Episode Ninja

Ranking the best episodes of any TV show

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Founders Code
Solo Founder
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I initially wanted to build Episode Ninja for myself. I'm a huge TV fan, and when I go back to watch a show that I've already seen I don't want to watch every episode - I want to watch only the best episodes.

October 24, 2020 2000 registered users!

It took almost 13 months for Episode Ninja to hit 1000 users, but only another 5 months after that to hit 2000! I started promoting the fact that you can create an account on the home page of the site and that seems to have helped growth a bit.

June 22, 2020 100,000 TV episode ratings created by users!

Users can rate TV episodes on Episode Ninja and their ratings directly impact the ranking of episodes on the site. It took about 9 months to hit 50,000 ratings, but only another 5.5 months to hit 100k! A user account is required to rate episodes and users are only allowed to rate each episode once.

Total Users: 1,280
Total Ratings: 100,847
Average per user: ~79

June 10, 2020 Highest traffic month ever - 675k pageviews!

Episode Ninja had another record setting month of traffic in May. I'm guessing that a lot of this bump is still attributable to widespread quarantining, so it will be interesting to see what happens in June as many parts of the world start opening up again.

Totals for May (compared to April):

Revenue - $1125.05 $975.46 (+15.34%)
Unique Visitors - 394,180 365,613 (+7.81%)
Pageviews - 674,896 628,636 (+7.36%)

May 29, 2020 More than 5,000 TV shows tracked

New shows are automatically added to Episode Ninja at a rate of about 10-12 per day. The new shows are selected based on popularity and viewer interest.

We recently hit the milestone of tracking more than 5,000 shows - up from about 2,000 when the site first launched a few years ago!

May 14, 2020 First month with 500k+ page views!

April was a huge traffic month for Episode Ninja with more than a half million page views. In fact, it blasted past that mark and hit almost 630k!

I am mostly attributing this growth to the global quarantine which has resulted in a big uptick in TV streaming viewership. Unfortunately revenue is still down from the end of 2019 as the online advertising market has been hit quite hard.

Totals for April (compared to March):

Revenue - $975.46 (-17.21%)
Unique Visitors - 365,613 (+41.51%)
Pageviews - 628,636 (+44.58%)

May 3, 2020 1,000 Users!

Episode Ninja crossed 1,000 registered users over the weekend! I added the ability to register just over a year ago, so it has taken a long time to get to this number.

On average, each user has rated about 80 TV episodes each.

February 11, 2020 Trough of Sorrow - Revenue Down 50% in January

Part of being an Indie Hacker is reporting the bad milestones, not just the good ones. Episode Ninja's revenue absolutely cratered in January after a fantastic run in the latter half of 2019. Not all hope is lost though - my advertising company warned me that this would happen! Advertisers massively cut their ad budgets at the start of the year and slowly ramp back up. I'm expecting February to be rough as well and then things should look brighter after that.

Revenue breakdown:

  • Monumetric (Ads) - $815.99
  • Amazon (Affiliate) - $228.62
  • Hulu (Affiliate) - $20.39
  • iTunes (Affiliate) - $4.34

Total Revenue - $1,069.34 (-50.7%)

Total Unique Visitors - 258610 (-2.3%)

January 5, 2020 More than 50,000 episode ratings created by users!

I added the ability to register for a user account and rate episodes to Episode Ninja in early April 2019. It took just under 9 months to reach the milestone of 50,000 ratings created by users! There are currently a total of 625 registered users, so this works out to about 80 ratings per user.

January 3, 2020 Second $2k month in a row

Episode Ninja was able to maintain its gains from November into December. Ad revenue was huge early in the month but has been steadily declining since then as advertisers decrease their spending as the holiday shopping season winds down. My ad partner warned me that I should expect a very slow January before ad revenue starts recovering again in February. Average session RPM decreased slightly to $6.13.

Revenue breakdown:

  • Monumetric (Ads) - $1950.77
  • Amazon (Affiliate) - $204.12
  • Hulu (Affiliate) - $7.20
  • iTunes (Affiliate) - $7.90

Total Revenue - $2142.19 (+1.3%)

Total Unique Visitors - 264748 (+2.3%)

December 8, 2019 Hit $2000/month in revenue!

Episode Ninja had a huge month for both traffic and revenue in November. Ad revenue experienced a big bump, especially over the Thanksgiving through Black Monday shopping weekend. Average session RPM increased again to $6.22.

Revenue breakdown:

  • Monumetric (Ads) - $1867.98
  • Amazon (Affiliate) - $213.85
  • Hulu (Affiliate) - $51.20
  • iTunes (Affiliate) - $9.16

Total Revenue - $2142.19 (+41.0%)

Total Unique Visitors - 258,845 (+15.8%)

About

I initially wanted to build Episode Ninja for myself. I'm a huge TV fan, and when I go back to watch a show that I've already seen I don't want to watch every episode - I want to watch only the best episodes.