The Escapist Snags 1 Million Visitors

The Escapist (which you may have heard of) hit the million mark for unique visitors in October.

"This is a proud moment for The Escapist," said Julianne Greer, Executive Editor of The Escapist. "We are really excited to reach such an important milestone in just two years."

Respected industry-wide for over two years as the leader in inventive, insightful features on games and gaming culture, The Escapist's recent redesign and the inclusion of feature content such as Zero Punctuation, daily news and editorials and a revamped, revitalized forum community have propelled the site to among the top-tier gaming destinations.

"It shouldn't come as any surprise that The Escapist is hitting the 1 million visitors per month mark so soon, frankly. It's a must-read publication unlike any other in the category," Hal Halpin, President of the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA), told dBusiness News. "I don't have as much time as I would like to read through all of the media that cover the IE business, but The Escapist is on my short-list; it's insightful, intelligently-written and topical."

The Escapist Publishes weekly features every Tuesday. A new Zero Punctuation can be seen every Wednesday.

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Congrats Julianne, congrats The Escapist, may many more visiters appear in the near and far future.

*claps*

Happy to hear this news!

Hot damn! Congratulations to everyone on staff! Very cool. I'll admit I missed the old format of the Escapist at first, but I really like the increased focus on the forums, and you guys have created a booming community. Well done!

I can't help it...You lured me in with Zero Punctuation. Now The Escapist is on my daily list of RSS feeds to keep up on. :)

Congratulations on your success!

Bravo! And do keep up the good work.

It is well deserved!
Congratulations to the team, and all members and visitors for their contribution.

Nice going guys:)

Bravo!

Now can I have my cookie? :)

The instant gratification from the hilarious episodes of Zero Punctuation followed by the insightful and intelligent articles of the Escapist Staff is a devastating one-two punch! No self-respecting gamer can resist that kind of assault.

Congrats to The Escapist! You guys definitely deserve all the success!

Give Yatzee a raise.

edit: If you haven't already.

Congrats, Escapist! I started reading quite soon after launch, though it's only recently that I became a regular reader (and a poster in the forums), and I've always enjoyed the perspectives brought by your writers and articles.

Now onward and upward to the next million!

-- Steve

nice, way to go. Let's hope for the sake of zero punctuation it will become better, then.

Cause that is why i joined.

Keep up the good work.

Brother None:
One million a month isn't actually that much, and it certainly isn't top-tier.

Still, congrats and may you keep growing.

how can you be so cynical! yes, many of the most popular sites may get a lot more a month, but who cares, this is The Escapist, and this beautiful website has achieved 1 million visitors!

Jakebently:
Give Yatzee a raise.

edit: If you haven't already.

Or get him a sex life.

I have to admit to not being as fond of the magazine as I was before it changed from a magazine format, but it's still one of my favourite game sites.

With the case of Gamernode: I was a reader (and a one-time contributor with a Battlefield 2 review) when it was just starting out. One of the reasons it became to successful was the hosting the Black Mesa Source site, which did wonders for hits, as BMS has a massive following.

And with Gamespot...well, it's years old, and quite sensationalist. That and The Escapist are two completely different sites. This one doesn't give out regular reviews or previews - The Escapist isn't about that, so it's bound to be less popular.

congratulations, I love the site.

Num43:

Jakebently:
Give Yatzee a raise.

edit: If you haven't already.

Or get him a sex life.

A raise buys more whores. Case closed.

Thanks everyone for the kind words!

About our relative size, we are quite aware of exactly where we stack up in the taxonomy of the web.... Compete.com shows Escapist (100,000 readers, presumably daily) as being larger than both Gamebanshee (79,000) and Gamernode (59,000) as well as Gamasutra (90,103) and Next Gen (46,000). We are at half the size of Gamershell (219,000), and of course far smaller than giant Gamespot (4MM) and Gamespy (1.4M). But we have grown 1850% in the past twelve months, while Gamespot is down 12%, Gamespy is down 21%, and Gamershell is up only 1.4%.

Additionally, our one million readers have far more demographic similarity to a Gamasutra/Next-Gen type site (well-educated, professional, game dev or journalistic ties; influencers...) than they do to a youth-oriented gaming blog. That puts us in a very happy place.

Put another way: Reader's Digest has a far larger monthly readership than The Economist, but if you asked me which magazine I'd rather publish, I'd take The Economist. We have a similar philosophy with The Escapist...

A raise buys more whores. Case closed.

Puh-lease. A raise buys him more *escorts*. Let's not be crass, people.

