IndieSpam

Hiya!

My name is Ivar, I’m the admin, creator, and sole-writer on IndieSpam at the moment. I thought id bring you a little update on the site. I’d mostly like to give a little bit of an explanation on what’s been going on and what you can expect in the future from IndieSpam.

If you have up to this point been a fan of what I’ve been doing on this site:

Thanks! It means a lot to me. At this point after around 4 months (where I’ve basically only been active for 3) the site has received over 5k unique visitors and over 8k views all in all. I’ve gotten to speak with some really cool people, and I’ve been able to document and show of some cool stuff within the often overlooked indie animation space.

Outside of the site, I’ve hit over 100 followers on Instagram. While that isn’t earth shattering in any way, from my perspective it is a good start. The discord also amassed over 20 members. YouTube:er Ayy Lmao made a short on my reporting that amassed over 600k views and ExtraDoven made a video citing the me that has gathered over 25k views as of now, both on the Rafael Andaya interview. I’m pretty sure I’m doing something right, I just have to do more things right.

Initially I thought the site might reach, like maybe 100 people, over a significantly longer time generally due to how little traffic sites outside off the core web seem to get today but I’ve been lucky to have gotten help by very kind people to bring more eye’s on the site by collabing.

Initially I mostly thought I’d just do this to build more of a portfolio within English media journalism to maybe get a job within that space but I’ve received a lot more readership than initially expected which I’m very thankful for.

Where have I been?

If you have been following the site you might be wondering exactly where I’ve been off to the last month. There has been nothing new on the site and close to nothing on the socials. Is indieSpam shutting down?

No.

I’ve just been busy with my studies. The good thing that I’ve learned is that although I take a break of the site it don’t mean that traffic halt to zero which is good to know. The last month has netted me around 50 daily unique readers which is far from groundbreaking, but also far from zero.

I have also gotten a brand new promotion from student to unemployed. Everything is close to finished at this point academically, for better and worse. A positive thing with that is that I’m for the time done with school. I have studied on a university level for over 5 years, I have both a bachelors in media production and an associates degree in webmaster and coding so now we are hoping for them to get put to good use in future endeavors.

Another positive thing is that I should hopefully have more time to spare on working on IndieSpam stuff.

The MAJOR negative thing is that I have no income at the moment. I’m currently looking for work preferably in the media and web spheres so if you have any tips or know someone who is looking for someone who fit my profile you can either message me through discord or via my mail: Ivarsandberg.admin@indiespam.com

I’m not dying on the street or anything like that and I’m not in any risk of homelessness. However if you’d like to support the site you can always do so via a direct donation on my Ko-Fi, where you can also peruse some pixel-art I made a while back. (Please don’t tip if I know you in person. That’d be weird.)

Ambitions and current goals

The current most important goals for the site is to build more of a sizeable and active community as well as a tight, yet wide, personal network with creators and artists. A surprising amount of people have already messaged me in hopes that I can help them with their Kick-starters or just with marketing as a whole. I’d like to help anyone who I believe have the skill and determination to realize whatever they set out to do. Sadly, more often than not, I’m unable to do anything major.

By building more of a core audience I’ll be less reliant on larger IP:s and current trends thus I’ll be able to more effectively platform and recommend smaller artists.

I’m also looking to get in contact with more artists of varying sizes to do interviews and other collabs. I think the most important thing in pretty much any industry is to be able to reach out and talk with each other. I see a lot of negativity online where people push each other down to get higher and I’d like to see more people raise each other up.

With that said: If you are an artist. You can always message me no matter if you are big or small. I’d love to hear from you.

My biggest focus as of now will be on interviews but it won’t be the only thing on the site.

The ultimate dream would be to be able to live leisurely through online content creation but I think I’m pretty far from that as of now.

I don’t like the idea of ads on the site and either way, they pay horribly. The people turned off by them would hurt me a lot more than google could ever compensate me. The Ko-fi has gained no tips, a patreon could be neat but I have very little to offer in return right now outside of being put on a supporter-page and I’d expect it wouldn’t faire much better than the ko-fi. Paywalling content would be completely antithetical to what I’m trying to do. I am fairly confident that no merch I’d slap my logo on as of now would sell either.

I don’t mean to whine or anything like that. I’m mostly just trying to explain my situation. It would be a little foolish to expect any riches from 100 insta-followers and a dream.

