2018 by the numbers–And new Channel Trailer!
As the year closes out, I just wanted to reflect on the progress of the blog and it’s related internet properties. Straight away, the blog got a huge facelift this year with all new coloring and branding. I could not have done it without my bud Steve who did a lot of the heavy lifting and educated me on the power of graphics, branding and consistency. I think the Blog, GitHub Repo and YouTube Channel all really gel together now.
For the numbers breakdown:
The YouTube channel (youtube.com/vCloudInfo) was started this year on September 6th with it’s first official Smart Home upload. From that point, we have gotten about 590 Subscribers, have uploaded about 25 videos and had about 20k video views. This is still super small in terms of YouTube numbers but I’m excited to see the growth and glad people are responding to the content.
My GitHub repo is where I store and share my Home Assistant configurations. The repository passed 1700 stars this year and has over 600 commits to it. These are all the changes I make to my Smart Home as I strive to make it better, smarter and more responsive.
On the Twitter front, this year I rolled out my automated House Bot @BearStoneHA which live tweets activities as they happen around the house. Lights going on and off, sprinklers and other Automation related events. The bot has around 300 followers (which I think is awesome) and my twitter account just passed 2100 followers. I have about 8k tweets under my belt now. It is by far my favorite social media platform and is the easiest way to get in touch with me. (@CCOSTAN)
This year we also started the official Home Assistant Facebook Group. To date, it has about 3575 members and is growing all the time. The discussions on the group are amazing and is a great way to find support for HA on Facebook. My vCloudInfo facebook page is closing in on 2000 likes.
This blog has had some major growth spurts this year as I have focused on creating as much new content on it as I can. This is the first year we hit 500,000 page views (~540,000 to be more precise) and have about 2.1 million views for the decade. So this was a big year in terms of readership. While still tech focused with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft related articles, Home Automation has really added a dose of healthy traffic to the blog. I’m amazed at how much cross over there is in the audience. I mean, HA is pretty IT focused so I shouldn’t be that surprised right?
Over all, we produced about 100 pieces of new content this year between videos and posts.
Big thank you to everyone who has helped me on this journey and continue to read the posts and watch the videos.
Here is the new Channel Trailer for 2019 based on the 2018 growth.
Happy New year to everyone and see you in 2019!
Thanks