Shacknews LoL

Shackers have been experiencing a terrible Shacknews experience due to aggressive programmatic ads for years. I have had users reach out to me and have been working with our ad partner to remove them as fast as possible. The problem has been that the dubious ad buyers who host fullscreen takeovers on mobile or autoplaying video/audio ads on desktop are too fast for most online advertising companies.

Today we are taking the first step in bringing all visitors a better Shacknews experience. We are not removing advertisements in their entirety, but we are removing all display and banner ads that were being served up through programmatic exchanges.

This means that we will still feature large takeover skins (Like Mutant Football League) that lead to a skinny Chatty at times and Shacknews will also be continuing our sponsored content strategy with livestreams, articles, and videos.

The amount of time I have spent in the last few years trying to debug ads was simply not worth the money. I also like to look at this problem from the perspective of a user, and I would never return to a site if I was served the terrible ad experience that we have endured these past few years.

We will remain focused on increasing value to our Shacknews Mercury Subscribers with content and other offerings in the coming months.

Thanks for hanging in there with us.

For a man who is almost 60 and has been fighting a decades-long war with Parkinson's, he looks pretty damn good imho.

In the end, his mental health was not great. He had a lot going on in his life, but as his wife/partner, I always made sure he knew I was there to support him and that I loved him. He was diagnosed with ADHD in the last few years, which he took medication for and thankfully it helped him. But it was certainly not the silver bullet he was hoping it would be. I tried my best to pull him aside and ask if he was ok whenever I could sense that something wasn't right. The last few hours we spent together, I did just that... and he turned to me and said that he was just feeling a bit sick and that everything would be fine.

I realize that this has turned into a long anecdote and if you've made it this far, thank you for reading our story. It's such a very short version because how the hell could I summarize everything that he was in a single post? My intention for this post is not to brag about this incredibly romantic time we shared, but for you all to realize that he wasn't a monster, that he was human who had a huge fucking heart. I would have loved to have posted a few photos of him but I simply can't look at photos or videos of him without crying my fucking eyes out.

Hug your loved ones tight when you get the chance. Tell them you love them. I tried to take advantage of every moment we had together and it still wasn't enough. I carry so many amazing memories we've shared together and I'm happy to share with anyone who'd like to know more about the man who was a best friend, amazing coworker, fellow Shacker, weird nerd, that Australian, and my husband.

Part 1

Today marks six years since I became CEO of Shacknews. Each year, I like to look back at how we are doing and highlight areas where we are differentiating our company in the increasingly competitive and changing games media landscape.

2020 has been an extremely challenging year for everyone. Shacknews was already operating in a virtual office format, so we were able to handle the lockdown better than other companies. Year-to-date, the site is experiencing a slightly up year, having hit our peak monthly visitors for 2020 in April, during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns in America.

Overall pageviews at Shacknews.com for the first 9 months of 2020 are up 2.62% year-over-year from 2019, with Shacknews.com/chatty experiencing 18.65% growth in the same time period. That's right, Chatty pageviews are actually growing, and all it took was a pandemic. Shacknews Chatty also remains our most viewed page on Shacknews.com in 2020. Both Shacknews.com and Shacknews.com/chatty have seen seven months straight of year-over-year pageview growth, and Shacknews.com has grown our monthly unique visitors year-over-year for 7 straight months.

Our most viewed article YTD in 2020 is All Wishes for the Wall of Wishes in the Last Wish raid in Destiny 2:

https://www.shacknews.com/article/107433/all-wishes-for-the-wall-of-wishes-in-the-last-wish-raid-in-destiny-2

We planned to expand our brand into the esports space in 2020, with Smash Bros. Ultimate tournaments planned for SXSW, WonderCon, E3, EVO, ComicCon, and The Great Quakeholio Tournament 3 set to take place at QuakeCon. The COVID-19 pandemic obviously shutdown those plans when we began to cancel events in March. 90% of our 2020 expected revenues were to come from our live events division. We have not let that stop us, and instead created the Shacknews Stimulus Games 2020. This series of online video game competitions have pitted the staff against each other, raised money for charities, and created work for folks directly impacted by the pandemic. We even crowned our third Great Quakeholio Champion this year as discoryne put on a clinic in our online tournament. Shacknews Electronic Sports remain one of the most fun and unique things that we are doing at the company, and it has been a joy to put these special events together.

From a content standpoint, while the Shack may not be having a record traffic year, we are seeing some wins from a brand visibility standpoint. Our reviews have been quoted in several accolade trailers for some of the year's biggest games like Final Fantasy 7 Remake. We pivoted to digital events on our Twitch channel this year, with Shacknews E4 content replacing our E3 efforts, special interviews with Mike Tyson and Richard Sherman, and our Play It Forward livestream where we helped raise over $11,000 for the IGDA Foundation. We even played Gears 3 with ICE-T on the front page of Twitch.

Shacknews Long Reads Editor David Craddock is currently working on an amazing long read that will be dropping next month. Developers and PR firms have been jumping at the opportunity to work with us, and Shacknews continues to have great access to some of the top studios for interviews, previews, and reviews this year. Like Bugsnax.

From the business side, Shacknews.com reintroduced our Mercury subscription service last year, and it is our largest source of income at the moment. Revenues from Shacknews Mercury subs in 2020 amount to almost six times the total advertising revenue at Shacknews.com in 2018. We didn't run ads in 2019, as we began our transition to a subscription service model during that year.

