Audioreviews.org Blog – Our Year 2020 in Review
THE STORY SO FAR
Our blog audioreviews.org was established in February 2019. I reported of our beginnings 10 months into our journey. At the time, we had grown to six contributors and mainly wrote about earphones.
2019 — 2020: NOT A SMOOTH TRANSITION
The year 2019 ended on a bang. In December, Head-Fi moderators attempted to extort money from us. When I fully complied on something that was entirely not their business, they nevertheless tacitly censored my posts for 2-3 months into 2020. They left me alone thereafter. And, to put this to rest for once and for all: we don’t receive money or gear as favours for our help. Right now, we do not need Head-Fi anymore as we have more traffic than they have in our realm. And many competent people have turned their backs on them.
(ANTI)SOCIAL MEDIA: FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, TWITTER
After having had enough of Head-Fi’s stifling environment, I established an audioreviews.org Facebook group on 1st January 2020. The idea was to have friendly and fruitful discussions without censorship and commercial interests. And it worked. The group reached a spectacular 5000 members before Christmas 2020. Our members come from all over the world. We are truly multicultural – united by our love of music reproduction. And our Facebook group constitutes a huge readership for the blog.
I also established Twitter and Instagram accounts but have yet to value their usefulness. I essentially scrapped Reddit and Discord right away as they are for angry teenagers imo.
YOUTUBE CHANNEL
A YouTube channel was established in early summer accompanying our written reviews. “YouTube is by people who cannot write for people who cannot read“, I tend to say (based on observation). It is entirely tended by me in the character of Dr Schweinsgruber. For the first few videos, I did not even have a tripod to hold my phone used for filming. The interest in this channel is (still) limited as it is not as fluffy as YouTube watchers are used to, but more technical. I tried something different such as screen recordings and hope it will catch on. Soon, the YouTube crowd will figure out that they can get an earphone or headphone sufficiently characterized in 7 minutes or less. The best and most effective of all, Tyll Hertsens, just used a simple camera and next to no editing. No window dressing required to convey a complete message.
NEW BLOOD FOR THE TEAM
We also welcomed two new keen and competent contributors to the blog: Head-Fiers Baskingshark (Joshua Teng, Singapore) and Kazi Mahbub Mutakabbir (kmmbd, Germany). This raised our number to eight: USA (3), Canada (2), Singapore (2), Germany (1). Each of us has their different writing style.
DIVERSIFICATION AND ADVANCEMENT
We diversified in both co-operators and product types. We dealt with over 30 companies in 2020 in order to stay as independent as possible. And we branched out in our reviewing into Bluetooth gear, microphones, headphones, cables, dacs/amps incl. phono preamps, earpads, and eartips. We are also broadened our exposure to include the premium crowd by participating in loaner tours on Head-Fi and Audiotiers. And we will continue contributing useful technical articles. KopiOkaya continued to help companies tune earphones.
OUTPUT: TOGETHER WE ARE STRONG
The eight of us had a prolific output of statistically an article in less than every two days, 186 over the year (including this one). Apart from reviewing gear, we continued publishing technical articles and posting our music picks.
USER APPRECIATION
The audience started appreciating our efforts – we have more than doubled our daily individual users this year to typically 500-700 per day, currently. Tendency is up as also seen below in our daily page views since February 2019.
THE SONG PHILOSOPHY REMAINS THE SAME
We will continue sticking to our mission of providing unbiased, competent, concise, thorough, and accurate accounts of the technical, sonic, and practical capabilities of any product analyzed. We see ourselves primarily as consumer advocates – which is the whole idea of product reviews in our opinion. After all, it is our money that is at stake when purchasing gear that does not work for us. While this has cost us dearly with some manufacturers, it may have given us the respect from most others.
We will continue to stay out of conflicts of interest as far as possible. And while we won’t monetize the products we review through affiliate links, we hope to cover our operating costs through PayPal….which, admittedly, has not worked well yet.
OUTLOOK: THE FUTURE IS EVEN BRIGHTER
In the last two years, we have established audioreviews.org as a recognizable entity in the blogosphere. We have a distinctive logo, a clear and clean layout, and we bring our message across pragmatically and concisely. Our different styles offer interesting reads for different folks.
In 2021, we hope to diversify our activities further while climbing up the reputation ladder to include more mid-tier and premium gear. We continue doing this step by step as we learn going along. There is no hurry. We hope that the positive feedbag loop created by the interaction of blog, Facebook group, and YouTube will bring us even more exposure.
We eight wish you a happy and better 2021…keep on listening!
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