We at Mein-MMO.de look back on a summer that brought us great numbers and posed a major crisis.
At regular intervals, we want to give you a behind-the-scenes look at our website and show you what has been happening with us.
Our plan for the summer: Chill and specials
In summer, we were actually prepared for a quiet, busy phase without major highlights. We wanted to further train the new authors who recently joined us or took on larger roles, work on some ongoing topics in the special, and otherwise take it easy.
Destiny and The Division, we thought, would go through rather quiet phases, with hardly any major releases and the next highlights we wanted to be prepared for being Gamescom 2016 and the WoW expansion Legion at the end of August.
Then came the huge hype
But everything turned out differently. Pokémon GO was the biggest “phenomenon” we have ever experienced on our site. We had occasionally reported on the “Augmented Reality” game before and reached a relatively large number of readers with it, but when the craze began, it blew everything that was there away.
But we were well prepared for it. In our editorial team, as it turned out, we didn’t just have one, but two geeks who could classify a Pokémon based on its approximate silhouette, so we were able to really take off during that phase.
It also helped how well our website is usable for mobile users and that the servers can handle peaks thanks to our partners at Webedia.
The Pokémon summer was a resounding success for us in every respect. Even now, we are benefiting from significantly increased “permanent traffic” from the phenomenon and seem to have convinced some new readers of ours in the long term.
A lot of hustle and bustle behind the scenes of Mein-MMO.de
Behind the scenes, we faced major staffing challenges. Our editor-in-chief Schuhmann, who had written more than half of all articles in the previous years, was out for long stretches in summer due to health reasons and without much warning.
Since Schuhmann was also responsible for content planning (Who writes which article when?), this would have posed insurmountable problems for us in 2015: the website would have been practically crippled.
In 2016, it became clear that we had managed to stabilize the website during the first half of the year.
We had already considered plans on how to distribute the planning and writing workload across several shoulders – originally to be able to bridge a vacation phase: The plans now had to be implemented immediately.
Organizational changing you
Employees jumped into the cold water. Cortyn and the boss temporarily filled the organizational gap. In July, Cortyn then took on external tasks for the GameStar in a WoW Legion special edition, but also internally had a high additional load for an important bureaucratic task. During this phase, our author Ttime took on the “more” of responsibility. He significantly increased his involvement in the website and the missing articles could also be compensated.
Other authors like Patrick Freese, who had previously been more active on the fringes of the website, moved into more central positions and now participated more in daily operations. The boss also put in overtime – no easy undertaking from the back of a Cuban donkey.
The greatest compliment for our editorial team is perhaps that hardly any reader noticed how serious the situation was for an extended period and how many working hours our team had to compensate.
It was not a peaceful, relaxing summer in 2016, but it was a time that made us stronger as a team and editorial team, brought us closer together and in which some of our authors were able to develop splendidly in their new roles.
Your team from Mein-MMO.de
