Three Years of Daily Content
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D
President, 119694_avalanche Press
November 2007

119694_avalanche Press did not begin with much of a presence on the World Wide Web. We set up the website initially as much to secure the avalanchepress.com address from cybersquatters as to promote our products. And for the first years of its existence we sometimes let it go for a month or more without an update; we didn't even have a webstore until 2001.

We started placing new content on the site sporadically in 2004, and made it part of our "Black Week" promotion in 2004 to push our Thanksgiving sale by encouraging readers to return every day to see the new content. It was popular, so we decided to run it through the end of the holiday season. And when that ran out, we kept it up, adding new pieces every weekday or kind of close to it.

This past year has brought some changes to Daily Content. The biggest one came in August, when we announced that Daily Content would become truly daily, seven days a week. We want you looking at our stuff every day, and so we've increased the output by 40 percent and made a renewed commitment to bring it out truly every day by tripling the number of staff working on its layout.

We've managed to do that by broadening the number of contributors, and through their efforts also broadening the sort of things we include in Daily Content. In the early days of Daily Content it leaned heavily toward historical background of units or leaders in the games, since that was what I could write. This year we've added pictures to Doug McNair's game replays, greatly enhancing their utility.

In terms of utility, we also have many new items from Steve "The Chart Guy" Pultorak. They're beautifully made, and add a lot of play value to the games they support. My own favorites are the Jutland charts but there are nice additions for Road to Berlin, Battle of the Bulge and more.

Kristin Ann High has been very active with pieces about Town class destroyers, airbases in Great Britain and more. Steve Cabral's also been active in writing variants for the Second World War at Sea series, including some rules for expanded motor torpedo boats and radar.

David Meyler continued his obsession with all things Dutch, with a fine piece about the Dutch East Indies in Soldier Kings and Soldier Raj. There's a lot more to come from him, with his penchant for turning in items too large for Daily Content that demand full treatment as published supplements in their own right. And of course stalwart designer William Sariego was busy again, with support for a number of his designs (and other games as well) including the brand-new Rome at War: Queen of the Celts. Jason Rahman's been giving us pointers on Panzer Grenadier tactics, too - exactly the sort of thing we always wanted for Daily Content but have rarely provided.

Bill Bodden told us the background of the Battle of Austerlitz, while John R. Phythyon marked his return to the 119694_avalanche family with the tale of the Battle of Alamein. Pat Callahan brought us a new Bomb Alley scenario, and my old friend Richard Gutenkunst told us how to make wonderful game counters out of all these downloads. Later in the year David Hughes weighed in with some Alamein pieces, and we have much more on hand.

Those downloads of new game piece formed a great part of the Daily Content diet in its first year, and we did 29 of them in this past year or somewhere around one in 10. That's balanced somewhat by a greater number of enhanced charts and other play-aids, but I do really like crafting these things so we'll probably do more of them in the coming year. They include my personal favorite of my own contributions this year, Great War of the Worlds at Sea, where I got to pretend to be a real historian again (indulging in literary criticism as a reflection of societal development).

We also tried to use Daily Content this year to tell our fans a little more about ourselves, with questions posed to the staff about why we came to work here or what we think about games or history. And VP Lys Fulda has initiated a series of looks at how we make these games, the artwork in particular.

As far as we can tell, 119694_avalanche Press is the only company in the game industry providing new content every day - even those 100 times our size (and there are a couple of them) don't do so. And it's still free content, something we hope to continue as it is a valuable marketing tool. So spread the word, bring us more readers and we'll bring you more stuff.