by John Hoskin on May 22, 2006
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It's a holiday in Canada! Today we celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria. She died in 1901, but we really, really like her.
Special and heartfelt thanks to Jeff Woleslagle for covering this column last week while I was unable to do so. Additional and equally fervent thanks to the rest of the TenTonHammer.com team that turned our E3 coverage into a tremendous success in my absence. Even more thanks to those that sent me their condolences last week. I couldn't get back to everyone, but please be assured that I appreciated each and every letter. Who's da man? You da man!
Although I had to fly home from E3 before the show officially started, I was there to see the team preparing (imbibing liberal amounts of caffeine) for the longest three-days of their media lives. Many of our editors had never been to an E3 before. The culture shock alone is sometimes enough to unnerve a new editor, but the team stood tall, had fun and diligently got their articles written, proofed and posted in what little time they were allotted.
At first glance, you might anticipate that a network like ours that covers massively multiplayer online games exclusively would have a straightforward time picking and choosing appointments. The truth is that even with 12 editors/support staff at the show we were hard pressed to cover the games and article angles that we dearly wished to incorporate into our E3 2006 agenda. The team did a tremendous job and though I wasn't there to share in the successes, I can live through them vicariously via our E3 2006 coverage section.
Pouring through the traffic statistics (in which we set some new network records) was engrossing. What staggered me was what I have been calling the "WoW Effect". Even at E3, surrounded by the most hype that any other MMOG publishers could produce the vast majority of traffic to our network was to read World of Warcraft related articles. A final look at the Top 50 referrers (sites that linked to our E3 articles sending their readers to us) showed that World of Warcraft related sites, including the official site sent well over 70% of our referred traffic. The idea that this would be the case was inconceivable prior to the show. Blizzard really didn't have much in the way of new content to show compared to some other big-name games.
Another statistic that was unimaginable prior to the show was that with the exception of our index page, our comics page and our booth babe photos, World of Warcraft coverage would take up every spot in the top 50 pages viewed on the network. No other game made it into the top 50 pages viewed; not because they did not have a large following, but because that large following was dwarfed by the multitude of World of Warcraft fans rabidly seeking out any information on the Burning Crusade and the new Alliance race, the Draenei.
Any game that can tap into even a small percentage of the World of Warcraft community will be a success.
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As always, thanks for visiting TenTonHammer.com,
-- John "Boomjack" Hoskin