Since it’s my anniversary day of arriving on this planet, I have to act more wise and mature. And I get presents. This is just how it is. I don’t make the birthday rules.
Now, I know what you’re asking yourself: Ian, what can I actually get you? And you’re probably also saying to yourself, too: Dude, I sometimes enjoy reading you, but a present??? This is just a distant blog-internet reader relationship. That seems a bit much, bro.
What if that gift, though, was a minute of your time and a few clicks or taps on your device? And, in the process, you make one of your favorite hockey websites just a tiny bit healthier moving into a very weird and uncertain future?
Pwease? 🥹
Possible Gift #1: Follow us on Facebook and update your settings so we’re a “Favorite.”
Here’s the link. Hit the Follow button. Then hit the Follow button again and choose Favorites.
Here’s why it’s important. I can’t speak to this with much authority. I can only describe what I’ve read on the internet and our experience.
Publishers in general have seen steep declines in the traffic they get through Facebook. According to Digiday, major publishers have seen drops between 60 and 80 percent over the last couple years. According to Axios, the numbers are even worse. Forums for independent publishers are full of panicked comments about their traffic drying up as Facebook has deprioritized outgoing links and instead promoted AI slop.
For us, Facebook has long been one of our bigger traffic drivers. Then over the last year, things began to noticeably fall off a cliff in October 2024 when we had about approximately 40 percent of the traffic we had in October 2023. For a tiny blog like us, that really hurts.
The changes for RMNB on the Facebook timeline appear to have been significant for friends and others I’ve talked to (thanks RMNB crashers!). Some of my friends stopped seeing our stories with regularity. One went from seeing them all, to seeing almost none, with no change in their behavior. Some people would see one random story, but like a week after the news happened, taking away any reason to click. Who wants to read a week-late recap? (No offense, Peter.) Instead of having fluctuating traffic depending on a story’s importance or well-written-ness, we started to see similar traffic everyday between the same range. Evidence that suggests there’s a throttle.
Just clicking on the follow button again and turning us to Favorites should make us pop up WAY more for you again, especially if you click on us when you actually see an RMNB post on your timeline.
Possible Gift #2: Follow us on Bluesky.
Here is the link. Hit the follow button.
Here’s why you should. We have over 60k followers on Twitter, I mean, X, I mean, the “Everything App.” You would think having over 60K followers on a social media site would be life-changing and deliver huge traffic. And back in the day, yeah, I guess sometimes it did. But here is a helpful graph to show you how things are going now.
These are pageviews. Now, we’re getting lots of retweets and favorites there (thank you) and that number above is certainty not 0, but our traffic is riding down a ski slope like we’re a world champion alpiner.
What we’re noticing as a blog is that many people are flocking to or, some of you might say, fleeing, to Bluesky, which is gaining a million followers a day.
If you’re already there, or about to get an account there, please follow @rmnb.bsky.social.
(And maybe the whole RMNB past and present team too including me.)
I’d be grateful. What a great gift! Now, I’m getting the warm and fuzzies.
I’ll be honest. This is one of those times when there’s an earthquake happening in how people get and consume their news. And this is one of the ways I’m trying to stay on top of it — by, groveling, and using my birthday as an excuse to promote these things.
The good news is that we’re still doing well because our readership has adjusted and is finding us in other ways. And for that, we are grateful.
I’d also say, as someone who has read hockey stories all my life, we do provide a real service by how on top of news we always are and how good the writing is here by everyone else not named Ian Oland. What makes us special too is our community, many of you I know are noncommenters, but visit everyday. You are our lifeblood.
At this point in my life, I do really feel like I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To have a son. To have a cat that cuddles with me. To play hockey every week. To create things and have a creative job. It was what I was born to do. My birthday wish — dead serious — is to be able to do this forever for you.
P.S. – If you want to get me a super crazy birthday gift, follow us on Patreon where you can get perks, too!
