JetPunk 2020 - Year in Review

• Overview
• New Features
• Top Quizzes
• Top New Quizmakers
• Traffic Changes in 2020
• What about 2021?

Overview

Well, here we are at the end of 2020, and what a year it has been. At JetPunk, we started the year off pretty normally, with a January influx of users due to schools returning after Christmas. The main difference back then was the introduction of Polish as a language (more on that below). However, little did we know that 2 months later, the world would be changed in unimaginable ways. In March 2020 of course, the world changed with lockdowns and more. On JetPunk, this resulted in large increases in traffic, in particular from Europe.

This in part inspired the increase in the presence of non-English languages across JetPunk, which is detailed in the New Features section below.

Overall, we had thousands of new users join us in 2020, tens of thousands of new quizzes created, as well as the expansion of our blogs and minigames.

In each of the sections below, we detail the various changes on JetPunk over the year, including highlights from some of the biggest quizzes and users to join us this year. At the end, we look at the changes in traffic as a whole in 2020, and what we might look forward to in 2021.

New Features

Throughout 2020, JetPunk went through some pretty big changes. From an SVG overhaul, to 3 new minigames JetPunk sure has expanded its horizons. These are 3 of the most notable changes in 2020:

• Languages Galore

  Perhaps one of the largest changes to JetPunk was the increase in the number of languages available. Before 2020, there were only 6 languages available for points, and a further 7 available to create quizzes in. During 2020, we added Polish, Dutch and Finnish as featured languages, as well as adding 7 new languages to create quizzes in. Along with this, all featured languages now have daily quizzes on their respective front pages.

  The other major change for languages was getting JetPunk translated and displayed in their native language. Prior to 2020, only French and German had major parts of the site translated (primarily just quiz pages and the front page), with other featured languages having some small parts translated. During 2020, this has been expanded so that Arabic, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish all have the majority of the site translated. Overall, there is 5 times as much of JetPunk translated, and it's all thanks to trusted members of the community who have volunteered their time and effort to make JetPunk more accessible.

• Three New Minigames

  Since June 2016, JetPunk has had just one minigame: Number Factoring. This all changed in February 2020 when I created JetPunk's second ever minigame. This came about because I was bored one weekend at University, and came up with this idea of sorting objects into equal groups. This eventually turned into Even Split, a fast-paced game requiring knowledge of various geography. It was met with positive reviews, although after its initial launch, it somewhat faded and is now the least played minigame daily.

  It seemed like this was the end of the road for minigames, with the newest falling somewhat flat after the initial hype, there was little motivation to create another. That was until October 2020, when I was trying to learn the flags and shapes of countries, but struggled to find a good resource to do so effectively. So, one fateful weekend, I put my mind towards creating a minigame which would allow me to learn the flags and shapes of countries with ease. This took the form of a matching game, similar to "Snap". And so, Geography Snap was born. This minigame was met with rave reviews, and became so popular that it took merely 5 days to overtake Even Split's lifetime plays. After a couple of weeks, it even appeared on an external website, which congregates many gizmos and games from the internet. Upon its debut there, it even reached #2 on the top monthly charts! Another week later and it shows up on another site, this time being 2MinuteGames.com, which features "all the best games and puzzles". As you can see there, Geography Snap is actually number 1 on the monthly chart, and has been since it arrived on the site. It's very clear that Snap was an overwhelming success, and still is having had almost 2 and a half million tiles matched together in just over 2 months. Thankfully, unlike Even Split, Snap is still thriving and has yet to fade away.

  Finally, just this month, Quizmaster released his first minigame since 2016, in the form of U.S. State Puzzle. This puzzle game challenges you to recreate the map of the United States against the clock. Since its release, it has also been rather popular, with little signs of fading away since it arrived. Since its creation, the fastest user to complete the challenge was cooladri with just 76 seconds! This is an incredible time, and much quicker than my measly 2 minutes 33 seconds!

• The SVG Update

  The SVG Update, the first named update in JetPunk history, and quite possibly one of the largest as well, brought many changes to SVGs across JetPunk. Firstly, it completely reworked how Fill in the Map quizzes were played, to make it more friendly for mobile users and adding more possibilities for larger and randomized quizzes.

  Secondly, it added a fully comprehensive SVG Guide, entirely written by me. This guide aims to provide as much information as possible to users who wish to either get started with SVGs on JetPunk, brush up on their skills or just find a solution to one of many possible issues they could run into. This guide alone tooks several weeks to write, and has helped an immeasurable amount of users get their hands stuck into SVGs already. We plan to continue adding to this in the future, as and when needed.

