Who doesn't stand around whiteboarding all their stats? It sure-as-hell looks a lot nicer than SQL output in a terminal window.
More Fun Stats From 2019
Alternate title: 2019 in GIFs! In last month's look back at 2019, I pulled out a few fun stats to share. It was a massive post, though, so there were a lot of fun nuggets that I ended up cutting. I'm back with more nuggets in GIF form!
The top 10 intro videos on the site make up 40% of all preview renders. In 2019, the most popular intro videos were:
Glitch and gaming intro videos are well represented here, and it's no surprise that these 10 intro videos were also among the best performing in terms of overall sales.
63 intro videos sold at least 10 copies. That's almost 2/3 of all the templates on the site! I'm generally pretty happy with the diversity of templates I currently offer, which is one of the reasons I keep putting off new content in favor of other site changes. As I go through and optimize templates for the new render engine, I'll likely retire more of the lower-performing templates and make the "good ones" easier to find.
465 Git Commits. I'm an engineer, so I can indulge myself a little on geeky stats. I actually have three different repositories for IntroCave—one for the site itself, one for notes, SQL queries, WIP blog posts, and various scripts/tools, and one massive repository for new template development.
Looking at my main repository for the website, I had 465 git commits in 2019. I was most active in November (makes sense, we stayed put for Thanksgiving!) and least active in May (summer travel).
My most popular article from 2019 was Say It With Text: 12 Logo Reveal Animations That Don't Actually Need a Logo. This post was a lot of fun to put together, so I'm glad to see it perform well. Lesson: make more GIFs (as you can see in the post you're now reading).
IntroCave did over 3 million page views in 2019. Organic traffic has been stressful this year, but I'm thrilled with the overall amount of traffic I'm getting. IntroCave doesn't make enough money from just intro sales to support me, so that means I'm still showing advertisements. I tried a few new networks this year (Ezoic, IncreaseRev), but ultimately I've been happiest with AdSense. I don't have ads on every page, but a lot of pages have more than one ad unit. In just AdSense, I had an RPM of around $3.09 for 2019 (which works out to a sub-$1 CPM on individual ad views). That doesn't feel extremely high or low for this niche (video tools), but it might be worth experimenting with more ad networks in 2020. Ads only made up about 25% of my total revenue last year, so it's probably more worthwhile to focus on getting more good video content and selling more intro videos.
I like to keep an eye on what people search for in the top right. These are the top 10 searches in 2019.
Great coverage, lots of templates. I feel like people who know about IntroCave mostly associate the site with gaming intros, so it's no surprise this is a popular search term on the site as well.
Lacking an official license from Epic, you have to get pretty creative with your own image editor to build a nice Fortnite intro with my current templates. It's on my TODO list to build a tutorial for how I'd go about it, but I haven't gotten around to building it yet.
I've got a few templates tagged with "news," but the biggest one here is my Breaking News Red template. This one is popular enough that I just recently added a logo version.
People love fire. The Flame Reveal Logo is my favorite here, and I'd like to develop a few more flame/fire-themed templates this year.
While IntroCave does have a few general-purpose video templates, it's primarily an intro maker. Seeing this one in the search logs always makes me scratch my head a bit.
This is another well-represented category. Five of the top ten videos listed above are in this category, and there's a ton of overlap here with gaming/techy intro videos.
The "Minecraft look" has become generic enough in the 10+ years since the game's launch (dang I'm old) that I could maybe build some Minecraft-themed templates and not run afoul of Microsoft's lawyers. For now, though, users are in the same boat as Fortnite fans -- you've got to get creative in your own image editors and use a template that lets you customize the whole frame.
This is the video category I'm most ashamed of. I've known for well over a year now that there's demand for car intro videos, but I've been too preoccupied with other problems to go out and get a few good templates in this category. It's a lot easier to bury my head in the sand with the specific IP-themed videos because of the copyright issues, but I need to get a few good car templates added to the site.
This one is a bit surprising -- I've pulled "top searches" a few times in the past and don't recall ever seeing "horror" on the list.
As we'll see in a minute, India is one of IntroCave's top countries by traffic. PUBG is massively popular there (and worldwide!), so it's no surprise to see this one just crack the top 10.
There's a lot of ways to measure "top," but in the web business game we're mostly talking about two things: traffic and dollars. Three of my top 5 countries by traffic are hard to monetize, but I don't know that there's a way to fix that. Some of my pie-in-the-sky business ideas include building a downloadable renderer or some kind of P2P renderer, which might be a way to offer lower-cost content to countries where $5 or $10 is a lot of money.
Top 5 Countries by Traffic
- USA
- India
- Indonesia
- Vietnam
- United Kingdom
Top 5 Countries by Revenue
- USA
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Australia
- Italy