It’s a wrap for us this week here at TouchArcade, and provided nothing crazy happens in the world of iOS gaming, we’ll see you again on Monday morning for Shaun’s Update Mondays and Tasos’s Touchstone Tavern Hearthstone (Free) roundup before diving in head-first to whatever awesome mobile games get released and whatever rad looking mobile games are coming soon. We’ve been doing this for years now, and to keep doing what we’re doing, we need your help. Whether you’re here for our game reviews, to read about upcoming games, find games on sale, listen to our podcast, or participate in your community, we’re glad to have you. If the feeling is mutual, which I hope it is, there’s a few things you can do to help keep TouchArcade alive in this weird changing world of mobile gaming, which for numerous reasons has jeopardized the future of third party editorial sites like ours.
First off, and the easiest, tell your friends about TouchArcade. Practically everyone has a smartphone now, and as Pokemon Go (Free) has shown, even total non-gamers are playing mobile games. If you see your friends have a bunch of junky games on their phone, they’d probably appreciate learning about a site and community like ours where they can find good stuff to play. Tell them about our podcast, encourage them to register for our forums, whatever you’re comfortable with. Organic growth via trusted word of mouth is the best way to get other great people onto our little island of appreciating great mobile games, which really just makes things better for everyone.
Another easy thing you can do is if you read something on TouchArcade that you like, share it out to your online friends via Twitter or Facebook or posting the article on Reddit. Most of our traffic comes from Google, which means our top trafficked stories are consistently about (often dumb, or otherwise generally uninteresting) popular stuff. Shaun’s RPG Reload series, which I think is some of the best content we put out, are always among our worst performing articles. I’d love if that eventually changed, but in order to get there, we need to depend on our core community of readers who I know appreciate our long-form content to help spread the word. Even a few people sharing those articles makes a significant difference.
A lot of people seem to discover TouchArcade via our podcast, and both subscribing and leaving us an iTunes review helps us appear higher in the iTunes charts and search results. Also, going back to my first point, in telling your friends, if you know someone who listens to a lot of gaming podcasts, it’d be great if you could recommend they check out ours.
All of those things can be done at no cost to you, and with practically no effort. If you want to help TouchArcade even further, these days we’re primarily supported by Patreon. We’re still a long way from our original goal which would allow us to do all sorts of stuff like creating even more content, cover even more events, and potentially even explore the feasibility of updating the existing app or creating an entirely new one. TouchArcade gets millions of visitors a month, and (as of this writing) barely over 500 of those people are Patreon backers. We’d love to see that number increase, as every dollar contributed directly goes back to making this site more awesome. Think of it as a magazine subscription, but you get way more than just one outdated issue a month.
Even if you’re not willing to do any of this, thanks for visiting TouchArcade. We’ll see ya’ next week.
