Blog

It’s this time of year that Spoon Graphics is getting a little older. 2021 marks 14 years of tutorial creation, freebie sharing, and article writing on a blog attached to my portfolio website in 2007. Every April I take some time to think about the past 12 months and talk about how things have changed. Last year I talked about how well my subscriber numbers have grown despite falling traffic. So let’s look at the latest stats and numbers and see how things go in another year.

I always start these anniversary posts with links to my previous annual celebrations. It’s interesting to go back and see how my blog turned out:

Traffic change: -6%
Top content: 25 Adobe Illustrator Brush Sets to Download for Free (2016) & 8 Free Stipple Shading Brushes for Adobe Illustrator (2015) (NEW)
Email subscribers: 220,884 (plus 16% compared to 2020)
YouTube channel subscribers: 409,183 (plus 23% compared to 2020)
Highest traffic peak (this year): Tuesday, April 27, 2020 – 32,403 visitors (20 free old paper structures with creases, creases and spots)
Highest traffic peak (all time): Tuesday November 11, 2014 – 44,592 visitors (How to create a realistic paint effect in Photoshop)

While the volume of traffic is still declining after the huge 23% decline in the 2019-2020 period, it seems to have at least hit a plateau with a further decrease of 6% in the past year! Even so, it’s still great to see email subscribers and YouTube subscribers continue to grow at a good rate. Interestingly, my second most popular content has changed again this year. Typically, free resource summaries get the most Google search traffic, but my old Illustrator Stipple Shading Brushes download replaced a summary of t-shirt models in the popular post rankings.

On Youtube, the audience numbers are ticking without any exciting traffic spikes, but that’s still an impressive 5.2 million views across all of my video content. I focused on getting YouTube viewers to my Spoon Graphics mailing list. Creating a dedicated landing page with all of the freebies available on Spoon Graphics really helped me grow my list. The subscription form on this page has a conversion rate of almost 25%, much higher than the popup that asks users to subscribe when they download a free resource.

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Hosted on: Bare metal server
Server location: Dallas
Monthly bandwidth: 15 TB
Average operating costs: $ 2070 per month (up 10% from 2020)

Last year I talked about upgrading the server to a bare metal server with a bandwidth allocation of 20GB, which removed the overhead from my bills. It looks like this helped reduce monthly operating costs, as costs have only increased 10% this year. Regular spring cleaning of my mailing list to delete inactive subscribers also helps ensure that you don’t have to pay more than I have to!

I used to end these anniversary posts with an update from my personal life – like our wedding in 2013, our daughter’s birth in 2014, and moving to our dream home in 2016 – but nothing particularly exciting has happened since then! That changed this week with the arrival of my little boy Lincoln Spooner. I am the happiest man alive!