A Christmas & New Year Message From GBHBL
The writers here at Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life would like to wish all our readers & supporters a very merry Christmas & a happy New Year.
It’s been a fantastic year for us & we hope our readers have enjoyed the wealth of content we have posted for you. In a world where videos are now the way to see reviews/people’s thoughts it’s great to see that people still enjoy reading ours.
This year saw us destroy our own records with nearly 20,000 extra views compared with 2015 & over 15,000 extra visitors compared to 2015.
A couple of months ago saw the site get a complete overhaul in an attempt to make it more user friendly & stop the burying of older articles too soon. Whereas you could previously only view the 5 latest before having to click on older posts you can now view 12!
This year saw us re-focus our content & look to be more relevant within certain areas of the site. Our main targets have always been gaming, horror & heavy metal/rock but this year saw us really push to become something within the metal & rock world.
We’re very proud of the reviews, interviews & features we’ve been able to do this year. A lot of that is thanks to the wonderful PR companies & bands we’ve contacted or been contacted by & we thank them all very much for their support. As huge fans of the scene it is very important to us that we are supporting it as best we can & in the New Year we’re going to be pushing even harder on that front.
You’re going to see more features, more interviews & even more music reviews! Don’t forget you can contact us at gbhblofficial@gmail.com if you want us to review your music, feature your band etc.
Gaming has taken a bit of a back-seat over the last few months & that is often because of our commitment to write lengthy & detailed reviews. Those take time so we’re rarely able to get a review up with the first few days of a games release. We’ve felt it’s a necessary choice but in the New Year we will be working harder to get more gaming reviews out particularly on the mobile platform.
Thankfully relevancy in horror is hardly an issue; it’s a genre that is so over-saturated that there is no end of modern & classic horror movies to review. Expect the same level of content throughout 2017!
It’s been a year of trial & error in other areas of the website & a lot of lessons have been learned. We’ve tried to take on the monster that is YouTube but after running up against copy-right claims after copy-right claims we became disillusioned with the process & figured that the only way we could make headway would be to focus more time on it but that would mean less time for the rest of the site. We weren’t happy about that so decided to put it on the back-burner for now.
Going forward in the New Year we will have a dedicated member of staff who will focus solely on YouTube & we have many ideas floating about on how we can make that entertaining & different to all the other YouTube channels out there.
The GBHBL Whiplash podcast will also get a re-focus in the New Year. We’re very grateful for all the support we’ve received up to this point & we really want to make a name for ourselves out there so you can expect some changes to the format going forward. Having started it in September we are constantly looking at ways in which we can adapt & find a system that works for both us & is good for the listener.
Thank you to everyone who has supported it, argued with us over some of our opinions & offered their feedback. Words can’t really describe just how much this means to us.
To all those that support us on social media, we thank you. It can be a very frustrating experience but we’ve learned to roll with the punches. We never thought we’d get past 100 likes on Facebook especially with how badly they try & neuter your page but we are grateful for every like & share we’ve received. The same goes for Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr…everywhere that we are!
In the New Year we’re going to be putting ourselves out there even more with leaflets & campaigns!
From the bottom of all our hearts we are fiercely proud of the work that goes into GBHBL but it’s nothing without the support of all of you.
Thank you so much & here’s to an even better 2017.
Carl (The Disc)
Brendan (Unholydarklotus)
Sally (Fleshmechanic)
Sian (smdk666)
Liam (Raptures Lost)
