Happy Lewd Year!
Reflecting on a wild year of covering the news in Naughty List News #62
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Writing this newsletter over the past year has exceeded my wildest expectations. My goal was to release a newsletter every week and I managed to hit exactly that. I released 52 newsletters in 2021, one every week, even when things were very hectic in my life.
And while doing that, I tried not to worry too much about the stats I do not have control over. I can only put my writing out there and hope that people like it. I cannot force you to become a subscriber or even to interact with my writing in some way. (Although I love you very much regardless!)
But people did show up, and they did so in droves.
Stats and a graph
On January 1st, 2021, I had 32 wonderful and amazing subscribers. But on January 1st, 2022, I had 453 subscribers. That’s an increase of 1312%! You don’t get returns like that anywhere except in crypto or pyramid schemes. But I repeat myself.
I pivoted away from reviewing games and instead tried to cover the news from the adult gaming world. This was primarily a time-saving measure. Reviewing a game properly can take a lot more time than you think, especially when no screenshots or story overview is provided. This strategy worked out great for me because it reduced a lot of anxiety I had about delivering a newsletter every week.
I also made news myself. I was interviewed by The Sex Files about my newsletter and I interviewed Spicy Gaming about their platform relaunch. I also interviewed Operation Lovecraft about their launch on Steam. I even had a guest contributor!
In 2022 I want to keep doing what’s been working so far. You can expect more news and more interviews going forward. But first I need to answer a burning question.
Where did you all come from?
By far the largest segment of my subscribers came from people visiting the site directly without any referral or by typing in the URL themselves. 61% of you signed up in this way. The next biggest referrer was Reddit with 17% of signups, closely followed by Twitter (15%) and good ol’ Google (6%).
Linktree performed just as poorly as Facebook at 1% of signups, which is interesting because I don’t post on Facebook at all while my Linktree is linked from my Twitter profile.
If you still remember how you found out about the newsletter, I’d love to hear about it!
Let’s break this down further. I want to talk about what worked for me on these platforms but also, what absolutely didn’t.
Reddit
Reddit is a link aggregation site that is divided into communities they call “subreddits”. Users subscribe to these communities, which makes posts show up on their homepage using an algorithm. You can vote posts up if you like them and vote them down if you don’t and the same goes for comments.
You can have a community about anything on Reddit but I usually post my newsletter in communities like /r/Adult_Gaming, /r/lewdgames, and /r/nsfwdev. This is because most of the larger communities about gaming frown upon posts about adult gaming or NSFW material in general.
When I posted a link to my newsletter directly on some of the larger subreddits I saw a lot of “sugar rush” traffic: lots of views but very little engagement. That’s why I pivoted to posting image summaries of my newsletter that link back to the website. I theorized that this would get more engagement on Reddit than a link and that any subsequent views would be of a higher quality.
This theory has held true so far. I get hundreds of upvotes and about a dozen comments on my posts every week, spread out over multiple communities. This was definitely not the case when I posted a link directly.
Unfortunately, I pushed my luck and was banned from several of the largest video game communities. They did not appreciate my posting about adult games, even though I always make sure to never show anything explicit. I’ve tried to appeal these bans without much luck.
Nevertheless, Reddit is still a reliable source of growth for me.
What worked for me
Posting image summaries of my newsletter to many subreddits.
What didn’t work for me
Posting a direct link to my newsletter.
Getting banned from /r/gaming, the largest forum for video games on the Internet.
/r/NaughtyListNews
Cards on the table, I had a very simple reason for starting my own subreddit: I wanted to post my newsletter summaries on subreddits that wouldn’t allow me to do so directly. I found out that these communities would still allow crossposts, which is where you share a post from another community.
And so I started /r/NaughtyListNews with the express purpose of hosting my newsletter summary images just so that I could share them. I made the community Restricted, which means only moderators can post threads, but other people can still upvote, comment, or join if they want to.
My community now has over 3,500 members. I have no idea where they all came from. Even though I’m the only one that is allowed to make posts, the people in this community don’t seem to mind.
