100.000 visitors & a Patreon to support Silent Shadows
After nearly two years since the first brainstorming sessions that lead me to create a Burning Crusade Rogue website with the help of a few contributors, Silent Shadows was finally released on November 25th of 2020, with a dozen of pages only, but a lot of motivation. Until that day the website kept dragging more and more players and here we are.
Dears shades,
It’s a different kind of post today but there are days for working hard, and days for celebrating. Today I wanted to celebrate and share with you the second milestone of Silent Shadows (the first one was the release of the website itself).
A very special milestone
As you can read in the title, after a bit less than 6 months of existence during which silentshadows.net received an incredible wave of support from all around the world, we just reached
– 100K unique visitors*
– half a million page views*
*source: Google Analytics.
This is something that I would have not really expected before the release of Burning Crusade Classic because the starting point of this adventure and project is very humble and simple: sharing what we know about Burning Crusade rogues, creating a place where players could share their passion, their content, and highlight the players who need/deserve visibility. To do so, I’ve put myself out, in order to create content for the players, and collaborated with multiple friends and followers of my own little YouTube community to start covering things that I wouldn’t cover myself.
About Sbkzor and Silent Shadows genesis
For those who don’t know who I am, I am Sbkzor, and I’m a WoW player who’s been passionate about the game and more specifically Burning Crusade for a decade. I’ve experienced most of the aspects of the game, from leading the best guild on my server to first servers down, through roleplay writing, in-game machinimas, fun PVP, to the highest levels of arenas, on multiple class, and always with the same vibes: enjoying the game and looking for improving, connecting with players, and creating. Every single day.
I produced a lot of videos and that’s what allowed me to start such a project.
– SbkzorTV YouTube
– SbkzorTV Twitch
– SbkzorTV Twitter
– SbkzorTV Facebook
To make it short, Rogue is the latest class I’ve played, and I fell in love with it the first day I touched it. After years of playing, like a lot of content creators, I was often asked to produce guides and tutorials and that’s how this project was born. My purpose with SIlent Shadows is to leave something behind when I’ll be done with gaming. I think that playing more than a decade on a competitive game, and not sharing the little amount of knowledge I had would just be a total waste and this platform exactly reflects this vision. Nonetheless, I like challenging myself, and I couldn’t make something that would feed half the needs of the players and that’s why I want Silent Shadows to be a 360° coverage of rogue instead of staying on my own perimeter and not evolving myself, because, yes, like most of you, I also learn things when I read some contributors guides, and that’s what is magical with this website.
Silent Shadows’ Patreon officially started
This being said, you have to know that Silent Shadows is the result of countless hours of work, and sometimes sacrifices to become the project you can see now. It keeps me busy 4 hours a day, to say the least, and it has easily eaten most of my weekends and vacations for a year. I am lucky to have a job that heavily helps me in the process of creating such a project, but I’d be lying if I was not considering this website as a second full-time job. But all this is worth it if the community likes it, and so far I can’t find the word to express how thankful I am towards the community’s support. Reading all your supportive feedback, every day, about this project is really something meaningful and motivating, and now that we start growing a bit, I received multiple players’ requests about the way to support the website.
In France, money has always been a taboo topic and I guess that I also feel quite uncomfortable when it comes to this subject, but I finally decided to start a Patreon for the players that would like to support Silent Shadows. You can click on the button below if you want to start tipping.
Patreon’s advantages
For now, tipping is only meant to be a way to support the website. However, I am looking forward to new ideas to give something more to the patrons. For now, every donor gets the 💯super shade rank on our Discord. once we’ll have a certain amount of donors, I will create a new section on our discord and we’ll build that together.
We’re far from finished but now I can say that I really am proud of the direction it’s taking.
All this wouldn’t be possible without you, the community, and again thanks for supporting this project, thanks for joining the discord (already 5.000 soon!), and thanks for sharing your feedback, because they help make this place even better for the future newcomers.
Community shoutouts
I could not finish this article without highlighting the great support we’ve received during these six first months from a lot of content creators and their respective communities. I am trying my best to keep an eye on all the content creators that talk about SIlent Shadows in their videos, but if you are not mentioned, please reach me out to be highlighted like all the other content creators.
TBC Guides YouTubers (playlist)
💚 WillE
💚 BiosparksTV
💚 Metagoblin
💚 Toyhouze
💚 Kargoz
💚 BiGaBuG
💚 KamiLabs
💚 TheTired Llama
💚 JuDge TV
💚 ItsTote
Moviemakers (playlist)
💛 Thugwaffle
💛 Perplexity
💛 Kinnu
💛 Reklez
💛 Strain
💛 Logannax
💛 Pvpsy
💛 Daretlol
💛 Mlpwny
💛 Galigonnor
💛 Purpp
💛 Jadenx
💛 Mndx
Twitch Streamers
💜 Mir
💜 Wuehgros
💜 Req
💜 Zhilex
💜 Lithon
💜 Holyundead
💜 Bran
Without your precious support and contribution, we wouldn’t get such visibility. Much love to you! 🙏
I think I’ve said it all for today, so now, let’s wish us a happy pre-patch and see you on the other side of the Dark Portal!