Keyboard Builders' Digest /
Another year of kbd.news (2023)
Tamas, the guy running this blog, wraps up one year of kbd.news.
Published December 28, 2023
Hey, this is a summary of the blog's third full year in existence, in a weird captain's log style about some highlights of the year, stats, happenings, even finances, etc.
I very rarely check visitor stats and other similar metrics nowadays, so this will be a good opportunity to compare them with last year's numbers and see where things stand. Also, I know this should be an upbeat article, celebrating the project, creators and the community in general, however, life is full of unexpected surprises as it definitely proved this year. So beware, the post comes with some dramatic twists, but most importantly: it's boring – I really don't recommend anyone to read it. Seriously. ;)
TLDR; 2023 was such a rollercoaster of a year that the only reason I don't call it the worst period of my life is because, beside all the lows, there were many achievements and positive experiences too.
December, 1st Calendar
Let's jump back in time to one year ago. The first advent calendar in Dec 2022 resulted in record visits and almost reaching the 100K unique monthly visitor mark for the first time. Stats peaked at about 98-99K, but we could have easily succeeded if I had stayed and not gone on vacation in the last week of the year. So in my mind I associate this month with reaching 100K for the first time.
I can't check the exact number because, being in the free plan of my CDN provider, I don't have access to historic data (and GA sucks). I can only rely on my notes and some screenshots taken during those days:
I loved this calendar idea originally seen in the Japanese community and started to organize the first such event on an invitation basis back in mid-2022. I knew that the result will be valuable but didn't think about visitor stats so was delighted to see that you loved it. I also knew that a more organic number was 80K users at that time, these higher values were unsustainable, and that dropping below the new peaks was only a question of time. What I didn't expect was how quickly tides can turn.
January/February, first KO, newsletter
I probably could have maintained this artificially boosted visitor number if I'd posted daily and put some effort into dissemination, i.e. polluting reddit, twitter and all the relevant keyboard forums on a daily basis. But even if I had the willingness, life had a different plan. My wife was hospitalized early this year and she spent about a month and a half there.
This meant that my main focus was something totally different than keyboards. For this month and a half I spent hours in ICU every day, focused on my children, took care of the household, which is probably visible on the posting frequency too.
At the same time, MailChimp revamped its pricing, so I had to look for alternatives for the newsletter. It took me some weeks to compare and test various ideas and providers, and then migrate subscribers, but eventually I ended up with Buttondown. I love it, but still don't get how some stats are calculated there. ;) And sorry, some of you reported issues with BD putting tracking codes in the links by default. I may turn this off temporarily, but then I won't be able to identify inactive users and end up paying for people who don't even open these mails. (Yes, this is a free newsletter for you, but I keep paying to be able to send it out. This is only one of those weird paradoxes of the kbd.news "business model".)
March, 100K users, Drop
Miraculously, my wife had a full recovery and is still with us without any symptoms left. When she returned home, the next month was probably the happiest period of my life. I got back to the blog too, picked up the threads, and Drop reached out to me at this time asking for an article about splits and with the prospect of closer cooperation (which, in hindsight, did not materialize).
I was quite excited about this because Drop has always been one of those big, unavoidable yet elusive, notoriously unresponsive companies, at least for me, with whom I did not have the luck to build a healthy relationship with. They are not the only one though. KBDfans, Melgeek, etc. – get ready, I'm going to annoy you until you get back to me. ;)
Trust me, I exchange emails with new and established vendors every single day. Literally. There's not a single shop in the vendor database I haven't exchanged at least one mail with. But there are some big names in the hobby/industry who are very hard to approach. That's one advantage of working with smaller companies: at whatever time I message the shop runner, be it Saturday night, there's a good chance I get an answer almost instantly, but definitely before Monday. Compare this to some huge and slow giants of the industry with lots of coworkers (who pack up on Friday afternoon and don't look back until next week or the end of the holiday season, if ever). Often, these big players don't even have a public email address, only those dreaded ticketing systems which are especially frustrating and good at swallowing my attempts to contact someone in charge.
