Shacknews LoL

Today marks five 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 games media landscape.

2018 was a record-setting year for Shacknews.com monthly unique visitor and pageview stats, and that has made 2019 a bit of a grind. Year-to-date, the site is experiencing a slightly down year, having hit our peak monthly visitors for 2019 in January. This is attributable to a few factors like 2018's game release lineup being stacked with RDR2, God of War, Smash, and countless other titles.

Overall pageviews at Shacknews.com are down 1.94% year-over-year from 2018, with Shacknews.com/chatty experiencing 22.7% declines in the same time period. Despite the decline, Chatty remains our most viewed page on Shacknews.com in 2019.

Our most viewed article YTD in 2019 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 continued to expand our brand into the esports space in 2019, with two tournaments this year. Shacknews Champions League kicked off with an over-30 competition at E3 2019, with a special live music performance from Marc Rebillet. We also returned to QuakeCon 2019 with The Great Quakeholio Tournament 2. 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 accolade trailers for some of the year's biggest games including Super Mario Maker 2, Borderlands 3, Remnant: From the Ashes, and Days Gone. We were also very visible at events this year, with a massive E3 2019 presence on the showfloor and SDCC 2019 partnerships. Shacknews Long Reads Editor David Craddock also recently dropped a massive Everquest long read, in case you missed it. Developers and PR firms are taking notice, as Shacknews has been given access to some of the top studios for interviews, previews, and reviews this year.

From the business side, Shacknews.com reintroduced our Mercury subscription service earlier this year, and the results have been great. Revenues from Shacknews Mercury subs in 2019 amount to four times the total advertising revenue at Shacknews.com in 2019. We didn't run ads in 2018, as we began our transition to a subscription service model during that year.

While the early success of Mercury is encouraging, the company is still not profitable. It is entirely possible that the only way that I will ever make money off of this investment is by exiting it with a sale to someone else. I remained focused on ways to generate more revenue at the company, but I am still committed to keeping the lights on with a larger staff than Shacknews Founder Steve Gibson ever had. I could trim our budget in an effort to reach breakeven financially, but it would undoubtedly hurt our growth. This has been a delicate balance, and the name of the game is to keep Shacknews afloat while a lot of our larger competitors flounder and shrink.

On the dev side of things, I am currently outlining the next phase of the redesign that began last year and continued with the LOL page integration update earllier this year. Phase 3 of the redesign will be a huge update that will change how Shackers interact with the site while keeping some things exactly the same. I look forward to sharing more information about the update once we are closer to launch.

Shacknews celebrates its 23rd year in 2019, and it has been a pleasure reviving the site over the past five years. My time here is not over by a longshot, and I remain motivated by my vision for the future of Shacknews. This is truly a special place on the Internet, and I will continue to do right by the community as we continue to grow. Thanks to our Shascknews staff, readers, viewers, Chatty posters, and filthy lurkers for your support.

She's doing exactly what they claimed they wanted Trump to do. I can't quite figure out why they hate her... WAIT! Unless they really didn't give a shit about draining the swamp, and it was about something else entirely?

Update your Shack[lol] scripts!

http://lmnopc.com/greasemonkey/shack2007/shack-lol.user.js

I added [tag] and [unf] to the script. For those of you who aren't interested in seeing or using those tags, you can turn them off. When the script starts, it will run through a series of lazily programmed confirmation boxes. Follow the prompts and you can see only those buttons you're interested in.

Cross your fingers ... lol

PS - Thank you stonedonkey and electroly for providing these services!!

This Twitter thing has got me appreciating how much worse Shacknews could be right now if it weren’t for our Briefcase man. So there’s that. Gratitude.

https://i.imgur.com/Ms6sTZs.jpg

SHACKER OF THE YEAR 2019

The Shacknews Shacker of the Year 2019 is...

valcan_s

For always being a super positive and supportive force here on the Chatty. Congratulations!

No, laypeople are just uninformed about this stuff. It was the same story with cigarettes in the early days, look how that turned out. I'm a pulmonary pathologist and we already are starting to see cases of chronic lung damage and acute lung damage that is most likely vaping related; the reason you don't "hear about it" is because its non-specific findings in the lungs, so top line diagnosis of "vaping" is ever issued.

