Well my friends we have once again arrived at the closing of another year and as I’ve done in the past its time to share some thoughts and give those in the readership a glimpse into the overall creative process on our family of websites. Depending on how long you’ve been following our work, you might recall the times when there was a seperate narrative for both PiercingMetal and Piercing Ken but once I had the Ken Pierce Media site, I decided to place them all into one post. I was hesitant about that at first but now after a couple of years doing it in this fashion I have to say that I prefer it. The 2023 Year was very busy on all sides and as a content creator who’s tasked with doing so many different things for the sake of entertainment I certainly had my hands full. Now we can get onto the business at hand and since PiercingMetal was the first website I’ll be keeping to beginning with that one and so on. As was done in the past I will also discuss each outlets social media standing and share which countries were the top site visitors.
PiercingMetal
Back in April, PiercingMetal celebrated its 18th year of online life and its great to still be sharing all sorts of content and having a website entertain you for that long. It’s not easy to keep something like this going and there are several sites that started around the time I launched that are either gone or hardly worth checking out anymore based on their presentation. Historically speaking I’ve published close to 8.5K posts since launching and this coming year we are setting the sights on reaching 9K posts or getting as close as possible. I remember saying something similar to that last year but this time around I am much closer to being able to do it. Will there be 500 items to share with you and will there be time to do it all, only time will tell. Many have noticed that over the last few years I’ve really upped the level of news related items and band announcements as much as stuff for the traditional review side and when it comes to Pop Culture, I’ve made that particular section something very vibrant. I’m a pretty close to lifelong comic book and superhero fan and I love the films related to them and also a lot of Science Fiction. A good Marvel Studios series can find me generating about five website posts and if the comics industry keeps on dishing out title after title and we know about it, I will have a lot to fill your screens with. My love of the geeky side of things found me once again attending the famed New York Comic Con and Anime NYC as a member of the press and we did a ton of video interviews during these events that can be found on our Official YouTube Channel, but that discussion is for the next section. The giveaways were non-existant in 2023 but that was not for lack of trying to secure them. Last year I mentioned that they were one of the pandemic casualties when it came to live music events and with so many artists and venues losing money for so long a time, securing tickets to give away just wasn’t easy to do. I’d like to get back to these if at all possible but the final say falls into the hands of the major promoters. I’ll also be looking into doing some of the movies and conventions if I can work those arrangements out. This past year was a fantastic one in terms of shows but I didn’t find myself attending all of the ones that I wanted to. While I was sad to miss the double-header that Metallica did, I was in attendance at the final shows of the legendary KISS who called it a career at Madison Square Garden early in December. My concert year ended just before Christmas with an exhilarating performance by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. According to the server logs, the PiercingMetal site picked up once again in terms of traffic with more than two million pages viewed across the entire year. Now onto a little about our PiercingMetal Social Media.
Social Networking: Social Media has remained steady with regular activity on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Now while there has been more life happening over on the Facebook Page, the numbers growth has slowed down. Twitter is now called “X” and it continues to be less than useful for the brand. I do post whenever there is new content on the website but its rare that its engaged with or secures new followers. I will still keep it despite all the changes that have happened. My most active networks are the Instagram and YouTube Channel and this is mostly based on the conventions we’ve attended. I snapped hundreds of photos at the conventions and am still feeding them up on that network since life got busy. The videos are scheduled and premiering every other day until finished. Support of these two sides is imperitive to me as a creator with the YouTube being the highest so please get on point with that in order for the Channel to reach the next milestone. One new network was launched this past year called “Threads” and its Meta’s response to Twitter and can be easily set up in tandem with your Instagram. With it being an easy connection to The Gram I signed up but so far I haven’t found much overall value in this one. As mentioned time and time again social media is a numbers game and now there is even more competition to keep up with and hope you’ll click our feeds instead of someone else’s. Low numbers can be used against an outlet and I’d like to avoid that whenever possible. If you’re a fan of the brand and its adventurous efforts you must be locked into as many of the social media profiles as possible.