  Thirdly, this update made SVG quizzes much more accessible to users in general, with a brand new interface to how you add SVGs into quizzes, as well as more options on this. Along with this, we introduced "JetPunk Standard SVGs". These SVGs were all uniform in style, format and creation. They are also all possible to add to a quiz without ever downloading an SVG! This means you can select a JetPunk SVG and add it to a quiz, then simply type the countries, states or capitals into Step 2 of the quiz editor, and click the "Add Path IDs" button to add the relevant SVG information to make it light up green. This process made SVGs an accessible form of quiz to all users, not just the advanced ones and those with computers.

  You can read the full release notes for The SVG Update here.

Of course, there was so much more added than just these 3 factors. However, with so many changes, it would be unreasonable to list them all in this end-of-year review. Thankfully, since April 2020, we've been documenting many of the changes on JetPunk on our Change Log!

Top Quizzes

In 2020, we had lots of great new quizzes created. In particular the following 5 quizzes, all brand new this year, topped the charts and were the most popular new quizzes among JetPunkers. (Max. 1 per user)

World Map with Random Merged Countries

by Stewart

Date Released: January 1st

Total Takes: 200,758

Rating: 4.97

It seems my own quiz managed to top the board in 2020... I swear this wasn't planned! I can't deny that many seem to enjoy this one, as shown by its rating and total takes. This took a long time for me to create, so I'm glad others enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it!

Save Humanity by Guessing Countries

by GeoPhilia

Date Released: May 5th

Total Takes: 75,847

Rating: 4.92

Save Humanity struck gold on JetPunk ever since its release, becoming extremely popular and even breaking the single-day record for a new quiz on the front page with over 13,000 takes! Since then, it has enjoyed many appearances on the "Top Today" list, and continues to thrive.

Win the U.S. Presidential Election

by HinesBrothers

Date Released: February 3rd

Total Takes: 61,901

Rating: 4.60

Perhaps the most bizarre quiz on this list, since it had less than 400 takes on November 1st. So how did it gain so many takes in less than 2 months? On November 5th, the day of the U.S. Elections, this quiz debuted on the front page by surprise and ended up demolishing the record set by GeoPhilia above. This quiz achieved the biggest single-day for all quizzes since 2014! A whopping 28,461 takes in a single day. This record is one that will likely stand for many years.

Random Point on Land to Country

by Yev

Date Released: July 10th

Total Takes: 41,421

Rating: 4.99

Despite being the latest-released quiz in this list, it rose to stardom through nominations, and I'm glad it did since so many users have thoroughly enjoyed this quiz with many plays, a debut of over 16,000 takes and the highest rating of all 5 quizzes here. The sheer beauty of this randomized quiz, with over 3400 defined possible points, makes it one that will be soaring through the lists into the foreseeable future.

Random Countries on the Borderless World Map

by Quizzer6794

Date Released: January 15th

Total Takes: 41,376

Rating: 4.98

This quiz is, in ways, similar to Yev's quiz above, however is distinctly different since each country can have at most one single point. Having been featured in the days after it released, this quiz has enjoyed a long and healthy run throughout all of 2020, and I'm sure will continue to do into the future.

There were thousands of other quizzes released in 2020, but these five happened to become the most popular this year. It's clear that randomized quizzes and highly-replayable quizzes are a common staple amongst the leaders this year, however all 5 of these were very unique in their own way. They struck the perfect balance of replayability, uniqueness and enjoyment which seems rarer to achieve than becoming featured. Who knows what will be top in 2021, but I'm sure many more great quizzes will be released next year as well.

Top New Quizmakers

This year we had thousands of new users join us. In particular, these 5 managed to climb their way to the top of that list! They're from a variety of countries, with a variety of statistics, but all have managed to gain a decent amount of takes - enough to rival longer term users!

JPin8497

Top Quiz: Countries that Beat Germany

Date Joined: March 14th

Total Takes: 65,942

# Quizzes: 155

JPin had one of their earliest quizzes featured on the day it was released, a rare feat in itself. This quiz was Geography Containing the Letter X, and is one of those quizzes where you think, "How did this not exist before?". They have already gained 7 featured quizzes (6 in English), and I'm sure they'll continue to thrive into 2021. Congrats on coming top JPin!

Levisek27PL

Top Quiz: Mapa Europy bez 10 losowych państw

Date Joined: February 5th

Total Takes: 64,097

# Quizzes: 995

Levisek is almost certainly the most active Polish quizmaker, and has been since they joined the site in February. With over 100 of their quizzes being featured (all Polish), their contributions to the Polish side of JetPunk are very much appreciated, and we hope they continue to do so long into the future!

