It’s that time of year again, when Kanka celebrates its birthday and becomes one year older! Continuing on our growing tradition of the yearly celebration, let’s have a look at what exciting things happened for Kanka this past year.

Highlights of the year that has passed

This year has been the most exciting year for Kanka so far. Last year for Kanka’s birthday, we ran a survey of our community with over 300 responses. A lot of our changes in the past year were a direct result from all the feedback we gathered.

Some key highlights:

• We simplified our pricing system, merging boosted and superboosted campaigns into a single premium campaigns terminology. This has been very well received based on our annual survey.
• We updated large parts of the interface… again.
• Our biggest difficulty was dealing with several thousand dollars worth of fraudulent charges made to Kanka by scammers testing stolen credit cards. This has cost us a lot of time and money to combat.
• Jay became a dad, finally earning his dad joke diploma that he had been training years for.

What we hope for our next anniversary

I’m broad terms, we want to keep taking Kanka to the next level. Being a small team of 3 with limited resources can make it harder to do everything that we want to do, but there are still many projects we want to work on.

To begin with, we want to offer a better experience for first time Kanka users. A lot of features have been added over the years, and while we spent a lot of effort last year to improve the documentation, many aspects of Kanka still aren’t clearly explained.

This will mean rethinking the onboarding experience, potentially creating an intro video, a modal tutorial, or any other crazy ideas we feel we should try out.

A frequent request over the years has been to add a full-text search in campaigns. This is something we hope to tackle in the next year.

Another frequent request is for the export feature to be useful. We’re brainstorming ideas on how to make the export more complete with all data of a campaign, and some way to use said export in Kanka.

Lastly, we want to work on some ideas regarding running your games and generating journals of your session in a more automated way. Some of you have had a sneak peak of this, and we’re thankful for your feedback.

Highlights from our yearly survey

This year we did our second yearly survey to better understand what we do well, and what we can improve. We were absolutely delighted to once again receive several hundred responses!

Our key takeaways from the feedback echoes the feedback we got last year:

• There’s a lot of love for Kanka and you want to see it succeed.
• 91.3% of respondents feel positively or very positively about Kanka.
• Most requested features are things that already exist in Kanka (family trees, PayPal subscriptions, custom CSS), showing that we still need to improve communicating new and existing features.
• 40% of respondents use AI to boost their worldbuilding and TTRPG experience.

Statistics

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And lastly, our statistics. We now also include last year’s stats here more easily compare the numbers.

What	2023	2022	2021
Accounts created	225,000	170,000	98,000
Active accounts	27,000	22,000	10,800
Average daily active users	2,700	2,400	1,800
Average daily visits1	10,690	3,400	2,500
Biggest campaign (members)	206	283	286
Largest campaign (entities)	12,300	9,500	12,000
Campaigns created	221,000	150,000	80,000
Public campaigns	4,000	3,400	2,100

Entity stats

Entity type	Amount 2023 (thousands)	Amount 2022 (thousands)	Amount 2021 (thousands)
Characters	1.3k	805	480
Locations	1.2k	721	440
Races	551	301	170
Items	357	210	147
Abilities	348	160	75
Tags	323	212	144
Organisations	257	164	105
Notes	225	155	105
Families	147	95	63
Events	133	85	57
Journals	98	60	36
Quests	93	60	40
Maps	70	40	20
Creatures2	64
Attribute Templates	26	16	12
Timelines	25	13	6
Calendars	20	13	8
Pinned relations	137	95	45
Pinned attributes	702	455	200
Posts	497	222	100

Top five countries

Position	2023	2022	2021
1st	USA	USA	USA
2nd	Germany	Brazil	Brazil
3rd	France	Germany	Germany
4th	Canada	United Kingdom	United Kingdom
5th	Brazil	Canada	Canada

Some interesting shuffling this year. Brazil has lost its second place dominance, and the united kingdom has left the top five.

System	% 2023	% 2022	% 2021
D&D	51.4%	38.2%	26.32%
D&D 5e	13.61%	35.41%	26.32%
Other	20.89%	14.36%	39.91%
Pathfinder	5.27%	4.33%	4.76%
Savage worlds	1.9%	1.66%	1.58%
Chronicles of darkness	1.46%	1.25%	1.21%
Pathfinder 2e	1.77%	1.12%	0.77%
Dungeon world	0.89%	0.98%	1.1%
Fate	0.89%	1.01%	1.07%
GURPS	0.96%	0.82%	1.05%
DSA	0.95%	0.82%	0.92%

D&D’s dominance has gone down, but is still 65% of the market. We won’t speculate as to why, but anyone who has followed along the past year probably saw this coming.

Closing words

We continue to be incredibly grateful for everyone’s continued support and enjoyment of Kanka. Thanks for being with us on this wild journey, and we hope to see you in a year!

1. The way this is calculated changed in the summer of 2023 ↩︎
2. The creature module was added in 2023 ↩︎