Top 10 Countries: United States, China, France, Germany, Russian Federation, Seychelles, India, Indonesia, Great Britain and New Zealand.
“The Chronicles of Piercing Ken”
“The Chronicles” is now halfway through its lucky thirteenth year and it was definitely a busy year for the companion site to the PiercingMetal adventures. The trade shows and conventions that had gone away in 2022 didn’t seem to make a return so its very likely they’ve sunset for good which is a shame. New shows do launch and we found that happening a couple of times with stuff like the Bild Expo. Toy Fair returned and while that usually is focused on with PM there are numerous exhibitors that we post about on “The Chronicles”. In addition to Toy Fair being back, our friends at Toy Book and Toy Insider launched a debut event called “The Play Date” and we gave that some love in editorial and video spaces. There were a couple of more cosmetic changes to the way “The Chronicles” flows and that was with our Pop Culture and Reviews categories. The original design filed those categories into sub-categories but based on the way the site posts I felt this worked against the flow a little too much. Removing all the sub-categories allows the reader to see all Pop Culture and Review features in one rundown each. Doing this on PiercingMetal would make no sense since each sub-category is quite populated by comparison. Let’s see how this idea pans out in terms of the content. “The Chronicles” while a vibrant site in its own right, doesn’t publish as often as the PiercingMetal side of the fence does. That being said I am happy to share that we surpassed the 1.5K posts published mark and the site traffic almost doubled from the previous years tally with more than 925K pages viewed over the course of the year.
Social Networking: “The Chronicles” still uses all of the most important social media accounts and is most active on both the Instagram and the YouTube Channel for this outlet. We’ve had Facebook and Twitter from the onset but neither network has embraced the outlet despite the positive traffic that was just lined out. The analytical side of me finds it odd that a site generating almost one million pages viewed in a year doesn’t climb much at all on its own Facebook Page or Twitter feed. If you’re using either of those please add us to your feed. The lifestyle events attended find a lot of images going to Instagram and continuing to do Reels while YouTube gets both longer comprehensive clips and keeping their Shorts angle in play whenever possible. Speaking of Instagram, as mentioned in the social media section for PiercingMetal, a related Threads account was created for the Piercing Ken side of things. Those who love this side of the creative coin love it considerably and truth be told its for a much wider audience than the PiercingMetal stuff since that has to stick to format as much as possible. Spend a little time on the site and if you like what you come on over and engage with us. I will admit that I am most passionate about the YouTube Channel which only recently celebrated its third anniversary since I initially never felt I would be doing videos at all. That network is the hardest to build but I have almost 500 videos now and the subscriber base is climbing little by little. In a sea of content creator channels and beyond staggering number of lifestyle channels, I am quite proud of how far its come in the short time.
Top 10 Countries: United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Russian Federation, India, Japan and China.
Ken Pierce Media
As I pen this final editorial of the year, the Ken Pierce Media website is now 3.5 years old and heading to its fourth anniversary this coming June. Though initially launched as a terciary mechanism to reach an even wider audience with a simple bare-bones Blogspot, the idea expanded with the rebranding of the Tumblr profile and eventual import of the whole thing into a bonafide Official WordPress and dotcom. The original premise of only being links to what was featured on PiercingMetal and Piercing Ken has expanded into numerous and very succinct editorial posts and while the menu categories have not had any significant changes over the 2023 publishing year, there might be a modest edit done by the time that we hit Year Four. All three mediums now work fluidly and in tandem with each other and I maintain the notion that KPM serves as the executive level editorial brand over the other two. It was somewhat of a banner year in terms of publishing as the content base surpassed 6K posts and if the two core sites have very a very busy 2024, we shall hit 6.5K before I am here to talk about this stuff once again. Sadly, the cleanup of the legacy stuff that was originally imported from the Tumblr account is still an ongoing and slow process. Remember that the original belief was that Tumblr was going to end or be integrated into WordPress by Automattic but they left it alone. At one point in history that Tumblr used to feed from our PiercingMetal Facebook and Twitter as much as it did from the main website and that’s not a snap your fingers and its done process. It’s best thought of as a new filing cabinet and five boxes of unsorted paperwork. Once everything is where it should be it looks wonderful but there is still a bit of a journey before everything is where it should be. On the upside if that Tumblr ever does go away all of this stuff will be here and directing you to what it is supposed to. The techs out there reading this realize that with better titles and tagging the site will get picked up by Google a lot better so I am doing my best to edit that legacy stuff whenever there is a slow moment in the creative day. That being said, the traffic to the Ken Pierce Media dotcom surpassed 575K Pages Viewed which is pretty damned good for this kind of outlet. Now let’s talk social media.
