CD-ROM Fossil

Featured image is a graph of which countries viewed us the most.

By: Elijah Moon Blackwell

The year is already over? Time flew! Well, let’s take a look at this past year by exploring numbers and giving some shout-outs.

Note: All information was gathered on 12/16/2021.

Website Stats
One of my favorite things to track is how many countries our site reaches. For 2021, CD-ROM Fossil was accessed from 53 unique countries! That’s the most so far! We’ve listed each country before, but that was when the total number was in the 20s. For fun we’ll post the top 5 and the bottom 5 in terms of amount of views.

The Top 5 Countries by Views:
1. United States (kind of a given honestly)
2. India
3. Canada
4. South Africa
5. Poland

The Bottom 5 Countries by Views:
49. Tunisia
50. Uruguay
51. Croatia
52. Zimbabwe
53. Estonia

Shout-out to all of our readers around the globe! 

Next let’s look at the top 3 most visited blog posts:
1. Mario’s Short Time on PC (and as a Teacher) By Elijah Moon Blackwell
2. Games from My Childhood Library: The Book of Pooh – A Story without a Tail By Katelyn Vause
3. Games from My Childhood Library: A Retrospective Look at Christian CD-ROM Games By Katelyn Vause

These top 3 are kinda interesting. Pooh made its way to Reddit. Someone used our article to help someone else identify what game they couldn’t fully remember. The original post has been deleted, but you can see the comments still: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/dqwhl1/tomt_game_early_2000s_winnie_the_pooh_pc_cdrom/

However, Mario is interesting because it’s one of the older articles. Posted in 2019, this article hasn’t been a top contender until this year. Not sure what brought on this resurgence, but hey, I wrote it so I’m not complaining! Keep reading!

The third one is both surprising and not. Katelyn’s Childhood series has done very well. If I were to list the top 10 blogs, that series would be all over it. The Christian one making the third most viewed is kinda…cool? I’m never sure how many Christians actually seek out video games themed around said religion and/or people who grew up in some kind of Vacation Bible School. This being a top viewed post tells me that we got some Christian demo discs floating around out there and people are trying to remember them. 

Next let’s look at the top 3 most viewed archives. This is the first year where we started documenting games and companies. We haven’t done an incredible lot, but it will still be interesting to see which games are being searched up the most (and being directed to this site).

In order of most views to least, here are the top visited archives:
1. Campus: Student Life Simulation
2. Frogger: He’s Back!
3. Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchling Adventure

Campus is an obscure Sims clone I recently discovered. I found it on eBay and decided to give it a whirl. It’s a wild trip. I did a video review on it awhile back. I think because this is a severely under reported title, lots of players are finding their way to our site.

Frogger, not going to lie, kind of throws me for a loop. Didn’t think that many people were on the hunt for that. Frogger as a series is popular, but how many of you miss the random PC port it got? I’m genuinely curious.

Cap’n Crunch was a game included in select cereal box bundles. I’m sure there’s some nostalgia there for sure. It could also be people just looking for cereal; who knows!

YouTube Stats
Time for the channel’s performance. The growth it experienced is awesome. It’s been a rewarding year to see views and subscriber counts grow. 

Without further ado, here’s some quick stats:
2021 saw a total of 27,102 video views. 2020 saw 18,821. That’s a 44% increase!

In 2021 we gained 246 subscribers. In 2020 we gained 166. That’s a 48% increase!

To keep this trend of 40ish% growth going, even total watch time falls into the same place. During 2021, viewers watched a total of 1,464 hours. In 2020 that number was 1,024. 

So it’s safe to say the channel experienced an average 40ish% growth in terms of analytics, which is honestly great to see.

If you are curious about lifetime totals I’ll quickly put those below.

All data is from May 10th, 2018 to December 16, 2021:
53.2k views
2.9k hours watched
529 subscribers
579 comments
2,180 likes
45 dislikes
260 shares

YouTube breaks down analytics to see if your videos were accessed through searches. 53% of our viewer traffic is from YouTube’s search function. These are interesting as it gives me a little insight to what people are looking for. 

Here are the top 10 searches our videos popped up in during 2021. I think you’ll catch why I’m choosing the top 10:
worlds.com
boiling point road to hell
killing time game
killing time
sony clie
killing time 3do
bluemaxima flashpoint
boiling point game
killing time pc
sinistar

It’s definitely apparent that people are wanting to see content for Killing Time. I did a playthrough of it, but seeing these frequent searches make me want to do a review. But that’d mean playing through it fully again and I have to be in the mood. As I detailed in a blog post, Killing Time can be a chore.

Shout-outs
Last but not least I want to give some shout-outs to some people who have helped me out. I’ll detail in what way with each person or group. In no particular order:

Zach Zimmerman
Zach has written a few articles for this site and that’s a huge help. I’ll be the first to admit that content is a little slow so every Zach article helps keep things fresh. Not just in quantity though, but also in tone and subject. Having him guest write has been great and I hope to publish more of his work soon.

Jeff Schleg
This dude made the Discord (which you can join by clicking here) which I greatly appreciate. He also advertises it better than I do. Also, Jeff is good about finding extremely obscure stuff like Russian mods or long forgotten budget games.

Snbnth
A Finnish man who sometimes edits my streams. I uh…don’t know how else to describe him? But he is greatly appreciated because the stream highlights he’s done for me are glorious.

DBK
You know why I’m thanking you.

Kill Screen Games
This is a game store in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I’m sure you’ve seen me mention them plenty of times, especially on Instagram. These guys keep me in the back of their minds anytime a computer game rolls into their shop. It’s because of them that I’ve come across some holy grails, like the Commodore 64 version of Ultima I.

Zoom Platform
The Zoom Platform is a DRM-Free video game marketplace. You can check them out here. One day a CDRF Discord member linked this storefront asking whether or not we’ve bought from them. I joined the Zoom Platform Discord, asked a few questions and next thing I know we became pretty good friends! Each staff member I’ve chatted with (including the CEO) have been great. They are the reason why my Hardwar and Duke Nukem videos exist. Can’t wait till see what else comes of this new friendship! 

And of course shout-out to all the lovely Patrons! You guys are amazing and keep the shelves stocked with classic computer games and hardware!

That’s it for this year’s roundup! I can’t wait to see what’s in store for CDRF in 2022!