JetPunk 2023 - Year in Review

As 2023 draws to a close, we review how the year happened on JetPunk. Once again, the first half of the year brought an influx of newcomers - welcome! New features on JetPunk were sparse towards the second half of the year, as is often the case. But plenty has happened in 2023!

In each section below, we detail the various changes on JetPunk over the year, including highlights from some of the biggest quizzes created this year, users who joined us this year and also the most popular blogs of the year. At the end, we look at the traffic in 2023, and what we might look forward to in 2024.

In 2023, we saw some pivotal changes on JetPunk - not all of which were on the site itself! So strap in, grab a snack, and read all about these 4 major changes this year on JetPunk.

One of the biggest changes in 2023, was the introduction of the JetPunk Shop! It has been a passionate project to have merchandise for JetPunk for many years now, and after a lot of researching and prototyping, we finally released the shop in summer of this year.

Read all about it in "Introducing... The JetPunk Shop"! There's also the full backstory linked in the comments. 

Here's a selection of some of the most popular products:

And there's so much more!

Also, as a special for the 2023 Holidays, we have a special dated product available for a limited time only! This is a 2023 Coaster for JetPunk. Also, if you order before the end of 2023 you get a free 1-month JetPunk Premium gift certificate for yourself or someone else.

JetPunk Holidays Coaster 2023

Randomized quizzes finally received stats! After many years of randomized quizzes being on JetPunk, they've never had stats by answer, mostly because of technical difficulties. Well, that all changed this year.

Now, you can see by-answer stats on randomized quizzes. Representing the % each answer was guessed when it was selected by the randomizer. For example, on Random Countries of the World Map we can now clearly see the map showing the global % guessed:

Now, keen-eyed readers will remember that Word Search actually started daily in 2022. Well on January 31st this year we said goodbye to the daily word searches on JetPunk - or so users thought! In fact, jump ahead to April 1st 2023 and we brought back Word Search and better than ever. Now you have access to all previous puzzles, with the ocassional addition of a new puzzle. You also have stats across all the puzzles - visible on your user profile.

The full story of its return can be found here!

What we can reveal though, is that on December 14th 2023 we passed 2 million total plays across all Word Searches! This makes it the most played minigame on JetPunk!

For reference, here are the total takes of all minigames as of December 19th 2023:

Regular quiztakers received two very well received updates in September, this being the introduction of daily streaks and confetti once a quiz is finished!

The Streaks feature rewards users who return daily to take a featured quiz. In fact, we even managed to back-date this feature. And so, the top 10 users by their streak are:

Note that users who have opted-out of Streaks are not included, even if their streak would place them in this list.

The other feature along with Streaks was the introduction of Confetti after completing a quiz at 100%. This has been well received as a little positive pick-me-up reward for completing the quiz!

Despite these major changes, there were many smaller changes that didn't make the cut in this end-of-year review, such as Baseball & Basketball Facts, the Recently Taken Quizzes page, comment collapsing and more! Thankfully, they're all documented on JetPunk's Change Log for you to enjoy.

In 2023, other than one obvious series, it seems the output of quizzes was varied across the top 20.

As usual, to ensure variety and fairness, we will limit the following top 5 to a maximum of 1 per user (they are still all in the overall top 10). We also limit only to English quizzes in this blog, especially important this year since #1 was in fact a French quiz (Trouvez le pays mystère en utilisant des indices - Aléatoire) by user Simon1006! Receiving almost 300k takes in less than a year! On top of that, French quizzes encompassed 6 of the top 20 quizzes.

So far over 90,000 quizzes have been released on JetPunk in 2023, that's 18,000 more than last year, and these have amounted to over 11.8 million takes! (Phenomenal increase of 3.5m from last year).

This also represents over 1.4% of all takes on JetPunk ever, or, perhaps more helpfully, about 6% of all takes this year! In fact over 200 million takes have been added this year, or rather 24% of all takes ever, have come from 2023. That's pretty insane, in my opinion, and shows JetPunk is still growing very strongly.

Once again, we will highlight the top quiztakers this year, with the top 4 users having at least level 75. Now, while nobody got over the level 90 of last year, we did have one user achieve level 80. This is still, of course, incredibly impressive to achieve!

As we progress, more and more quizzes are featured and so it becomes technically easier to achieve a high level. That said, to dedicate so much playtime to JetPunk every day is a truly incredible feat.

This year sees the return of the top quizmakers of the year. Most interestingly, the top quizmaker this year was not even from English quizzes! In fact the top 5 comprise of 4 different languages, which is very impressive given the usual domination of English across the site.

Once again, we also bring you the most liked blogs on JetPunk that were released this year. There is great variety here, and perhaps your next blog to read could be found here!

There were far more than these 3 though, they were just the top ones by user over 25 likes. Overall, over 500 blogs were submitted this year, with almost 6,000 comments combined across all of them and over 2500 likes. Unfortunately, most of which is down on last year.

It should be noted that the top 7 blogs were comprised entirely of Quizmaster's blogs and my blogs, mostly announcements about new things.

Looking back over the traffic of 2023, we can see clear changes in the fluctuations over the year of quizzes created and number of users that joined JetPunk.

Analysing this, we see that the number of users that joined JetPunk doesn't correlate to the number of quizzes released. In fact, the number of quizzes is pretty constant all year, but as always the infllux of users trends towards school and office time (i.e. anything outside school summer holidays).

Comparing to 2022 below, this is a massive difference! 2022 eclipsed 10,000 in a single week, whereas in 2023 we never got above 6,500. However, unlike 2022, we didn't start off poorly in 2023. We started strong and remained strong all throughout the year!

Several of the changes this year (including the JetPunk Shop) have been known about for a few years since it took that long to develop them fully. Others however, like Streaks and Confetti, weren't thought about before the year started!

As always, in last year's blog some users predicted some things for this year. Let's see how they turned out.

There were more predictions, but this was a selection of them. Thanks everybody for making them! Let's see what you come up with for next year :)

What stood out in 2023 to you on JetPunk? What future developments would you like to see in 2024 and beyond? What do you plan to do to improve JetPunk yourself?