TerapiaDeShock

Top Quiz: Top 20 Countries With the Tallest People

Date Joined: February 29th

Total Takes: 28,263

# Quizzes: 2

Perhaps the most unique addition to this list, since this user has only released two quizzes, both of which were featured within a day of being posted! It is a quiz which many have tried to do, but nobody before has found a reliable source for the data. This is where Terapia stood above the crowd and managed to find a reliable source, allowing their only two quizzes to be featured. We hope they make a 3rd quiz someday soon!

Tietopankki

Top Quiz: Suomen kunnat kartalla

Date Joined: March 27th

Total Takes: 24,002

# Quizzes: 10

Another non-English user, this time specialising in Finnish which only became a featured language this year. Their quiz was Finnish subdivisions on a map. Sounds simple, yet it has blown up in popularity, gaining more takes than almost all Finnish quizzes that came before, averaging over 100 takes a day! This is a number which rivals even English quizzes, despite Finnish being a much smaller section of the site.

youtubeplayer

Top Quiz: Quiz o Polsce

Date Joined: May 15th

Total Takes: 22,158

# Quizzes: 154

Finally we come to our second Polish user, youtubeplayer (aka Ytp). Ytp has been another invaluable member of the Polish community, expanding the Polish section with 154 quizzes (so far), with 91 of those already featured. They have spent countless hours adapting quizzes from English into Polish so those users can enjoy them as well. Since the majority of Polish users on JetPunk don't leave the Polish section (unlike other languages), it means these translations are vital to provide these quality creations to the native Poles.

As you can see, the top 5 were very diverse users, with 3 being solely non-English users. This is testament to the expansion of other languages seen this year, as mentioned in the Updates section above. It is clear this year was an exceptional one, and we can't wait to see what new users find themselves to JetPunk next year!

Traffic Changes in 2020

As the world began to lock itself away in March 2020, with nationwide imposed lockdowns, schools being closed down and workplaces being shut, we expected JetPunk would begin to tank in traffic. This was because JetPunk has often relied on schools and workplaces for much of its daily traffic. This is most noticeable as weekends are typically the quietest days of the week on JetPunk.

So, when schools and work in the western world started to fade away, we wondered what devastation might be seen here on JetPunk. Much to our surprise, traffic exploded on JetPunk. It seems the combination of working-from-home and online schools contributed to a drive in traffic.

The initial results of this are detailed in the first blog on traffic back in April 2020: How Coronavirus Has Changed JetPunk's Demographics. This section will serve as an update to that. The main criticism of that blog, was that we used unique users, rather than page views, as a measure of a country's importance on JetPunk. This meant countries with users that visited once and never again, would have a much higher effect than actuality. To compensate for that, below is the % of page views from the top 5 countries for each of the following months.

A lot to unpick here. First, January was a rather "typical" month, with the exception of Poland which was amplified due to external traffic. Then April shows the effects of lockdown, and the fact that traffic from the USA was largely unchanged, but traffic in other countries, in particular the UK and France, rose greatly. Bear in mind that, in a typical year, we peak in January and then drop a little until May-June time when we pick up again (exam time for many schools) and then we drop again over the summer holidays, recuperating in Autumn when schools go back into session. Well, here we have the unprecedented month of April 2020 where JetPunk had its biggest month on record. As countries started to open up and summer came around, traffic started to dwindle to "normal" levels, albeit with still an imbalance of traffic from the U.S., still below its usual one third of traffic.

Coming towards the end of the year, almost every month of 2020 has been bigger than every month of 2019, showing the enormous growth seen on JetPunk in 2020. In October, we start to see a normalisation of the proportions between countries once again, with France taking a higher prevalence than before due to the downturn of Polish compared with January.

What about 2021?

So, what can we expect from JetPunk in 2021? Well, with a vaccine on the horizon, and some countries starting to see glimmers of normality, perhaps that means JetPunk will return to business-as-usual as well. Or perhaps all these new users from 2020 will decide to stick around for next year. I guess only time will tell.

What I do know is that we have lots of exciting new features and ideas that we hope you'll love. We don't want to share details of these just yet, as many are in the preliminary stages, but between myself and the Quizmaster, we hope to please the community and expand it.

It's been clear that the dominating factors of this year on JetPunk have been languages and minigames. Perhaps these will skyrocket next year and become even bigger, or perhaps something new will take their place. All we know is that we will strive to make 2021 on JetPunk just as exciting and as expansive as 2020 has been.

On a personal level, JetPunk has been the one constant keeping me going throughout 2020, as I know it has been for many of our users, and we are honoured to help those who need it in our own unique way.

What has your highlight of 2020 on JetPunk been? What do you hope to see in 2021? Any predictions as to what might dominate the site in 2021?

All data on this page is correct as of December 21st, 2020. Data from JetPunk and Google Analytics.