Anyway, I was really glad to be approached by Drop, everything was on track, visitor stats once again reached and exceeded 100K (for real this time), active coupons reached the 100 mark too – but this upbeat period lasted only for a month since now it was my turn…
April, second KO
I developed some kind of heart disease, as it turned out later, probably due to the stress of the previous months. So now it was my turn to become familiar with the health care system. My condition and the possibility of a surgery freaked me out and kept me awake at night for weeks.
At one point I wrote kind of a will, mentioning some of you in the part about my digital heritage, so don't be surprised if one day, when the blog hasn't been updated for a while and you can't get in touch with me either, an unknown lawyer contacts you with the credentials to access the blog and databases. ;) I do think that what we do here collectively, cataloguing open-source projects, shops, coupons, meetups, etc., is of great value, so I wanted to make sure it won't disappear when something happens to me, as it happened with many projects in this hobby in the past (e.g. the disappearance of Soarer and many others).
May, 500 shops
Back to the blog again. New achievement: 500 shops in the vendor database. This is one of the most visited parts of the site, probably because of the discounts. More than 120 keyboard stores offer you various discounts with the semi-standardized "kbdnews" coupon code.
Runners of many new shops contact me to include their store in the database with the coupon already set up, I don't even have to ask now.
June, reddit blackout
Another low. This is history now, but of course the reddit backlash/blackout had its effect on kbd.news too.
Despite all its problems, Reddit is pretty good for the stuff I do: to sniff around for new projects. Back in 2020, the whole blog started with monitoring r/mk. Then of course r/ergomk took over its place, at least when it comes to interesting open-source projects. And many of you notify me directly about your projects nowadays, some even prior publishing them, but I'm pretty sure half of the featured projects still comes from r/ergomk.
So during the protest, I desperately tried to find viable alternatives, without much success. All in all, alternatives are much more time consuming. Unfortunately, I can't feature a single photo posted on Instagram or Twitter without any details, however nice it is. Discord is very fragmented, and I had no luck with Mastodon either.
So thanks for all the help and your suggestions.
July, donations, PayPal issues
Let's talk about money, which is tabu in most cultures, and I don't feel too comfortable to write about this either. But we can talk about the "business model" in general, which is mainly donations, but could be also affiliate commissions, plus the free stuff I get regularly should be added to the "income" part of the equation too. Yeah, sorry, I couldn't afford to put this much time into the project if there wasn't some return on my efforts.
For context, from all the donors I get about one twentieth of the amount I could earn during the same time with my other hobbies. :D As much as I appreciate the help (check out the list of all the fantastic donors here), the last one year has shown that this project cannot be sustained by donations alone.
The site is visited by people from all around the world, so $10 may be a huge contribution for some readers and ridiculously low for folks from countries with higher purchasing power parity. The monthly donations amount to a visible sum which is okay as a start where I live, but my goal, set about a year earlier, was to double this sum. Unfortunately, there hasn't been any progress in this field despite the seemingly ever longer list of donors. The actual income is getting slightly smaller and smaller due to various factors. e.g.: PayPal issues.
This July, PayPal started to behave strangely and it occasionally fails to process some recurring donations. When this started, with a single donor, I thought this was some region locking issue. However, soon there were dozens of these notifications in my inbox, many from the US (while other US donations work fine). We couldn't figure out what was the problem, and I ended up adding alternative options for donation.
August, Analytics, collection and boards I purchased
After years of using Google Analytics for basic stats, this August they broke continuity by stopping processing data of old properties and enforcing migration to GA4. I don't care any integration beside basic stats like unique visitors and pageviews, so I wasn't too enthusiastic about this to say the least. I still genuinely hate the new interface, can't find anything and stopped looking into these numbers entirely. I can't even generate a whole year of e.g. weekly stats now, not to mention a comparison with the previous year.
