peterb Jan 24th, 2005 Link
Hey, it sounds like you could be talking about any number of videogaming websites, too…!
There is something to the art of self-promotion that is a little bit sad. I spend an inordinate amount of time making sure that my site, for example, contains original, unique content that you can’t find anywhere else (the rule of thumb is that our goal is “one great article per day”) Yet I’m sure we get a lot less traffic than any number of sites that just daisy-chain links and one-sentence summaries to the same tired news stories that a thousand other sites link to. (and, please, don’t get me started about the grotesquely self-important podcasters).
I’m not willing to logroll random sites just to get my name out there, but that’s what it seems to take to get noticed fast.
It’s “fast” that seems to be the dimension that self-promotion pumps. I’ve been writing solid (I think — maybe really, everything I write sucks) articles for a -year-. In that year, traffic has gone up tenfold. That’s great, but when I think about sites that manage to get that traffic by just creating a little hype (without actually creating creative content to go along with that hype), it sticks in my craw a little.