We underestimated the demand for Mercury, and were woefully unprepared to scale. This led to a fulfillment pileup, and even Shackmemes. At this point in the year, I have sent out the majority of the 2019 Mercury shipments, with some folks missing shirts from the Ultra Mega tier. We are out of several sizes of shirts, but I have placed an order and intend to fulfill everyone's orders as soon as possible.

Despite fulfillment issues, Mercury has remained a bright spot. Sadly, the company is still not profitable. I remain focused on ways to generate more revenue at the company, and I am still committed to keeping the lights on with our current staff. This remains a delicate balance, and the name of the game is still to keep Shacknews afloat while a lot of our larger competitors flounder and shrink. I know of one large U.S. video game website that will likely be shutting down before the end of the year, and it isn't Shacknews. In spite of the many headwinds we face, Shacknews has the liquidity to continue on at our cash current burn rate.

I'm trans.

I've said it here before and honestly, it's not even a big deal. But today, JK Rowling just released a massive (and apparently ongoing) manifesto against trans folk and it is dangerous. Her screed is loaded with disinformation and with her MASSIVE platform and wealth, her words are going to bring harm to trans people, including trans children. So, two things: please, if you're an ally, denounce her on social, let people know you stand against her. I don't care if you still like Harry Potter, that's between you and the book, and as Daniel Radcliffe said, "it's sacred."

And second, I'm a trans woman: ask me anything.

I need people all over, including my Shack family to know trans people, to know we are NOT A THREAT or a danger to anyone, and our lives are vulnerable thanks to her and people like her. Really, ask me anything, even controversial questions around trans things you don't understand. I might not be able to answer everything, but I will try my best. I want to be sure I do everything I can to protect other trans folk and my voice is one of the few tools I have. Thanks for reading.

We don’t care.

Message About Moderation

There have been a few threads posted in the past few days that engage in blatantly racist jokes. The moderation team and I are going to be nuking these kinds of posts more rigorously going forward. No bans will be handed out until someone becomes a repeat offender.

If you have to post, "Is it racist if..." just don't post.

I want everyone to feel welcome here, which is incredibly difficult in 2018. There is a balance of context and free speech that we will be taking into consideration when moderating threads, but blatant racist jokes will not be tolerated. This goes for jokes about mental illnesses, disabilities, religious beliefs, gender identities, sexual preferences, and misogyny.

Please understand.

It was the night before Shackmas, when all through the Shack
Not an app was working, not even a Lamp
The dickbutts were posted by the shackers for LOL,
In hopes that Blake Griffin soon would come troll...

Greetings,

It has been almost a year since I bought Shacknews and I thought I would provide a bit of an update about how we are doing and what we have planned for the future. Increased communication with the Chatty community has been a focus of our team since we took over the site, and today I am happy to announce a new feature for the talented web/app development shackers. We need to be more transparent when it comes to what we are doing on the development side of the site. Today we announce Shack Lab.

http://lab.shacknews.com

Shack Lab is a blog dedicated to keeping the Shacknews Chatty community up-to-date with upcoming site improvements, community events, and much, much more. We hope this will amp up collaboration and innovation when it comes to improving our site. We realize that there are a lot of talented shackers who could lend a helping hand when we are developing site features. Shack Lab will be a place for collaboration, feedback, and the occasional animated gif.

Shacknews was in really rough shape when I bought it a year ago. It has been a challenging year, but I am happy to let all of you know that we are seeing the hard work of the team come to fruition. We have executed two site redesigns, and a mobile site relaunch, in one year. We are approaching 1 million views on our Twitch.TV channel, and our Gamerhub and Shacknews YouTube channels continue to grow rapidly as we crank out original content. The editorial team is firing on all cylinders and we are excited that shackers are rediscovering the front page. It is also exciting to see so many new visitors to the site. We are not a huge team and we don't have all the resources in the world, but I think the team deserves some kudos.

I would like to personally thank all of you for putting up with me as the new overlord of the Shack. I have had jobs in a few different sectors over my 33 years on Earth, but I really feel like I have found a home here. I care about this site and the community, and I want to see it flourish. I am not too arrogant to think that the Shacknews team can do this alone, so I hope we can all come together in the spirit of Shackmas.

One more thing...

I’d like to announce our first developer event: SHACKNEWS DEV CON 1, a very direct way to be involved in the future of Shacknews. This convention will mark the first in what will become a semi-annual development event aimed at integrating the many community ideas, applications, and existing 3rd party features into Shacknews.com. We will have more information in an upcoming post.

http://media.tumblr.com/b72bb211f5592da472507510f48f2ddb/tumblr_inline_ngc44nM96A1qziaq9.jpg

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more information regarding DC1, Shack Lab, and all things Shack.

Merry SHACKMAS!

Asif

Today is the 28th anniversary of the founding of the website that would ultimately become Shacknews.

https://www.shacknews.com/cortex/article/4442/today-is-the-28th-anniversary-of-th

Congratulations Helvetica, one of Audobon's Top 100 Photographers of 2020!

Every year the Audobon Society runs a photography contest for the best bird images in USA and Canada. In addition to the six winners, the judges also select 100 additional favorites to share with the world, two of which are Shacknews'-own Helvetica's.

Check out all the photos here:
https://www.audubon.org/magazine/summer-2020/the-2020-audubon-photography-awards-top-100
Search for "sandhill" to see Helvy's wonderful shots.