Another thing I have to work on in that regard is identity. There isn’t a lot to really remember the site outside of specific articles. There isn’t a face to the site and there are few reasons to get attached. At the moment I’m thinking something a little more Frutiger Aero design-wise and more branding in general. I also got some other stuff in the works that you’ll see eventually…

Given my position I can’t really promise daily uploads or anything like that. I hope I can get out more than one per week but it sort of remains to see. It will definitely be more than the amount during my month of absence.

Stay updated with the site

There are multiple ways to keep up with the site. You can follow us on our socials (that you find at the bottom of the site), you can join the discord (18+), and if you want to get updates whenever we release something new along with some extra tidbits you can join the E-mail newsletter at the bottom of the page.

Outside of just being kept up to date, on the discord we’ve also started an animation book club where we’ll be watching and discussing animated movies. This week we’ll be taking a look at Otaku no Video (1991) by Gainax. Hope I’ll see you there!

Thanks for showing interest!

Experiences as a webmaster (read this if you are a web nerd only)

Generally when talking as someone who run a website, one of the first thing you notice is how little search engine cares for you. The web is built in a way where search engines typically serve you the most referenced material available. It gives websites an invisible authority score that it uses to decide which site should be shown. That is why Wikipedia, YouTube, or Fandom is almost always one of the first sites to show up when you search for anything, it has a very high authority. Because of that it is hard to start a new site.

Trying to market with googles search engine in mind is somewhat of a fools errand unless you have an authority score large enough to actually compete with the larger sites or you have a lot of demand and little competition.

“But Ivar, aren’t you writing about rather niche topics? There can’t be a lot of competition right?”

That’s mostly right.

When I write about something more popular like Glitch I am more often than not somewhere out in space at placement 13000, but it might do “fine” on socials.

When I write about a smaller indie project there is very little competition. My authority score don’t matter to much cause I will regardless be in the top 5 (or at least top 10) in the search engine. That is if the title of the project is unique enough. A lot of times indieprojects are named after something else that is more popular than their project will ever be and I’m stuck competing with that thing instead.

Let’s say you name a project “Tomato”. what do you think will come up when you search “tomato”? You’ll probably not get the indie-project. I’m not trying to hang anyone out. I often think the titles fit well. Simultaneously it’s an issue for search engine optimization that often goes overlooked or is seen as a none factor.

Another issue is when there isn’t a lot of competition there is usually a good reason for that. Not many people search for that thing or it is new enough that no one has had the chance to post about it. Sometimes I can put something out before the larger sites, but if it is like that I usually only get that traffic during a very short time window. I could probably start to trend chase a little bit more IF this was profitable enough to put that sort of time and effort into. Right now it just isn’t for me. Either way I don’t see it as sustainable.

The whole point with the site is to document and shine a light on smaller indie creators and a problem with that is that you sort of have to have a platform, to platform someone else. To effectively help get eyes on my own and others people’s projects I sort of have to get a core audience to do that effectively. I have to reach a critical mass where most things I do can retain a core readership enough to have an impact on the creators I want to help.

A rather demoralizing factor is AI and content theft in itself. Right now a lot of big companies want to shove AI into anything, especially LLM:s and gen AI. On Bing there is a thing were you can see how many times co-pilot has cited you when people have looked for info and I now that it is way more than I would want it to be. I’m not gonna give any exact numbers because no matter if it is 1 or 1000 it shouldn’t happen even once.

The problem with AI citing is multiple. It often gives wrong information and thus misrepresents the site as a whole. Usually, historically, in questions of piracy its a bigger party upset at smaller individuals for unlawfully sharing their information but here there is a very little guy who need traffic through the site while the massive information stealer company uses him for their LLM. Usually when it comes to citing online there is some positive outcome for the original source.

If I get cited and linked to on another site that heightens my web authority at the very least. Although it don’t favor the site, authority wise, when I get YouTube or social media mentions it does at least bring in more people and help with awareness. No one cares for a AI citing. It is worthless. People who are using AI to browse are not gonna check for references. The LLM:s are taking up what was usually digital foot traffic and they are repackaging others goods without paying and handing it to people.

I just wanted to vent a bit. It is not “illegal” probably. I, personally, do however feel that it’s rather evil.

Either way, that’s the end of this little update. Have a good one! See you soon!