ca­pa­bil­i­ties. We are work­ing hard to fill our niche as best we can. Going into the last quar­ter of this year we are go­ing to be pump­ing up fast.

More gam­ing re­views, more in depth ed­i­to­r­i­al con­tent, more in­ter­views, more video con­tent. Just… more. Recently, we even agreed to be home to a new project and site com­ing to life in the form of Dropped Links which is planned to be a site cov­er­ing the fight­ing game scene — from be­gin­ner to ad­vanced. Plus we are go­ing to be break­ing into pod­casts as well, to sup­ple­ment our stream con­tent. There are a lot of things I am ex­cit­ed for com­ing down the pipeline.

With this bump up in amount and qual­i­ty of con­tent comes in­creased costs to op­er­ate. Currently all costs for SuperNerdLand are cov­ered out of pock­et, and all work done is on a vol­un­teer ba­sis. This is the de­f­i­n­i­tion of a pas­sion project for those involved.

Due to de­mand for it, and to help al­lo­cate the costs we al­ready in­cur to oth­er ar­eas of site growth, we are ex­pand­ing the av­enues of sup­port our com­mu­ni­ty has avail­able if they so choose to sup­port us more than you al­ready do by read­ing, watch­ing, and shar­ing our con­tent. That is why we are of­fi­cial­ly launch­ing the SuperNerdLand Patreon ac­count to help sup­port the site!

We have had our PayPal do­na­tions opened up for a bit al­ready, but we didn’t want to just shove it in peo­ples faces. So we put it on the site for those interested.

When it comes to struc­tured fi­nan­cial sup­port for the site, though, we want­ed to make sure we had the work­flow and con­tent to bring to bear for the support.

And so we humbly cre­at­ed our Patreon! It’s right over here. Now, I don’t want any­body to feel ob­lig­at­ed to sup­port us more than you al­ready do. We did want to open up this arm of sup­port for the site, and not just for those who had re­quest­ed it. We want SuperNerdLand to grow as much as our read­ers do, and this can hap­pen at a much bet­ter pace with crowd­fund­ing. No ques­tions about it.

I do want to note that all work done on the site will still be vol­un­teer; all rev­enue gen­er­at­ed will go to­wards cov­er­ing site costs. Things like han­dling our serv­er costs, pro­duc­tion soft­ware, and re­view copies of games is what it is planned for, so we have some pret­ty rea­son­able goals set­up. If we hap­pen to sur­pass the cur­rent month­ly goals for the site then any­thing above will be set aside to make sure fu­ture months of site costs are covered.

Currently our goals are:

• $40/monthly – Covers costs of the ded­i­cat­ed serv­er we are sharing
• $50/monthly – Covers costs of an Adobe CC sub­scrip­tion to im­prove con­tent quality
• $60/monthly – Allow for pur­chase of re­view copies of games, as well as cov­er misc. site upgrades

All to­geth­er, that’s a $150 month­ly to­tal that we set to have all serv­er costs cov­ered, to ac­quire high­er qual­i­ty pro­duc­tion soft­ware, and to en­sure we have con­sis­tent re­sources to put to­wards more time­ly game reviews.

Now, if the above the bar sup­port for the site con­tin­ues… well, let’s just say we have more plans than what is men­tioned here for con­tent and growth of the SuperNerdLand plat­form. We just want to make sure that we have the work­flow set­up for it, and we do not want to put the cart be­fore the horse when it comes to grow­ing the site.

So that is the sum­ma­ry of what is go­ing on in our neck of the woods. Growth, growth, and more growth.

October marks the 9th month of op­er­a­tion for SuperNerdLand, and we couldn’t be more proud of what our hum­ble lit­tle shop has man­aged to do here. We nev­er ex­pect­ed to be reach­ing a con­sis­tent 10 – 15k page view count so ear­ly in our jour­ney. That is why I nev­er can stop say­ing that we are noth­ing with­out our read­ers and view­ers. That amount may not be a drop in the buck­et to some sites, but it’s every­thing to us. You make this ad­ven­ture pos­si­ble, and we don’t plan on stopping!

So from the depths of all of us at SuperNerdLand, thank you for your sup­port so far. Until I see you next, stay ex­cel­lent to each other.

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Josh Bray

Josh has worked in IT for over 15 years. Graduated Broadcasting school in 2012 with a fo­cus on A/V pro­duc­tion. Amateur pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a pas­sion to make things work… by any means nec­es­sary. Editor-in-Chief and do-er of tech things at SuperNerdLand

Latest posts by Josh Bray (see all)

• Free Pack-in Game of the Month: Heidelberg 1693 — June 1, 2019
• Coming Down the Pike – June 2019 Game Releases — June 1, 2019
• Letter from the Editor (June 2019) — June 1, 2019