That said, most of you are tech-savvy folks, using ad-blockers and strict privacy settings preventing GA from working properly, so these stats had to be interpreted as samples, encompassing only about 10-20% of the whole user base anyway.
After all the frustration, probably as a form of self-gratification after my ordeals during half of the year, I delved into classified ads sites, looking for interesting vintage keyboards.
You know I don't buy contemporary keyboards. Designers and vendors send me some, which I'm really grateful for, but I simply don't feel like I should buy anything less ergonomic after designing my own boards with a layout tailored to my hands and fingers. That said, I do purchase interesting vintage keyboards all the time, and this summer I bought quite a lot.
My split article was finally published on Drop the previous month. I shoveled my splits together for a photo shoot, and probably that was the point when some obscure sense told me that I must have passed the 100 mark with regards to keyboards I own. Realizing I don't even have a basic list with the items of my collection, I opened up a blank spreadsheet and started my forensic work to identify various parameters of my past purchases: date, price, seller, etc. Since I started collecting in 2018, unfortunately, a lot of the listings were already gone. Regardless, I keep my register updated with new keyboards these days.
(By the way, my original intuition was wrong, to the best of my knowledge I have about 70 noteworthy keyboards, plus some typewriters.)
September, stuff, alternative business model
In the meantime I learned that people are paid hefty sums for writing reviews and shooting video reviews. Wait, what?! I don't even feel fair to write about something I get as a gift for free. There's a lot of bias involved, not to mention if a manufacturer or vendor would pay me for the review.
However, since I'm not closing in on my donation goals, I'll have to find alternatives in the future, e.g. focusing more on affiliate partnerships. This has some drawbacks from both the reader's and my own perspective: possible shift in content on one hand, and unpredictable income, increasing administration, higher taxes on the other.
Because of the min payout thresholds of these partnerships commissions may not be paid out for months. In fact, half of the affiliate programs I joined don't work at all, which means zero commissions (too small vendors, too few or niche products). And there are some shop runners who simply disappear by the time they had to pay (bye-bye MKultra and my $200). This is a learning process that I'd be more than happy to skip, but can't afford with the dwindling donations.
October, switches, collabs
I know the blog is far from perfect. There's a lot to improve, e.g. one weak point of kbd.news was/is: switches. That's why I reached out to Milktooth's Kevin in early October. Following the 1-year Milktooth update article, this turned into a monthly series of top keyboard switches – monthly lists based on real sales data. I asked some other vendors to complete this MX-only list with low profile switches, but haven't received anything usable thus far.
Another collab, the NKEY magazine, started around this time too, and the result is a cool PDF-zine by Nate Kearney – with some kbd.news interviews as its backbone.
On a similar note, I contributed to Marcin Wichary's Shift Happens, two thick tomes with commanding authority (plus a thin one), which became the No1 Kickstarter tech book of all time. Marcin contacted me after seeing this tweet, so my priceless contribution to his project is a single photo of an Enter key from my Philips PMDS keyboard. :D Can you spot it in the book?
November, Giveaway
29 sponsors, 70 prizes. One of my friends suspiciously asked me about the benefits of doing these giveaways, I mean my personal interests. There must be a reason, she insisted, otherwise no sane human being would waste weeks of his life for such a thing.
Well, there's really no explanation for it. You get all the prizes, I get nothing. Some newsletter subscribers? On one hand, this is not organic. On the other hand: more subscribers means a higher newsletter fee. Seems like a pretty big own goal for me. ;) Without the heavy monetization of the blog, this giveaway makes no sense from my perspective. Fortunately, there were fewer prizes this year (easier to organize) while their overall value stayed about the same.
I'm not sure if the number of offers can be traced back to the state of the hobby. Probably could source much more prizes with more effort put into this side project.
If there's one thing I was happy about, it was the feedback coming from all the winners. Thanks for your warm words! (And patience.)
December, Advent Calendar
As articles of this year's MK advent calendar started to pour in, one thing I was wondering about was how versatile the mechanical keyboard hobby is. If you take a look at all the topics covered by our contributors, there are barely two write-ups touching on a similar niche in the niche. Acrylic, meetups, hex layouts, trust system, vintage encoding, firmware, running shops, 3D design, keycaps, etc.
