Newgrounds.com is my Biggest Marketing Platform?!
A week ago today I made the most amazing discovery. I say that (or write it rather) without so much as a second thought. Certainly it was the strangest discovery of my entire career. You see, last Wednesday I was on my Newgrounds.com account to make a post about the recent changes to jmdesantis.com and stumbled upon a most astounding fact: my work is getting more attention there than on Facebook, Twitter and deviantART COMBINED!
Consider this. One of my most popular pieces to date is still The Horror Beyond the Door (despite it being panned by every artist and editor I showed it to the first few times I brought my portfolio to a comic convention). I uploaded it on deviantART on October 31st 2007. On Newgrounds.com, I uploaded it shortly after I joined in November of 2010. According to today’s numbers, on deviantART the piece has been viewed just over 4,000 times, whilst on Newgrounds it has over 12,000 hits. More than twice as many in less than half the time! And though on Newgrounds The Horror… has only 13 comments compared to roughly 20 comments on deviantART (I try to respond to every comment and deviantART counts my responses in their totals), these numbers are astounding, especially considering the facts.
You see, I finally joined Newgrounds.com, having been familiar with them for many years, after falling in love with Castle Crashers and in the early days of Game-Flush.com (which, the staff all agreed, might best appeal to Newgrounds/Behemoth fans). At the time, I uploaded three images to my account, just to have something there besides an empty user page. After all, I thought if anything we’d eventually be creating Game-Flush animations and that would be what would call people’s attention to my work. Foolishly I thought the Art Portal didn’t get much attention as it wasn’t the main reason people visited Newgrounds and certainly this would be the case for traditional artwork.
The only reason I made this latest discovery was because in my recent efforts to promote Chadhiyana as much as possible, I’ve been occasionally posting updates on my Newgrounds account, just in case anyone happened to look at it. On a whim I decided to see if there’d been any activity on my artwork. Little did I know, I had been guilty of neglecting the site I’m perhaps the most visible on.
So let it be a lesson to everyone (and to myself especially) to try not to overlook something because you don’t think it will pay off in the end. My sincere apologies to my Newgrounds fans. You’ve been noticed and heard, resoundingly. I’ll be sure never to make this mistake again. And, certainly, Newgrounds.com will be getting a lot more of my attention in the future.