Congrats folks,
This place has quickly become my premier site for game news and truly interesting and well written articles. I usually can't wait for new articles every tuesday. I just hope you don't think you can relax and start goofing off.

Archon:

A raise buys more whores. Case closed.

Puh-lease. A raise buys him more *escorts*. Let's not be crass, people.

Okay, so I guess his *escorts* will teleport into the room? :P

Congratulations guys. I've been plugging the hell out of The Escapist in my magazine, in the hopes of raising the profile of intelligent, reasoned debate. You're a glimmering light in a sea of sensationalist pop culture.

Excellent achievement Escapist. I'll admit I at first came for Zero Punctuation, but stayed for both. I didnt know such a site like this existed, which looked at video games in a professional perspective. Here's to hoping for the 2 million mark and that this site would reach the masses(or not depending how you see it).

Jakeb Smith:
Congratulations guys. I've been plugging the hell out of The Escapist in my magazine, in the hopes of raising the profile of intelligent, reasoned debate. You're a glimmering light in a sea of sensationalist pop culture.

in the words of yahtzee, The Escapist "is a beacon of excellent" gaming "philosophy in the dark wild piss-stained swamplands of the gaming industry", again, congrats, there is probably not another gaming magazine with the same kind of philosophy that gets this amount of attention. well done.

Brother None, it depends on what you mean by "top-tier". I think we are simply semantically in disagreement over whether "tier" is purely a matter of volume, or if its volume x awesomeness.

If your definition of top-tier is purely based on readership volume, then I see where you are coming from.

But if your definition of top-tier is some combination of number of readers, quality of audience, access to sources, quality of content, and professional reputation, then I would argue that The Escapist is now absolutely top-tier.

Again, as an analogy: If I start a sports-car company and sell 1 car, I can't claim to be top-tier. But would anyone question that by the time you sell as many cars as Porsche, you are top-tier? Even though your sales are dwarfed by Toyota?

And no, Compete isn't by itself reliable, but neither is Comscore, Nielsen, Alexa, or anything else. The very question of accuracy, though, is an interesting one. What exactly is "accurate"? At the end of the day, a server isn't accurately measuring readership either, it's just measuring IPs or pageloads. No one can telepathically measure eyeballs. It's not clear that internal server statistics are the best measure of accuracy, because they can be misled by variant IPs, multi-users from one IP, spiders, and so on. I think of all these sources as radar, sonar, infrared, etc. - each gives you a sensor reading and then you have to use them all to compile a best guess of what's going on.

So for what it's worth, Alexa, Quantcast, and Compete all show Escapist as considerably larger than Gamebanshee. If the folks at Gamebanshee are really twice our size, they should probably consider optimizing to adjust the way their traffic presents itself on public measures, as that's what sells ads. I don't read their site so I can't speak to its quality, access, and reputation.

I'm not sure what to say about Gamespot. It struck me as anomolously large as well, but on the other hand, editors don't always know their own traffic. But when it comes to something as big as Gamespot, does it really matter? When someone says "The Death Star is as big as a moon" do you care if the moon they mean is Luna, Io, Europa, or Ganymede? The point is, it's big enough that you have to aim for the thermal exhaust port. :)

Stay on target.

I'm in range! Target's coming up. Almost there...

You think my definition is muddled? Hmmm. Think about this: When we launched The Escapist, a lot of people told us we'd never reach more than 50,000 gamers per month. "There just aren't that many smart gamers who want intelligent games journalism." And, as good as we might be, at 50K readers per month it's hard to claim that you're in the top tier.

But when you take that same quality and reach 1 million, I think the equation changes. If that seems muddled to you, well, since you so kindly granted us top tier status on quality anyway, I don't feel I need to worry about that much. :)

Archon:
You think my definition is muddled? Hmmm. Think about this: When we launched The Escapist, a lot of people told us we'd never reach more than 50,000 gamers per month. "There just aren't that many smart gamers who want intelligent games journalism." And, as good as we might be, at 50K readers per month it's hard to claim that you're in the top tier.

But when you take that same quality and reach 1 million, I think the equation changes. If that seems muddled to you, well, since you so kindly granted us top tier status on quality anyway, I don't feel I need to worry about that much. :)

i like the idea that gamers arent smart, a lot are, unfortunately, i have to agree that there are also a lot of gamers who think their smart, no offence to anyone, but some aren't, although most of these people seem to have been singled out and blocked form this site, which causes me to congradulate The Escapist further, as it runs a fine ethic boundary, singling out those who take this website for granted. Or for idiocy.