Dear partners & supporters,

KBD.news (aka Keyboard Builders' Digest) is an e-magazine and weekly newsletter on custom mechanical keyboards.

An independent community project with a dynamically growing, committed subscriber base.

The ezine has a rather unique approach and mission: we help and incite readers to design and build their own keyboards.

Having been around for 40 months, KBD.news has published 175 issues featuring 2200+ projects, tips and inspirational ideas.

Our portfolio, consisting of more than 4,000 pages, attracts 100,000 unique visitors per month.

Visitor stats

From its launch in winter of 2020, reach of the KBD.news webzine shows a steady, dynamic, double-digit monthly growth (It seems the initial period of steady double-digit growth is over):

According to Cloudflare, the 100K user threshold was reached in early April of 2023:

(The peaks are usually days our weekly/forthnightly newsletter is sent out.)

Newsletter performance

The newsletter is sent to more than 3,000 subscribers, with open and clickthrough rates way above industry averages.

Open rate

The average open rate of our campaigns is 59.4% compared to our peers' average performance of only 29.8%.

Click rate

Click rate is 25.2% on average compared to our peers' average of only 5%!

The point is: people actually read these posts and navigate to the featured content.

User base (December, 2021)

Last month, our visitors came from 127 countries of the world (GA data). We have newsletter subscribers from at least 73 countries (this field is not mandatory and is often omitted).

"Over 65% Male, from 25 and up" -- according to MailChimp.

Top sources of visits:

• North-America: 45.7% (USA: 40.2%)
• Europe: 29.5%
• Asia: 18.0%
• Oceania: 3.4%
• Latin-America: 2.7%
• Africa: 0.3%

By country:

• USA (40.2%)
• UK (5.9%)
• Canada (5.5%)
• Germany (4.7%)
• Japan (3.5%)
• Australia (2.9%)
• Spain (1.8%)
• Netherlands (1.8%)
• Singapore (1.8%), etc.

Support & Marketing opportunities

KBD.news is ad-free so its survival depends on donations.

Feel free to discuss potential areas of cooperation (donation, branded giveaway, etc.).

While we want to keep KBD.news free from obtrusive ads, we can offer various opportunities to strengthen your online presence among mechanical keyboard enthusiasts:

Donors are listed with optional text link:

• on top of issue frontpages,
• in the sidebar of pages,
• in the weekly newsletter,
• on a dedicated Hall of Fame page,
• and they are mentioned in weekly editorial / behind the scene posts.

But we are open to any collaboration.

Thanks for reading this far! :)

In case you have questions, feel free to contact me per email (info at golem.hu) or on Reddit, Keebtalk, GeekHack, Deskthority, etc. (dovenyi).

Best regards,
Tamás Dövényi-Nagy
editor & curator
info at golem.hu
u/dovenyi

Timeline & Milestones

The Keyboard Builders' Digest started as a Covid-project, a simple list of bookmarks. Below are some milestones of the journey.