Celebrating 9 Years of House of Clashers!
02/21/202209/03/2022
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It's that time of the year again, here we are celebrating another House of Clashers anniversary! In this blog post, I will talk about House of Clashers history for the first time, our entrepreneur journey, and plans for the future. Check it out!
House of Clashers - 9th Anniversary!
The Begining
First of all, thank you so much for visiting House of Clashers! Without you, Clasher, this dream would not be possible. There is no way I could imagine a crazy fan idea would last so long; in fact, I still can't.
Everything started with a very simple idea in 2012: create a place where I could share stats and strategies about a new game I was completely addicted, Clash of Clans.
However, I wanted to do something different. Instead of an "outdated" website, why not a native app, where I could also provide news and create a unique/modern user experience? Long story short, 3 months later, in 02/2013, House of Clashers was released at the App Store.
We started as an iOS app, being one of the first free sources of information for the game. But that's not all; it was also one of the first app companions ever, for any game. In 2013 there was no such thing, and this is where Supercell's vision made the difference.
Thank You, Supercell!
House of Clashers is not related or sponsored by Supercell in any way (we don't even have a "Creator Code"), but I can't thank enough Jared and SuperSteve from Supercell that understood this crazy idea back then.
Without their support, this app would not have existed at all. And of course, thanks Ilkka Paananen and Supercell for their innovative vision about the gaming community.
In 2012, while other game companies and their lawyers were copyright striking YouTube videos (sounds crazy, but it's true), Supercell was working to find a way to enable fan apps to survive on a very strict and emerging market known as the App Store. Guess what, it worked and House of Clashers now has 11 million app downloads.
What content creators take for granted nowadays was in fact a big change 10 years ago, and Suprecell had a huge participation on this new approach regarding the gaming community. So thank you, Supercell! This isn't, by any means, an ordinary game company.
Since the day I got the first reply from Supercell, I've wanted to visit Finland. Now that the pandemic is almost over, I might pay a visit. :)
House of Clashers Current State
Over time what was a simple iOS app kept getting bigger: in 2016 the Android app was launched and in 2018, finally, the website.
House of Clasher's back-end development, since 2012, has never stopped. We are constantly pushing forward what we can do with such a small team and budget, and we have no plans to stop.
In 2018, with over 300 pages and available in 3 platforms, we came across a huge problem: how can we sync content between the website, iOS and Android app in real-time? With our particular needs, our solution was to create our own system, from scratch, where we could edit and automatically sync content through all platforms. The system was initially deployed in 2019 and became fully functional in 2021. It is currently being used in over 50 apps/websites, and we plan to make it public to other customers in 2022.
Over 9 years, we have never skipped a single Clash news and we are proud to be one of the biggest sources of original Clash content. With over 600 of exclusive content, 3.000 images, 11 million app downloads, we ended 2021 with over 15 million page views. That's 1 pageview every 25 seconds! We estimate having served half a billion Clash stats since 2013.
Who Are We?
House of Clashers was 100% coded by a single self-taught programmer. The same programmer happened to be a Clasher and wrote most House of Clashers content. Nice to meet you, I'm Tom! "We" are not a company, "we" are just a single freelancer developer trying to make a living while writing about Clash games.
As you can imagine, keeping all this content updated is a vast amount of work. With 16.000 content edits only in the past 3 years, I assume I'm one of the biggest Clash geeks out there :) I can't even imagine how many edits I have since 2013...
This has always been a fun project, I absolutely love what we do and we want to keep House of Clashers alive as long as Supercell makes Clash games.
With new Clash games on the horizon, we've worked around the clock to upgrade our system to support more content and, most importantly, allow user edits. This was one of the most extensive updates ever done in our platform and it's in its final stages of development.
Yes, we have plans to cover all new Clash games, so it is about time to open the entire platform to the Clash community. We are finally ready for unlimited content with the support from the Clash community, while we also increase the quality of our content, and most importantly, keep doing what we love.
2022: The Best Days Are Ahead of Us
Without further due, we are really happy to share our roadmap with our short-term goals and objectives! House of Clashers is "only" a fan website; what can they possibly have on a roadmap? Well, a lot of stuff, check it out!
Openning House of Clashers for the Community
Starting today, all content can be edited and improved by any Clasher. To me, as a developer, this is a dream coming true and a huge step forward on our plans to keep House of Clashers alive as long as Supercell makes Clash games.
It will be pretty challenging and for now, all news about all Clash games will still be written by me, and I have no plans to stop editing our guides.
We currently have 600 pages published and we plan to reach over 1.000 in the next few months. It's a lot of work, but with the support from the Clash community I'm sure we can handle it!
Get ready Clashers, we are now a 100% community-based platform!
House of Clashers Contributor? No Ads!
House of Clashers is 100% free and most of our revenue comes from advertisement, which is 100% used to cover server and development costs.
From now on, every Clasher that makes an edit will have all ads removed from the website for the next 30 days. Support us? No ads for you! :)
By the way, iOS users can make a small donation by subscription, which removes ads from the iOS app. If you are an iOS user, please consider doing this; it means a lot to us and really makes a difference.
User Rank and Content Creators
With House of Clashers being now a community-based system, it's about time to create ranks to show the most active users.
We also plan to promote our contributors. This is actually a big deal. If they are a content creator, we will do our best to drive viewers to your website, Twitch or YouTube Channel. More details coming soon!
New Layout
Being a back-end programmer, my goal was always to create the best website/apps in terms of accessibility, performance, and SEO. After a lot of trial and error, we were finally able to crush Google algorithm and become one of the best-ranked Clash of Clans websites. Now 90% of our website visitors come directly from search engines; thanks Google!
However, now it's time to focus on the front-end, and in a couple of weeks, an all-new design will arrive on the website. Stay tuned!
Clash Back Thursday
With Clash of Clans turning 10 years old, we thought a lot about making something special and unique to celebrate. The answer is, bring back #ClashBackThursday!
This was in fact incredible fun to do; we created a task force to find the craziest and most curious pieces of Clash history we could find. We went through 3000 Facebook images, thousands of tweets and had a blast finding many gems about the Clash history.
The result is almost 50 posts that will share every Thursday on our social media until Clash of Clahs turns 10 years old.
If you don't want to miss #funfacts and curiosities about Clash history, visit us every Thursday on Twitter, Facebook or Discord!
Trending and Recent Activity
The idea about trending topics is not new, and we are finally doing it. The list of most viewed and edited pages will be public, and every week we will pick a trending page, review/update, and share on our social media pages.
Partnerships
House of Clashers is 100% free and we intend to keep it that way, so we are constantly looking for sponsors to help us to keep up our server and development costs.
Would you like to partner or support us? Reach us out!
Thank You, Clashers!
If you read all the way through here, I must repeat it, thank you for visiting us! Without you, it would not be possible to keep this platform running.
It was a long journey and since it seems like Clash has plans for at least 9 more years, we also have no plans to stop any time soon.
Happy Clashversary and Clash On!