Kodiak64 Podcast 001: Website Purpose

Welcome to Kodiak64FM — the first episode of what I’m hoping will become a semi-regular podcast. This isn’t a polished production with jingles and sponsors. It’s me talking into a microphone about C64 development, the website, and whatever else is on my mind. Think of it as a newsletter you can listen to while soldering.

The Two Reasons This Website Exists

I get asked fairly often why I bothered rebuilding the Kodiak64 site from scratch. The honest answer has two parts, and neither of them is “because I enjoy web design” (I don’t).

Reason 1: Building the newsletter subscriber list. The newsletter is the core of what I do here beyond actual game development. It’s where the deep technical content goes — the stuff that’s too long or too niche for a blog post. But a newsletter without subscribers is just a bloke writing to himself. The website exists primarily to funnel interested visitors toward that signup form. Every tech article, every microblog post, every YouTube embed — it’s all there to demonstrate that the content is worth subscribing for.

Reason 2: Financial justification. This is the uncomfortable but necessary bit. Parallaxian has been in development for years. That’s years of evenings and weekends spent hunched over a cross-assembler instead of doing normal family things. At some point, the people who live with you need to see that this isn’t just an elaborate hobby — there has to be some tangible prospect of it paying for itself. The website, the newsletter, the eventual game sales — they’re all part of demonstrating that this project has a real audience and a viable, if modest, revenue path. Without that, the development time becomes very hard to justify to anyone who isn’t neck-deep in 6502 code.

Who’s Actually Visiting?

I share some analytics in the episode. The visitor demographics are interesting — heavily skewed toward European countries, which makes sense given that the C64 was massive in Germany, the UK, and Scandinavia. The USA shows up but in smaller numbers than you’d expect for an English-language site. The tech articles consistently pull the most traffic, particularly anything about VIC-II tricks or 6502 optimisation. Game development updates get decent numbers but it’s the coding content that brings people in from search engines.

Have a listen and let me know what you think. If there’s enough interest, I’ll do more of these.

See also: companion newsletter · Parallaxian · Seawolves