Social Networking: In 2023 the Ken Pierce Media branding didn’t subsume any additional social media profiles but there were two new ones that I created accounts on. The continuing disarray of the “X” (formerly Twitter) network found platforms like Mastodon and Blue Sky launching and I can tell you that KPM is on each of them for good measure. Sadly, both feel like its only shouting into an empty corridor so good for you if you’ve managed to generate any brand traction for medium on either of these. Oh wait, there were actually three networks signed onto this past year and the last one is Steam. Now Steam is more of a service than a social media platform and I joined them to interact better with the gaming developers I meet at a couple of the conventions. Since KPM performs and publishes much differently than the other two sites, the social media activity reacts in kind. However, we do need your loyalty expressed since its a numbers game on all of them. The more that I post on the website the more I will be using the social media platforms. One network that has been doing great is our TikTok with its almost 450 clips. I’ll reached that number in the coming days and laugh when I felt I wouldn’t be using it at all. There is a branded YouTube Channel which doesn’t have as many videos as the main two but needs your support so the proper URL can be established. Brand presence on Instagram remains as being the hashtag of #kenpiercemedia and if you search that on The Gram you’ll see a presentation of more than 2K images. This number will rise exponentially in the coming weeks as I am currently addressing a massive backlog of this kind of content. These networks like our ones for PiercingMetal and Piercing Ken are used very professionally and not in the manner that will make you regret following them. I know Twitter users who will tweet, or now post, every single given thought they have or take you through a television show or sporting match in a play by play fashion. Then there are friends on Facebook who will update you about every single occurrence in their day in almost ten minute intervals. That’s not us. When we write an article or wish to share some photos with the readership then you will see the socials employed. KPM social media profiles will sometimes direct you to great moments from the other websites and this is also not done ad nauseum.
Top 10 Countries: United States, Canada, Russian Federation, Japan, India, Great Britain, Sweden, China, Germany and Australia.
That brings me to the end of this years cross-brand overview and its my hope that you are enjoying the full gamut being presented in one longer editorial piece as opposed to the original way that it was done by being site specific. After doing it like this a few times now I have to say that I kind of prefer it and with Ken Pierce Media acting as the main editorial arm it makes sense to keep to this format. Wrapping up you might realize some similarities in the social media pitches and I will say very perceptive of you on that because these days the numbers often matter more than the overall editorial presence. To help these brands maintain their vitality and keep pushing ahead with the quality that you’ve come to expect we need you over on as many of the networks as possible. Now I should also remind the audience that running three websites and maintaining the necessary tech to do the job properly costs money and all of this is done without any advertising or sponsorship support and it gets costly over time. Donations can be made to help this all along and keep the lights on via our Official Ko-Fi and believe me every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and enjoying what we are putting out there. I am looking forward to making 2024 a banner year for branding and we wish you and yours a very Happy New Year. See you next time.
Important Links:
https://linktr.ee/piercingmetal
https://linktr.ee/piercingken
https://linktr.ee/kenpiercemedia