racketboy wrote:I have seriously considered the name change, but I don't currently feel like it is the right move. As unconventional as the name is, it does have a great deal of recognition in the community. SEO is strong as well.
I think a name change / rebrand would be a huge mistake. As you said, Racketboy does have recognition in the community. I feel like it's up there with the most well known retro gaming site, even with the recent lack of new content. Search engine optimization is still definitely strong. Even with the forum participation being much lower than what it was at its height, threads are always coming up in Google searches for me. And they're always toward the top of the first page, too.
The tagline might be a different story, though.
racketboy wrote:Even with YouTube being an emerging medium for retro content, I still think traditional text has a great deal of value.
I had some loose thoughts regarding this over the past year or two. Don't take this as an argument, or even a serious opinion, just food for thought. I don't think it's right to call YouTube an "emerging" medium for retro gaming. It has fully emerged, and it might be the Internet's single biggest resource for retro gaming content (as it is for other subject matter as well).
That said, there most definitely
is still value in traditional text. Some people prefer video, but many prefer text or both. For example, the three biggest wood working YouTube channels that I watch each have their own site. For every video they post, there's also a companion blog entry on the site. Of course, in this context, the text version of the video is important since some people learn from only watching and others learn better from reading and viewing diagrams. But, I feel like most people prefer having
both. I say this in the context of building stuff, but I feel like the same applies to videos / blogs in general.
Anyway, as to not go off on too much of a tangent... Have you thought about having more YouTube content? I mean, there's already a Racketboy YouTube channel. There just hasn't ever been many videos on it. Being a retrocentric site, a lot of the user base here either doesn't mind or even prefers blogs / articles to videos. But I'm sure if we polled the forum, there wouldn't be many people (if any) that don't like both. Some topics are right for text, some for videos, but some for either or both. I think it's something to consider.
I had some more thoughts and vague ideas regarding this, but I figure I'll wait to see if there's any strong opinions (one way or the other) before I turn this post into a wall of text.