99 reviews later, 2024 was an epic year
I take a slightly deeper dive into the numbers of the year that was, as I look ahead to 2025.
Welcome to the final weekly roundup newsletter of 2024. I hope you managed to spend some nice time with friends and family over the past week, eating good food and drinking delicious drinks. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope it was filled with love and joy.
The end of the year is a natural time to reflect on the year that was, while looking forward to what will be in the year ahead.
So for the final newsletter of the year, I want to share some of the ups and downs of 2024 for me and BTTR.
A lot of reviews
As of today, I've written and published 99 reviews on BTTR in 2024. Each review is somewhere around the 1000 word mark, which means I've produced roughly 100,000 words testing products this year.
November was my most prolific month, with January being the slowest.
I reviewed products from 42 different brands, but 20 of those brands only had a single product rated. Taking out those 20 brands, there's a clear leader in terms of quantity of reviews.
I reviewed more phones than anything else this year, by a magnitude of almost 3:1. I published 27 phone reviews, 10 headphone reviews and 9 speaker reviews. There were 10 categories that I only reviewed a single product, which is a clear indication that I need more writers to be really competitive as a product review site.
Performance has been improving
When it came to performance, things are on the up. Since making the switch to a member-first strategy in August, the BTTR community has grown from less than 20 to 143 total members. Ghost only shows me the last 90 days in graph form, but it looks like this:
From a traffic standpoint, there has been a huge bounce back the past few months after the mess that was Google's March core algorithm update.
Year on year, 2024 looks to have been a slight step back, but that's understandable given the Google issues. But I feel like BTTR is well placed for some solid growth in 2025.
I also started pushing a bit more on the social front this year. I still have a long way to go, but there's been some exciting growth.
On YouTube, I've grown from nothing to 212 subscribers in just a few months with a sporadic video strategy. On TikTok, there are 67 followers joining me for product unboxings, with 69 followers on Instagram.
These numbers are small and reflect the effort that's gone into social this year. It's definitely going to be a focus for me in 2025.
Reflecting on the journey of 2024, I couldn't have done it without you, dear reader. I really appreciate you joining me on the adventure this year, and look forward to growing with you in the years to come.
This week in tech
A quiet week from me this week thanks to Christmas. Some good news though!
Nick Broughall
This week's reviews
This week's reviews bring my total to 99 reviews published in 2024. It's been a big year, and I appreciate you joining me.
BlueAnt X5i party speaker
Nick Broughall
Ninja FrostVault cooler review
Nick Broughall
Thanks for reading
That's it for this week's roundup for free BTTR members. BTTR is funded by its members, and if you upgrade to the paid tier (from just $10 a month), you'll get access to the rest of this week's newsletter, which includes:
- A collection of the best tech news of the week (with some commentary from yours truly)
- A preview of next week's product reviews
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As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this week's newsletter, or even some input on what you'd like to see in next week's roundup.
Until next week
Nick @ BTTR
