Guest Article: Blog Watch: Trinest.com

This article was written by Allie Coyne for ITJourno.com as part of their blog watch feature which takes a look at some of the lesser known Australian tech sites and media outlets. It was originally published on their website on Wednesday 13th July 2011 at 8:00am.

Trent Petronaitis is going it alone. After an unsuccessful foray into fansites with several partners, Petronaitis decided in 2007 to venture off alone, combining his Nintendo and CiNG- focused sites to launch a solo-run general gaming blog.

Starting life as two separate entities; AnotherCodeLabs, a Nintendo fan site; and AussieDS, focused on the Japanese games developer CiNG, Trinest came to life following a drop in both sites’ popularity, and a push by Petronaitis to give his web offering a clear direction.

“I was always changing things, basically doing the wrong thing,” he said. “So I decided I would do something I wanted to do instead of trying to run fansites.”

“It has branched out into a more personal site, where I’m writing about what I want to, rather than what people think I should write about,” he added. “I believe people will be looking for a more personal opinion rather than a commercial opinion.”

Focusing on video games analysis, Petronaitis is keen to stay away from news and reviews, preferring to dissect and analyse how games work, how they appeal to the market, and how they fit within a franchise.

“I used to do game reviews but lately I’m just doing editorial pieces,” he said. “I’d rather write one good review every so often on another site, than have lots of average reviews on my site.”

Despite this unwillingness to post written reviews, Petronaitis has recently launched headfirst into a video review endeavour, posting his first YouTube video and play-through review of Minecraft.

“They’re sort of reviews, but at the same time not really reviews,” he said. “At the moment I’m just putting up raw footage, about half an hour in length, but eventually I’ll edit them down.”

“I record the game screen; most are PC games, so I record them with screen capture software,” he added. “Once I start doing the videos properly and taking my time, and writing up what I’m going to say, they’ll be much more successful than they already are, but I’ve already got a good amount of views from it.”

Although pleased with the YouTube viewer reaction to his first video, traffic isn’t a concern for the blogger.

“The website gets relatively good hits occasionally, and sometimes doesn’t,” he said. “It depends on the articles. I don’t really care about the hits anymore, I do it because I want to, not to please people.”

Having only recently gained control and ownership of the site’s domain name and hosting, Petronaitis’ care-free attitude extends to the site’s profitability. He says he has no future plans to make money from his efforts, and is more concerned with creating a first-person perspective website, as well as growing both his YouTube and editorial offering; branching out into unboxing and review video segments, as well as upping the regularity and ‘professionalism’ of his content.

“It’s not going to be successful in the traditional sense, it’s not going to have large hits, but I believe with what I do it will be successful for how the amount of time I put into it,” he said. “It will always be successful in that regard.”