What worked for me
Restricting posts to only myself to avoid having to moderate a community.
What didn’t work for me
No plan for what to do with a community on Reddit.
Imgur
Imgur is a weird one. I’m old enough to know that Imgur started as an alternative to terrible image hosts for Reddit posts. But by now it has become a social platform in its own right where people post memes and try to go viral.
At the beginning of last year, things were actually looking up for me on this platform. After some experimentation, I found an image template for the newsletter that seemed to appeal to this audience. One of my posts even went viral on the platform.
But even this success did not translate into a noticeable bump in new subscribers. I think it’s because this audience just isn’t all that interested in news about adult games. And now I’m even banned from posting to the community because I violated “community guidelines”.
The moderators wouldn’t tell me which rule(s) I broke but I suspect it had something to do with the adult contents of my images. For what it’s worth, I always flagged my posts as NSFW and included the relevant tags.
I could theoretically appeal the ban but I have no desire to do so. There simply isn’t an audience for adult gaming news on Imgur.
What worked for me
Posting image summaries of my newsletter.
What didn’t work for me
Posting image summaries of my newsletter.
Twitter
Twitter is the social media platform we all love to hate. But of all the tech giants, it’s the one I love the most. Twitter hasn’t cracked down on lewd content (yet), so it’s a place where you can still find adult artists, sex work activists, and adult game developers.
My following has grown steadily over the past year, which is terrific. The worst thing that can happen to you on Twitter is “going viral”, which is where a mob of strangers misinterpret everything you failed to say in 280 characters. Thankfully it hasn’t happened to me yet. I have only three tweets with more than 100 likes and my resolution for 2022 is to keep it that way.
Besides making terrible jokes, I always post a summary image on Sunday morning and a follow-up with the link to the newsletter in the afternoon. This gives me maximum engagement from my audience in both the southern hemisphere and the Americas.
I’ve also started using Hypefury for scheduling my tweets. I love how I can use it to create a backlog of ahem awesome tweets and it will tweet them out for me at the right times. It also autoplugs my newsletter whenever a tweet reaches a specified amount of likes. Hypefury is a great time-saver for me!
What worked for me
Writing my little stories in 280 characters.
Writing amazing jokes that everybody loves.
What didn’t work for me
Being on the platform all day every day.
What’s next?
I’ve finally bit the bullet and created a Steam Curator page. I realized that I need to meet my audience where they are. But I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew. There will only be short 200 character reviews on my Curator page but I do plan to do them every two weeks or so.
You may have seen at the top that I’ve created a Media Kit for potential sponsors. Sponsorships will allow me to justify spending more of my time on my writing. I want to keep the newsletter freely accessible to everyone, which is why I prefer advertising revenue over putting some of my writing behind a paywall.
Thank you so much for reading and let’s make 2022 an awesome year for adult games!
Writing Wrap-Up 📖
Help Desktop Chan save her virtual world from a virus in Lost: Find. Find the optimal path in each level and overcome the female antagonists!
Summer romance visual novel Complex Relations is looking for funding. I have had a soft spot for this title ever since I wrote about it for newsletter #6.
Erotic rhythm game Sailn Rhythm is out now on Steam. A 30-year old virgin gets the power to arouse any woman, possibly by getting a mortgage and a dog.
The Voluptuous DEMON QUEEN and our Shoebox Apartment Life is out now. Having a descriptive title like that really saves a lot of time on writing copy!
NookGaming lists their favorite visual novels of 2021. I’m a sucker for a great end-of-year list and Nook has impeccable taste.
Sweet & Spicy did a quarterly review on their journey. Very commendable to do something like this out in the open!
The Daily Beast published an editorial on sex workers and tech censorship. Webber writes about coming back from a hiatus from camming to find “probably the most inhospitable porn landscape we’ve seen in decades.”
Cheeky chuckle 🤭
Artist spotlight 💡
Thanks for reading this far!
If you want to help me compile the newsletter, feel free to poke me on Twitter.
Until next time!
-Mr. Hands