I Owned the Site and Couldn’t Use It

Two years of analytics missed what one weekend with a PS4 found.

In September 2014 I bought a PS4. I was 53, and the last video game I’d taken seriously was Galaga in an arcade.

I owned a video game website called Game Rant at the time. I’d had it for five years. Some of the writers from my movie news site Screen Rant were gamers and thought it would be cool to have a gaming site, so I registered the domain, designed it, configured it, ran the analytics, paid the bills, and handed the day-to-day to an editor who knew what he was doing.

My site, my name on every invoice - and I had never played a modern (Playstation or Xbox) video game in my life.

There was a new game called Destiny (so different from Galaga) which was the big release that fall, so I bought it along with the console. I liked it a lot. Then I came up against a boss I couldn’t get past, tried maybe half a dozen times, and quit trying.

I went to my own website and searched for how to beat him. Nothing.

I ran the same search on Google. Thousands of results.

That’s the picture I want to leave with you. The owner of a video game site, sitting in his own basement office, searching his own site for what he assumed was a very common type of question in gaming, and coming up empty.

What I had delegated

When I launched Game Rant in 2009 I gave the man running it one instruction: follow the same content rules used on Screen Rant, precisely. Same rules, just a different topic. I was strict about quality there. One of the rules was a 500-word minimum on any article. Minimum, not target.

He’d been one of my editors for years and he was good at his job, so I trusted that I’d been heard and I went back to work on the site that was paying for everything.

In February 2011 Google shipped an algorithm update called Panda that went after “thin” content. Posts and articles that were very short: 150 to 250 words or so.

I wasn’t worried.

But then Game Rant’s traffic and rankings fell off a cliff within days of the update.

I was confused, because as far as I knew we were clean. I found a WordPress plugin that displayed each article’s word count in the post list, installed it, and found around a thousand articles under 250 words. A large share of those were under 150. My instruction had been a 500-word minimum. What was actually on my site was a thousand Substack Notes with headlines on them.

Days, not weeks, to find it. Two years to climb back out. Eventually I let him go, and I don’t enjoy telling you that, because the failure was mine before it was ever his.

I could have found those articles in any month of the previous two years by looking at my own website. The plugin took a minute to install. I gave instructions in 2009 and never once verified them, and I want to be clear about why I thought I was paying attention: I read the traffic and the revenue reports every single morning and everything looked fine, until it didn’t. But I was reading what the site produced. I never read the site itself. Those are two different jobs. The one I was doing couldn’t have caught it no matter how carefully I did it.

Guides, guides, guides

The PS4 did in a weekend what two years of analytics hadn’t. Once I was the guy stuck on a boss fight, the whole business came into focus. My writers were hardcore gamers writing for hardcore gamers, which meant we were ignoring what I’d guess was 80% of the audience: casual players with 40 minutes after work who don’t want to spend three nights beating one boss.

I called my new editor and told him what we were doing from that point forward. Still cover games in development, still run reviews, and starting now: guides. The most popular games, the hardest fights, write the guide. Traffic started climbing and didn’t stop. When I sold that site five years later it had about 5 million visits a month, and it earned 3X the revenue per visit that my movie site had.

None of that came out of the data I’d been staring at every morning. It came out of being stuck.

Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds.
(Proverbs 27:23)

This was written for men whose entire wealth walked around on four legs and could go lame while they weren’t looking. The verse doesn’t ask whether you own the animals. It asks whether you’ve walked out and looked at them lately.

Look beyond the surface

A man in his second half can own a short list of things and inspect almost none of them.

Start with your body. That’s the one where I’ve done the most damage and the most repair. You own it. Years ago you handed it over to whatever habits happened to be running when you stopped paying attention, and your daily inspection is probably just a glance in the mirror on your way past.

Get the numbers. I’ve got 34,000-plus food entries and years of workout data. Every real correction I’ve made to my body in fifteen years started with a number I hadn’t been looking at. Get on a scale. Log the food you eat, at the meal, not from memory at bedtime. Get your blood work done.

I knew my numbers. I didn't know what was behind them. That's what a traffic report is. It might tell you something is wrong, but it won't tell you what.

Getting stuck tells you what. Mine was the bench press. My detached supraspinatus didn’t show up in a food log or a sleep score. It showed up in the middle of a lift.

Your marriage might be the same way. You made a decision about the kind of husband you’d be somewhere back in your thirties, and you’ve been running on those instructions without verifying them since. You’re reading what the marriage produces. She’s still there. Nobody’s fighting. The traffic looks fine.

Your faith, if you have any, might be running on a decision older than either of those, and you’ve had no reason to look at it since you made it.

So here’s a test, and it took me two years to learn it: go looking in your own life for the thing you’re not paying attention to that might be in trouble. If your wife has something hard to tell you tonight, ask her when she last tried, and what you did with it. If a bad number comes back from a doctor’s visit in March, pull your last blood panel today and find out what shape you’d be starting from. If your son asks you at dinner tonight why you believe in God, find out whether you can answer in your own words instead of somebody else’s.

I came up empty, sitting in my own basement, searching my own website.

You gave yourself those instructions years ago. Go find out if you’ve been following them.