That’s three years of AvidBards done and dusted. Every year it takes us by surprise that we’ve managed to keep this going for as long as we have. Coming out of 2020, that feeling was incredibly intensified. And at the end of every year, knowing that our yearly round-up post is going to come up, we dig into the statistics. To say that we were surprised would be an understatement.
Statistics
- Total views in 2020: 16,130
- Most views ever in one month: Nov 2020 with 1,894
- Top posts of 2020: Casual Racism, Sexism and Homophobia in Guy Ritchie’s ‘The Gentlemen’, How To: Essay Types, American Gods: Season 1 vs. Season 2
We’re not going to lie and say it was easy (I now have Coldplay’s The Scientist stuck in my head), this year was by far the hardest year. While we never considered giving up, the question of taking a break came up numerous times. The conversation of what we expected from ourselves came up numerous times. It wasn’t until we decided to take the pressure off of ourselves and realise that the state of the world was not gonna let us keep up with how many posts we usually put up that we stopped being afraid that we were going to lose what we had built.
It was incredibly rewarding, then, to look back at the stats and realise that not only had we not lost anything, but we’d also actually had our best year of blogging and it already seems like it will only keep getting better. At the time of writing, we have already surpassed our most-viewed month with 2,114 views in January 2021!
Favourite Posts of 2020
S – What Gender Bias in Videogames Reveals, Black Horror: Racial Commentary in ‘Get Out’ and The Arts In A World Of Scandals
Z – The Boys: The Abuse of Power in Positions of Authority, Good Omens: The Importance of Canonizing Queerness, and How ‘BoJack Horseman’ Achieved the Impossible
Z: I really appreciate that, over the last year, we approached more sociopolitical and human rights topics in our posts, like gender inequality, queerness, systemic racism, underrepresentation in the media, etc. We’re becoming more comfortable sharing our personal, subjective thoughts rather than being too concerned about objectivity.
S: Most likely because of the situation, it became clear to us that content for the sake of content was not good enough for us. We wanted to be saying things that we believed in and that meant something to us, which I think we accomplished!
Achievements
- We grew our social media accounts by quite a bit this year:
- On Instagram, from March 2020 at 245 followers we grew to 1288 followers in January 2021
- We’ve started building our social media community and have connected with some great people, from other film and TV reviewers to book bloggers and musicians
- We started using video on social media more, like doing our first Live sessions where we talked about topics that are important to us
- Started making our own graphics for blog imagery
- We launched our Etsy Boutique with prints of our artworks (we’re both artists by training!). Find it here!
- We launched our Movie and TV Recommendation pages
S: While we have grown in 2020, it was not because we continuously hustled. This year was a test of tenacity, not in productivity or drive but in compassion and stability. In past years we have come up with a new focus, a goal for the year to concentrate our efforts on. The focus of this year was determined early on by the national lockdowns when we realised that our past strategies of consistency (almost two posts a week for two years) would not work for 2020 and led us to determine what it really is we enjoyed writing about – social impact and the influence of storytelling. Part of learning that was also recognising that we were also impacted by the social (in this case COVID) and letting ourselves make excuses that were valid and legitimate in the climate we were in.
Z: Agreed, 2020 was an incredibly hard year and it’s taken a mental and physical toll on pretty much everyone. So I’m proud of us for doing the best we could given the extremely hard situation of having to isolate and deal with anxiety around the virus and other personal hardships. Like you touched on, we’ve had to redefine our definition of success and not beat ourselves up for not doing more. While consistency is key, we also always value quality over quantity, which is something that was solidified for us, even more, this year.
Looking forward: More experimentation with video formats (a great way to engage with each other and our followers, and show the faces behind the brand). More educational content with posts for students (both of us had our start in academia and means a lot to us to be a source of help for people where we can be).
