Marketing. We analyzed the lists of websites and the result was disappointing

It all started when I came across this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/cmp2cx/contacting_press_youtubers_and_twitchers_some/

Wow, I thought, what a luck, very useful information, now I won’t have any problems with marketing, or rather self-promotion, there are so many sites, and most of them are active...

We downloaded the lists and it began to prepare to work with them. But, to our disappointment, the lists turned out to be not quite as we had hoped. :-(

In general, my colleague took it upon himself to analyze these lists. He left a comment on each of the websites and updated the contacts. I must admit that the result is not very pleasant compared to what had been “promised”.

1. List of sites covering indie games.

Original list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1liBG5RRHvp8DPBPxIauPMWlsxjOjXewa1LBCjEPvKKc/edit#gid=700085094

In it, 38 websites were marked as Active. After we checked and analyzed them, there were only 11 websites left, and in my opinion, only 5 or 6 of them were actually useful. The rest have not been updated for a long time, are completely abandoned or simply offline :-(

Our version of the list with comments for each site: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mqMxOvR2l--y-vuAZBr0uj-6eeekGqNf8LTPqbjf44I/edit?usp=sharing

2. The same thing, but about video games in general.

Original list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R6UsXU_VeE4zhms4t0b1vwbbn7Fv5Z1TRlYsrfLghXc/edit#gid=1810066597

In this list, 146 sites were marked Active. After we checked every website and analyzed them, the situation changed a little :-(

Our version of the list with comments for each website: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OGhW_yN6jttpPV7UdFt7QcpsDX2jDu_X1JAuOQic5gk/edit?usp=sharing

The websites that were recurrent from the first file are highlighted in red.

3. Sites dedicated to games of certain genres.

Original list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CtirCVVpQrMkq_WvdPmvfMhjCk4vENdZLFTeGy4apQ/pubhtml

We didn’t analyze this list. The reason is simple, the genre that interested us was only represented by only 5 websites, the rest of the sites were, unfortunately, of little interest to us.

Here is such a story, colleagues. Thanks for your attention!

We hope that the work we did will be useful to someone, or at least save a lot of time for analysis, etc.