I've been writing about SEO since I was 15 years old, and a decade later I'm fortunate to have consulted for companies I love like Ahrefs, Kinsta, Buffer, ConvertKit and multi-billion dollar brands.
The basics can be incredibly effective, but hundreds of sites cover them well and I want to focus on unique, creative ways to achieve better rankings.
Instead, here's my promise: I will put my absolute all into guides like this one to give original insights that help you get an edge over your competition.
That's it. That's my pitch for you to stick around (or perhaps let you know this isn't the site for you).
This is already too much text for a 'click-to-read-more-fade-thing' but there's more if you like.
Thank you for being here!
TrueGaming are not the typical digital media goliath you may be familiar with like Future, Hearst and DotdashMeredith.
Instead of being behind dozens of sites in as many different niches, they have three content sites specifically focused on the achievements of gamers.
The biggest site we track for them, at least according to third-party data from Similarweb, is undoubtedly TrueAchievements.com.
Similarweb estimates this site alone receives around 8.7 million total visits each month.
The site targets Xbox gamers with news on what’s happening in their universe and also allows you to track your in-game achievements and compare them against friends.
What’s pretty special is that the website has full integration with the Xbox store, which I honestly didn’t even know was a thing until I came across this network a few months ago.
It looks like the Xbox store has an API that lets you tap into these:
While achievement tracking is definitely a “moat” and selling point of why the site is so successful, it appears to be their news articles that people keep coming back for.
The number of comments on their recent posts is really impressive. It looks like they have a custom forum integration – similar to sites like MacRumors – where commenting on an article is pretty much like commenting on a forum thread.
While search traffic is important to them (driving around 37% of visitors) they’ve clearly built a brand that Xbox gamers keep coming back to as more than half of their visitors arrive at the site directly. Again, this is according to estimates from Similarweb.
The Other Two Sites in Their Network Follow This Exact Same Model
The two other sites we track for TrueGaming are True Trophies and True Steam Achievements.
TrueTrophies takes the exact same concept as True Achievements but focuses on Playstation players. It also has full integration with the PSN store.
Similarweb estimates the site receives around 1 million visits per month, with search traffic accounting for 36% of that.
Then we have TrueSteamAchievements, which gamers will correctly predict as being the same model but for people tracking their achievements on games played through Steam.
This is the least popular of the three sites but still picks up an estimated 635,000 visits each month.
Founded in 2008, Here Are a Few More Stats from the Network
TrueAchievements was launched by founder Rich Stone back in 2008. Today he says that TrueAchievements is the biggest Xbox community on the planet.
Other stats from their network include:
- 5 million+ forum posts
- 1.2 million registered gamers
- 30 million+ monthly pageviews
- 3.8 billion unlocked achievements
Before I sign off, I want to make a comment on ‘Exclusive’ in the headline here. As far as I know, Detailed is the only site on the web that is reporting this traffic increase of 7.5 million monthly visitors to their network of sites. While I believe it is an exclusive, please don’t take the headline too seriously — I’m mostly having fun trying to cover news for the first time in my life.
Previously, the last reported information from the TrueGaming Network themselves was that they were reaching 5 million monthly visitors.
I don’t have any inside information from them, but this new 7.5 million figure is information they reveal and have updated themselves. It’s not a third-party estimate.
I’m really impressed with what they’ve built, so if you ever come across this Rich, I wish you the best of luck going forward.
If you like insights from niche networks like this, then I have dozens more I can’t wait to share with you going forward. Thank you for being here.