Even if I ran out of articles again, I really enjoy this time of the year – knowledgeable people writing for me. But it's also a very difficult time.
What the heck am I talking about? It's just 24 freakin' articles, what is the big deal with simply posting them?
Well, it takes a lot of time to organize, coordinate, manage this whole event, and also to edit, convert, etc. the articles and illustrations. It's quite stressful when authors fail to deliver in time – or at all.
Articles arrive in various forms and level of readiness to be published. It can take anywhere from half an hour to 5 hours to prepare one single write-up for publication. And I have zero control over the authors who do this for free. As Pete put it aptly: it's really like herding cats. ;)
Regardless, these MK Advent Calendars are somehow the highlights of my year (a natural remedy for my constant impostor syndrome), and I'm so grateful for all the contributors who put all the time and effort into their articles without any compensation.
2023 in numbers
- Num of posts: 402 (vs 656 last year), including 9 interviews, 40 editorials. Not including all the "quick news", mentions in my editorials I started to organize in July.
- New keyboards: 32 (16 received + 16 vintage ones bought – a healthy balance)
- Collection: 76(?) boards + 7 typewriters
- 87 donors. A shortlist with only this year's top supporters: KBDcraft, splitkb.com, Moergo, Ashkeebs, ZSA. And this is the ongoing list with active donors in order of their lifetime donations.
- Time spent? Last year, Reddit recap claimed I spent about 1,300 hours with keyboard stuff on reddit only. The recent recap does not have this metrics, only 60,878 bananas…
- Most popular posts? Early this year, Stephen of MoErgo suggested to make a most popular articles page, and I published that in March. Feel free to check it out, but that page lists all the posts, regardless if they were originally published in e.g. 2020. But here are the most visited ones from this year's posts: Tim's Event Horizon article, Honeywell H316, Monkeytype interview, Dilemma v2 + magnetic tenting system, Elkhorn, GrabShell, Killer Whale, Gboard CAPS.
2024, Future
I read somewhere that influencers or more specifically youtubers stop producing after 5-6 years due to burnout. Well, kbd.news being 3 years old means I'm at about halfway. Sometimes I feel I could do this for ever, sometimes I can't imagine doing this for another week.
My life has flipped over in 2023, my priorities have changed a lot and are changing constantly. In addition, running this blog costs me a lot in alternative costs: I could earn a lot of money during the same time I spend with posting. Don't get me wrong, it's not really about money, it's about my time.
I do enjoy keeping an eye on the scene, chatting with you all, assimilating all the content, and could definitely do this for a long time – casually, for myself. However, some parts of this project turned into a chore with many time-consuming tasks any reasonable person would simply abandon.
The main problem is the timing, more specifically peak times: weekly issues and cover, editorial, newsletter – preparing these probably takes a whole day from my life every single week. But I also know that, at the same time, these issues give the project regularity, which in the end ensures I get back to keyboards every week.
On the other hand, I don't have time for designing, building, manufacturing, etc., be it PCBs, keycaps or even deskmats.
My constant dilemma: much less time spent with the blog would be one obvious choice, doing this full-time the other. Well, in a year we'll see which solution I chose. ;)
Thanks for all your support, feedback, and love!
Cheers, Tamas
 | Tamas Dovenyi (46)dovenyi |
|---|---|
| Location | Hungary (sorry for my government) |
| Description | Keyboard content aggregator |
| Occupation | researcher, developer |
| Joined | 2018 |
| Niche | monoblock splits, vintage keyboards |
| Fav. switch | Momoka Frogs, Kailh This-Is-Plastic |
| Fav. keycap profile | MT3, MDA |
| Other hobbies | guitars, drums, learning Japanese |
| Links | kbd.news, golem, twitter |
Published on Thu 28th Dec 2023. Featured in KBD #2023.