One Year of Enby Meaning® Media: What We Learned, What You Read, and What's Next
A year ago, this site was simply a handful of pages and no readers. No archive to link back to, no sense of what would land and what wouldn't, just a bet that there was room for a media brand that talked about non-binary life, inclusive of the beautifully diverse gender spectrum that is often omitted, or just a category for other media brands. Gender diversity often gets treated as a single, tidy talking point, not a whole life that encompasses a spectrum of experience and emotions from highs and lows to euphoria to discrimination. We didn't know if anyone would show up. But you did.
So this isn't a listicle, a question we will answer, or a glossary entry — it's just us, talking to you directly, about what actually happened in our first year of 2025.
Why We Started Enby Meaning® Media in the First Place
The mission hasn't changed since day one: amplify gender diverse voices who don't usually get the microphone, and build a media brand that treats enbyqueer readers as the primary audience, not an afterthought bolted onto a "general" one. That meant writing definitions without condescension, covering culture and politics without flattening either into a press release, and never assuming our readers needed something explained twice.
Now, that doesn’t mean developing, creating, and publishing content for the enby community was easy, or that we always got it right. Just like each of you, we are learning and growing every day, which is challenging but the kind that excites us rather than deters us. Learning is empowering, and feeling empowered led to this.
Part of what pushed this into existence was how much existing coverage of non-binary identity felt written for someone else — for a curious cis reader who needed everything spelt out from the very beginning, or for a journalist looking for a single, digestible quote. Or, of course, the never-ending hardship stories that are written or filmed to synonimise our community with trauma. There wasn't much written, as if the reader already knew who they were and just wanted better language, better community, or better information to act on. We wanted to build the site we couldn't find. That's a bigger swing than it sounds from the outside, because it meant guessing, constantly, at what "already knew who they were" actually needed, without a template to copy.
A year ago, we didn't fully know which of those goals would actually reach people and which would sound good in a mission statement. Turns out, some of both happened, and the gap between them taught us more than either success or failure alone would have.
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What You Actually Read (Not Always What We Expected)
Here's the honest version. Our single biggest traffic driver of the year, by a wide margin, wasn't a coming-out guide or an identity deep dive. It was a slang explainer — "What Does 'Gooning' Mean?" — and it brought in more readers than our next several most-viewed posts combined. Most of those readers landed, got their answer, and left without exploring anything else on the site. That's not a failure exactly. It's just data telling us something specific: a huge number of people come to the internet with a very narrow, very specific question, and if you're the page that answers it clearly, you earn a moment of their attention, even if you never see them again.
Right behind it, though, was something closer to the heart of what we're actually trying to build: "Enby Meaning: A Guide to Understanding Non-Binary Identity” our first and foundational post the one explaining who we are, why we are doing this, and introducing enbies and allies to our understanding of non-binary identity and how we hope to support the community we are here to support, our community, the trans, non-binary, gender diverse community.
Next comes our own foundational definition post, “What Does 'Enby' Mean?" and why the word matters at all. That one didn't just get read; it got stayed with, at meaningfully higher rates than the slang piece or our introductory post for the site. So did "The Power of Pronouns," our travel guide to Bangkok, and "10 Books Every Non-Binary Person (and Allies) Should Read." Those are the posts that feel like they did the actual job — not the ones with the biggest numbers on the board, but the ones that did what we set out to do when we started this.
And then there's a category almost nobody sees in the traffic totals but that mattered enormously to us once we looked closer: the posts where readers didn't just visit; they stayed. Our piece on legally changing a gender marker held people for over twenty minutes on average. This shows us that legally informed pieces on navigating legislation in a world that loves to keep rewriting us in and out of existence are among the most important resources our readers are looking for.
Our guide to moving overseas as a queer or non-binary person held people through nearly the whole thing.
A short essay on microaggressions kept readers for close to ten minutes on a page that could've been skimmed in two.
Our dating and relationships piece did the same. Raw traffic and real engagement turned out to be two completely different scoreboards, and the quiet posts almost always won the second one.
