Well, in short, as Lauri told you guys before, we didn’t get any.

… and I understand why. After all, we are a small, pretty new and thus fairly unknown site.

However, the reasoning given to us, is not that good.

Pahoittelen, mutta olemme vähentäneet pressipassien määrää aiemmasta ja emme voi valitettavasti antaa teille pressipassia. Ropeconin ilmaislippujen määrä on kasvanut paljon nopeammin kuin kävijämäärä, ja sen myöksi myös pressipassien määrää on vähennetty. Pahoittelen.

In English (my translation)

We are sorry to inform you that we have lowered the amount of press passes from the past and regretfully can’t offer you one. The number of free entrances to RopeCon has grown much faster than the amount of visitors, and because of that, the number of press passes has been limited.

The problem with this?

Well, in order to grow, you must be able to reach out to people. Sure, the big media outlets will let you do that, but there’s a difference between us and them. They’ll inform you about the major awards given out, the guests of honor, and maybe some pics of cosplayers. In general, that’s not going to draw anyone in. Well, except for the pics.

We talk about the whole experience in depth. Bunch of pictures (both here and on Instagram), several articles, our own recommendations for RPGs, and so forth. Even a couple of short videos. Whereas others like to inform you about the “important” things, we make this whole thing seem like fun, the way it should be.

And people seem to appreciate that.

That’s the histogram of hits on our site. As you can see, right after RopeCon, the number of hits just explodes. Mostly because we made the effort to market ourselves, but why should that matter. Its a symbiotic relationship. We get good content from RopeCon, RopeCon gets the word out on what actually happens during the Con. Well, for a few people with pretty specific interests anyhow.

All in all, if you are worried about not growing fast enough, what you don’t do is limit your visibility or the coverage you are getting. Perhaps you have to invest in it a little bit, like giving press passes to people from an obscure blog, but that’s not much for what you are getting.

Of course, you can always count on us being there anyway, and doing all this anyway as well. However, we would appreciate being recognized as worthy enough to be given the passes. After all, we can’t really take part in much of what happens with them and still need to either pay, or participate in some other manner to get into the RPGs we are there for.

Of course, we don’t really need the passes, but they would be nice. Just approaching people becomes easier when you have the pass visible. Of course, it might work against you too, but at least there’s no feeling that I’ve deceived someone if I’m open about writing pretty in-depth about the whole experience.