Recapping TechRaptor In 2020 - Growth

This year has been... something. With that said, TechRaptor has had an incredible year, offering a bit of positivity in a sea of negativity. I’m excited to share some of the numbers, changes we’ve made, and plans for 2021.

2019 was incredibly good, but 2020 has been a year of shattered milestones over and over again. There’s a specific word you’re going to see a lot in this 2020 recap - growth.

Staff Growth

We’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to hire a number of new people this year, bringing on 17 new writers over the course of 2020. We’ve been able to combine this expansion of the team alongside pay raises in January, March, November, and December. My hope is to continue raising pay in 2021 as we grow, ensuring that our people can continue to be paid at the highest level we can!

We also made a big change to operations at the start of 2020, adding a dedicated news team that publishes 8 timely news stories a day for our readers’ consumption, not including breaking news stories and event coverage. Starting January 1, 2021 we’re also adding a tabletop news writer, and a gaming culture writer too, bringing the daily total to 10 news articles a day!

Editorial Team Growth

With our team growth, and content growth, we’ve also now have an editorial leader for each section of our site!

• Andrew Otton - Editor in Chief
• Don Parsons - News Editor
• Samuel Guglielmo - Reviews Editor
• Robert Scarpinito - Features Editor
• Adam Potts - Tabletop Editor
• Andrew Stretch - Events Editor & Jack of All Trades, helping with other sections as needed.
• James Bentley - Guides Editor
• Nick Maillet - Video Editor / Lead

With a full team of editors able to really hone in on their sections in 2021, we’ve got some big plans for content in 2021, and we can’t wait for you to read it!

Gaming Freelance Writers Allowed (At Last)

With our site growth, and the expansion of the editorial team, we’re also making a big change, and for the first time in our 7 (almost 8) year history, we’re now accepting submissions from freelance gaming writers!

You can check out the details (and non-freelance positions) here: Write for TechRaptor

Site Changes

We also made a number of site changes during 2020 that have helped us grow, as well as offer readers a much better experience when on TechRaptor.

In February, we changed our comment system away from Disqus, opening up a new revenue stream that doesn’t impact reader experience, as well as an overall cleaner commenting interface with some bonus features for the community. You can read about that more here.

In April, we drastically shifted the layout of our site as we moved to a new ad vendor, removing the sidebar that has been part of TechRaptor since 2013, to a cleaner and more linear layout. This change also allowed us to make some MAJOR changes that reduced site load times by over 50%!

There’s always room for improvement, though, and we don’t believe TechRaptor is perfect. We have a lot of plans for changing the design of TechRaptor in 2021 to help you find more interesting articles, get between pages faster, and just have a cleaner reading experience overall. We’re always striving to make the site better for our readers, and will continue to do so year after year!

TechRaptor’s 2020 By The Numbers

I live and breathe numbers, spreadsheets, and projections. As CEO, I track every aspect of TechRaptor’s revenue and statistics, and love watching the numbers change and shift year after year, and change after change. Here’s a breakdown of what we saw this year!

Pageviews in 2020 vs. 2019: 2.5x higher
Revenue in 2020 vs 2019: 2.5x higher

Beyond those general numbers, TechRaptor also had its best four months ever, with September, October, November, and December being better then any single month we had before.

Content Published in 2020:

• Total - 4,471
• News - 2,800
• Features - 210
• Opinions - 47
• Guides - 274
• Previews - 174
• Reviews - 304
• Originals - 66
• Interviews - 48
• Adult Gaming - 55
• Videos - 53
• Deals - 20
• Blog / Giveaways - 31
• Game Pages - 425

We’ve Been Lucky

In a year with so much pain, strife, sadness, and negativity, TechRaptor has been lucky to feel positive throughout the year. While the gaming industry has boomed, and we’ve been able to grow, we’ve lost colleagues across the industry as a whole as well as sites themselves to the effects of this pandemic.

We’ve been lucky enough to grow in 2020. We were privileged to be in a position at the start of June that allowed us to donate our entire income from May 2020 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in support of #BlackLivesMatter and racial equality in the United States. As we grow, we hope to find more ways that we can use our platform for good, and I’m actively looking for where we can donate our time and money to help others in 2021 and beyond. Increasing our pay, and offering bonuses is fantastic, but we also want to find ways to use our platform for good.

Onward & Upward

Our meteoric growth in 2020 has opened up a number of opportunities for the site to heavily invest in itself, increasing pay for our team, opening up new positions, and allowing us to open up pitches to non-staff writers. We’re really excited for 2021, and while there’s still a lot of uncertainty as to what next year will bring, we’re going to do everything we can to keep publishing quality content that may help you take your mind off things for a while, or give you another neat game that’s right up your alley.

I can’t thank our readers enough for coming to our site, supporting us, and being the reason why we exist as an outlet. Without our readers, we’d just be a bunch of gamers screaming into the void, but the sheer number of people coming to read our content and comment on it, is something that we’re incredibly thankful for.

2020 has been good, but we’re going to do everything we can to make 2021 (and our content) even better.

If you want to keep up with us across every platform, and see what we're doing in 2021, give us a follow here!

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Personal Note from the Founder:
I’m so incredibly lucky to have such an awesome and talented team surrounding me. My editorial team continues to knock it out of the park with new ideas, and our writers are people who I’m happy to call friends and colleagues. The culture that’s built up within TechRaptor over the last few years is probably the thing that makes me the most proud. Day after day, this team lifts each other up, and provides a positive place for conversation and collaboration.

I take $0 from TechRaptor. I work a full-time job and rely on my editorial team to handle most day-to-day affairs, but I never see working on TechRaptor in my spare time as “work.” Without this site, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, and without these people who surround me, this pandemic would have been much harder for me personally.

Thank you to each and every person who has been a part of this site’s almost 8 years.