But you get some kid with severe respiratory dysfunction where their lungs look like they were mauled by drug effect or infectious etiology except they have *no* history of either; yet they vape like sucking down vaporized chemicals all day is completely safe....well it becomes pretty obvious, but there is not a top line diagnosis of "Vaper's Lung" (at least yet) as I mentioned making the disease difficult to characterize, although the literature is slowly starting to come out.

Here is a couple early papers were they are starting to prove that vapors from e-cigarettes cause airway epithelial damage (airway epithelial damage is literally the exact process by which smoking causes squamous cell carcinoma in the lungs):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28337465
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27184162
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25979079

Not only that; we still don't know what the downstream effects are. People who smoked didn't get cancer a year later or 5 years later. The people who got cancer were heavy smokers for 20-40 years, people with, what in healthcare we call, "20-pack years smoking history"; which means they smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years straight. Thats when he cancers showed up. Its when the cancers for vaping will show up. I do hope i'm wrong and that it never gets to that point, but the irresponsible way people currently treat vaping is concerning and I totally expect to be diagnosing some new unusual variants of lung adenocarcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma near the end of my career that we don't understand until someone puts it together.....it was the vaping.

Like I said hopefully not, but any time you put something exogenous into your body there are consequences, do it for years and years because "theres no data" and your just putting yourself at risk. Okay sorry, off my soapbox now.

Police. Immediately.

So it took a few layers of clicks to get to the actual study that is purported to have discovered these 1000+ illegal voters. But, I did find it*, and first things first, here's the cover of the study -

http://chattypics.com/viewer.php?file=coverlol_7fo2a707us.jpg

Um, okay. That doesn't exactly give me the impression that I'm about to read some unbiased data analysis, but I'm game, so I continue perusing. Eventually, I find this chart:

http://chattypics.com/viewer.php?file=chart_dq6ak9yjhk.jpg

Which, if you're not a total dummy at reading histograms, you can see that these counts are not actually illegal voters, they're voters that were removed from the rolls. So the 1,000 people that the FoxNews Blog entry claims "are eligible to vote" are, in fact, not eligible to vote.

But hey, I'm a charitable guy, so let's pretend for the sake of argument that those 1,046 voters are real, illegal voters that will vote in this year's election. Let's see how they might affect things. Warning: some math is gonna happen -

The Virginia Department of Elections website - http://elections.virginia.gov/ - tells me that 3,896,846 Virginians cast ballots in our last Presidential contest in 2012. Obama's margin of victory in Virginia that year was 149,298 votes, or 3.88%. These alleged 1,046 illegal voters would have only accounted for 0.7% of that margin, which is not exactly blowing my hair back. But- the study does indicate that those 1,046 voters were found in only 8 of Virginia’s 133 jurisdictions.

Okay, so if we take the per-jurisdiction average from those 8 and extrapolate it to the remaining 125 jurisdictions, that gives us roughly another 16,344 potentially illegal voters. However! - even though those 8 jurisdictions only represent 6% of Virginia’s total jurisdictions, they represent 32% of Virginia’s total population, so it’s considerably likely that extrapolating up to 16,344 extra voters is an overestimation. But even then, those “extra” voters combined with the original 1,046 only account for 12% of Obama’s 2012 margin. 12% is not insignificant, but given that this is all conjecture anyways, I’m not gonna weigh it that heavily.

Drilling down just a little further on http://elections.virginia.gov/ reveals that 4 of the 8 jurisdictions in this so-called report were won by Romney in 2012, and mostly by very healthy margins.

So basically, this report seems to tell us stuff we already know – that in-person voter fraud, although a genuine ethical & legal problem, does not occur with high frequency, nor does it seem to be excessively biased towards one party or the other.

Next time, don’t take claims given to you in a fucking FoxNew Blog at face-value.

for those interested, here it is - https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/Report_Alien-Invasion-in-Virginia.pdf

Hey Shackers,

I am really excited to share that Shacknews.com saw 106% growth year over year and 24% growth month over month in monthly unique visitors! This continues a trend that started in May of last year and it was our best February since we bought the site.

Thanks for being awesome!

Love,

Asif