Later this year, Vooks will turn 25 years old, and we’ll have been bringing you all the Australian and international Nintendo news, reviews, bargains, videos, and podcast for a quarter of a century.
For the longest time, the site has been self-sufficient and able to maintain its independence using various income methods to pay for the site and podcast hosting, security, and all the other little fees involved.
Fortunately, the site is doing quite well; we’re constantly breaking new traffic records, and things are on the up and up—even with things winding down with the Switch. It’s an interesting problem because despite traffic being up, almost all the ways we pay for the site’s existence are down. Adverts aren’t bringing in as much, slower physical releases mean fewer affiliate buys, plus no one has any money for discretionary spending, so bargains, usually our bread and butter, aren’t doing too hot either.
So, because traffic is up, we can’t move to any sort of smaller hosting. The hundreds of thousands of people who read the site a month chew through the bandwidth, so what to do then?
Everyone is having a hard enough time. Instead, using the tools we already have, there might be some ways to support us without doing too much different. We’re not looking to make a tonne of money here , just enough to keep the lights on without impacting our wallet.
All of the below on their own won’t cover everything, but if there’s anything you can do – please take a read.
Advertising
Web adverts suck; either they take up too much space, get in the way, slow down your phone or just aren’t relevant to you at all. Worse still is when they’re too relevant and snoopy. Vooks has had adverts for years; in some months, they work well, and in others, they bring in almost nothing.
There’s probably an advert right here for some sort of topical butt cream ⬇️
If you run an adblocker, consider turning it off on Vooks. But if you find them too annoying, you know what? We don’t blame you. Block away.
Affiliate Purchases
For years, we’ve done bargain guides and roundups to save everyone money. Then, Amazon came to Australia, and affiliate links became a “thing.” Some people on social media make it their entire life and make a lot of money off it. We have our bargain guides, and they have some affiliate links in them, but we prefer to let you decide where to buy from even if it doesn’t net us anything. We want you to save.
You can support Vooks by buying from bargain guides and using our links to buy anything—it doesn’t have to be games as well.
By clicking any of our Amazon links, Big W links, or heck, even LEGO links, you’ll go through us, and we’ll get a portion. Do you need a carton of Pepsi Max or some dog food? You can help us out even just a tiny bit with those links.
Like, Comment, Subscribe and Watch
With Google shitting the bed recently, and social media networks and their algorithms being what they are – it’s even harder for us to be found than ever before. It’s a brag, but out of the thousands of people who follow us on social media, just a handful of people ever see those posts – even if you like/follow/subscribe to our channels. It’s sucks, and it’s only going to get worse as Daddy Google slurps up our data and uses it.
So, if you like our work, please share it and let people know about our site—we’re a small niche within a small niche. We’re also constantly posting the Vookcast video and gameplay clips on YouTube —if you can like them and leave a comment, it does help. (even leave it on in the background!)
It’s a cliche, but they wouldn’t say it unless it were true, would they?
As a reminder, we’re on
Patreon
Most people use Patreon to give you exclusive content or a separate level of content – for years; we’ve used it as a way for people to support the site and get a few little perks. Unfortunately, being based in America (specifically California), Patreon has a whole bunch of boring rules about being able to do fun things like contests, so being able to giveaways to our Patreons has been stopped dead in its tracks for literally years. But people get that the Patreon is just a way to support the site (and those little perks).
Even just a dollar a month goes a long way.
Merch
People have been asking for Vooks merch for years—not many people, but it’s always something we wanted to offer but couldn’t find the right way to do it. So now we have the Vooks Merch shop with a range of cool things that we would buy ourselves (and have!).
We’ve kept the margin as low as possible, so we get a little for each item. But we really just wanted to offer a way for people to buy something to support the site and wear it out and about.
Like anything, shipping is the killer, and we’ve tried to pick products that are made and shipped from Australia so the costs are low. But so many cool products aren’t made here so that it could blow things out.
If you’ve read all the way to the end, thanks for reading it – thanks for being here on our site at all. We truely appreciate it.
Have a cookie 🍪