Yes it’s that time where I spend just a couple of minutes to talk about this series for The Strictly Spoiler and thank a few people who have helped contribute to another massive year.
And massive is really the word. 2021 has blown away so many records for this site and the record book has been pretty much thrown out. Peaking at 1.3 Million views in a weekend throughout the series the spoiler has at the time of writing been viewed here almost 10 million times by 2.3 million of you. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d be recording weekend views in the magnitude of millions but here we are. It doesn’t feel like too long ago I was getting excited about a few thousand views and now we are talking about millions. It’s mad, bewildering and a little scary especially as the site has been struggling with the numbers a couple of times this series even with my scalable hosting solution and because of this my costs have sky rocketed as I’ve had to deploy increasing numbers of very powerful servers to cope with the demand.
Hosting this website will have cost me over £2k throughout the 13 weeks of this series once I get my December hosting bill and that’s without factoring other expenses that I incur into the equation. This is a ludicrous sum of money to be paying and is one reason why the website pushes a number of monetisation options to help support these large costs as there is no way I would be able to afford to keep this site running if I were to run it as a hobby as I did at the start.
Many of you have used the donation options available and I am really grateful to each and every one of you. Whilst the donations received haven’t covered the costs in full this series and that’s to be expected given how much they have spiralled from previous series they have seriously lightened the load and I’m grateful to each and every one of you who has donated whether you’ve donated £1 or £50. If you want to get a last minute donation in, buy me a pint or an early Christmas present to thank me for all the spoilers you can do so using THIS LINK (make sure to click send and not request) or the button below. Please only do so if you can afford to do so and there is zero obligation on anyone to help me out in this way.
Another way you guys have been helping me out with my costs is through the Patreon page. This was launched in 2020 but due to the pandemic I wasn’t able to push it as much as I would have liked and was only offering a warm fuzzy feeling to those few who signed up in 2020. Things were very different in 2021 and there are now over 100 of you on Patreon. For just the price of a coffee every month Patreon supporters have received the spoiler advert and monetisation free but have also received the results of the exit poll. Taken just after The BBC vote closes this poll has accurately predicted those in danger of landing in the dance off each week though has been a little less reliable at picking the precise bottom two, though this was also the case last series when the poll was being used as a spoiler back up due to the pandemic.
I’m grateful to everyone who has signed up to patreon as you too have helped me towards the spiralling costs and I hope a good few of you stick around during the off season as even though Strictly isn’t on I do still incur costs all year round. You can sign up to Patreon here and I’ll be in touch with everyone on Patreon in the new year to try and get ideas on what you’d like to see there in 2022.
Moving on and I’d like to thank my sources. I work closely with a few other spoiler sources and in a normal series we’d all source moles and help each other out with the spoiler. This was not a normal series but thankfully I have another source who has once again been invaluable at providing the spoiler even on the weeks when there has been no mole due to the audience capacity. Without this source things would have been a lot quieter on the spoiler front this year (and last). Last series I offered to send this person a little gift at Christmas however they declined but instead asked that I make a charity donation on their behalf. I’ll be making the same offer in due course to thank this person.
Finally I just want to thank each and every one of you who comes to the website and views the content I put out each week. It still flabbergasts me how many of you do that and I’m grateful to each and every one of you!
All that remains is to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!