A Note from the Editor
You may have noticed a few changes around Player 2 of late and I wanted to fill you, our dear reader, in on what is going on.
Firstly the brand new site. Flash isn’t it? We love the new design and think it gives everything a much more modern look, allowing everyone to get to their favourite Player 2 content as quickly as possible. The new site was undoubtedly overdue and has been some time in the making, which leads me to the thing I wanted to talk about most and that is money.
Since its inception, Player 2 has been primarily funded by myself out of my own pocket. Patreon and YT money cover some of our costs, but for the most part, it has been my love, my belief and my wallet that has been keeping Player 2 running. This was totally fine for a small community site with little in the way of overheads. But, thanks to a dedicated team of contributors, my amazing team of editors (Paul James, Stephen del Prado and Jess Zammit) and most of all our awesome community, we are no longer that little community site. We have enjoyed a massive boost in reader numbers over the last 18 months especially and have been growing as fast as possible to cater for that. In the sea of video game sites, we are no longer a whiting, more of a decent-sized Kingfish. Nothing compared to the big Sharks and Marlin, but certainly big enough to make its presence felt.
So bad fish metaphor aside, with more readers, more articles and more videos come more costs. Until this point, I have very purposefully kept advertising to a bare minimum on Player 2. I very much wanted to keep Player 2 clean of obnoxious advertising, make it a friendly place without popups or in-your-face ads. However, with success and growth comes increased costs. We have had to upgrade our image server (now placing them on an AWS server) and upgrade our hosting plan for the site itself. Along with this comes my desire to make sure my contributors have everything they need to be able to bring their words, ideas, videos and podcasts to life in the best way possible. So with this in mind, we have opened up Player 2 to sponsored posts and a slight increase in advertising space.
What does this mean going forward? Well for starters, I want to make this very clear, we will not be advertising anything, be it through sponsored posts or normal banner advertising, that fails to meet our standards of what we feel is of benefit to our readers. Or to put it another way, we will only provide space for products we think you may be interested in. You won’t see posts for suspicious gambling sites, questionable CD Key resellers or dodgy dating services, only video game’s focused items that have an excellent reputation will grace our pages. With this in mind, our first sponsored post has gone live thanks to KontrolFreek and we feel this article ads to Player 2 and doesn’t detract in any way.
As we continue to grow I don’t expect this to become something that happens often, just a semi-regular sponsored article of some kind that helps me cover costs, grow Player 2 and foster a group of talented and unique content creators whose only desire is to bring you the best video game coverage they can.
Thanks for joining us on the journey so far. I hope you all love the new website and continue to read Player 2 well into the future.