Q&A Friday #2: Brass Knuckles Webzine

04 Jun, 2004 by John Hawkins

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Question: “Didn’t you used to host another blog? I believe it was called “Brass Knuckles”. What ever happened to that?” — mike_the_engineer

Answer: Yep, I ran Brass Knuckles Webzine for roughly 3 years? It focused on humor, but I also did some interviews, daily links, and special features, some of which are in the archives section of RWN.

However, there was one problem — the $#$#$% traffic for the page just WOULD NOT GROW. I got it up as high as 3500 daily uniques at one point, but it dropped down to around 2000 daily uniques per day and stayed there. That just drove me up a wall. You have no idea how much it sucks to get some huge, once in a lifetime link, and shoot up to 20k readers in a day, only to slide down to almost exactly the same number of readers you had before within a day or two. But, I’d ask the BKW readers what they thought and it was “great,” “fantastic,” “love the page like it is, don’t change a thing”. I loved doing that page, but it was driving me up a wall.

Eventually, I started RWN, ran ’em both for about a year, and then decided to kill BKW because it was too much work to do both pages at the same time, and RWN was growing while BKW wasn’t. At the time, BKW had about 2000k sets of eyeballs hitting it per day, M-F, and RWN only had about a 1000. But today, RWN pulls around 6000 readers M-F so I think I made the right call.