If you're wondering about actual numbers, we'll give you a real one instead of a vague gesture toward "growth": a little over 13,000 page views since we opened the doors in early 2025 and by year-end heading into 2026. That's not a headline-grabbing figure, and we're not pretending it is. But it's thirteen thousand moments when someone typed a question into a search bar or clicked a link a friend sent them and landed somewhere built specifically to take them seriously. We'd rather have that than a much bigger number of people who never really arrived.
Spoiler Alert (ahead of our 2026 wrap, which will clock in at the start of 2027), we are 8 months into 2026, and we have already tripled our page views from 2025. You came, you saw, and you stayed. Thank you, enbies.
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The Posts That Were Hard to Write
Not everything this year was a definition post or a travel guide. Some of it was heavier, and we sat with some of it for a long time before publishing.
Writing about the Pulse nightclub shooting anniversary, or Transgender Day of Remembrance, or the rising political attacks on trans existence in the United States, never got easier just because we'd covered similar ground before. Each of those pieces meant naming real harm and real loss without either flattening it into a headline or writing something so heavy that a reader in crisis couldn't get through it. We may not always have got that balance right. We know we tried, every single time, to write those pieces as if someone grieving were actually the one reading them, because they were.
The pieces on colonialism, the gender binary, and Black non-binary history specifically mattered to us differently. It's easy for a media brand like ours to default to a mostly Western, mostly white framing of non-binary identity simply because that's the framing most available online. Actively working against that default — sourcing history from outside the usual references, naming the specific role colonialism played in erasing gender diversity that already existed — took more research time than almost anything else we published this year. It was worth every hour.
That doesn’t mean we always get it right, or that we dismantle the system with every post. But we are actively working to ensure that this site, as it grows, is not centred solely on Western, white, wealthy perspectives of gender diversity and queerness. We believe intersectionality is key to every conversation (put some respect on bell hooks’ name). Whether we get it right or wrong, we will hold that view and keep learning and growing to do the best we can for our readers and the broader community, which includes people with a wide range of gender identities.
And then there were the pieces that were hard for a completely different reason: they were personal, or personal-adjacent, in a way that definition posts never are. Writing honestly about burnout, about chosen family, about what it actually costs to come out more than once, meant being willing to sound less like a polished media brand and more like a person who's lived through the thing they're writing about. That's a harder post to sit down and write than it looks. It takes vulnerability to create those posts and then publish them, inviting both public and private comments and feedback on real lived experience.
We're still learning how to navigate these posts in a way that's safe for us and for the reader on the other end. So please keep the comments coming (no matter how difficult some may be to read), as it helps us better understand where the line sits.
The Messages That Changed How We Write
Around month four, we started reading the messages people sent us instead of just logging that they'd arrived. That changed things.
We heard from someone who used our pronoun guide as a script for a conversation with a parent who'd never used their name before that day.
We heard from someone questioning their gender for the first time in their fifties, after decades of assuming that window had closed.
We heard from a reader entirely outside the Anglosphere (reading our posts in their third language), who told us that most of what exists online about non-binary identity assumes an audience that doesn't include them. Ours was one of the first pieces of writing they'd found that did include them.
None of those messages showed up in an analytics dashboard the way a pageview does. But they're the actual reason the site exists, and they quietly reshaped what we chose to write next — more pieces meant to be used in a real moment, not just read and closed.
As a small media company in the early stages of growth, we appreciate your comments, emails, and general feedback, which help keep us motivated. To be transparent, since our first year, we have not been profitable, and we currently receive only a few dollars in revenue (from ads - so please keep those ad blockers turned off on our site). When the costs of maintaining a business and a platform, and funding the hours of labour completed both internally and externally to make this possible, become too much and doubt settles in about whether to keep trying, even when the negative figures keep rising, your feedback has kept us motivated.
We aren’t here solely to be a business for business's sake; of course, we want to cover our running costs, hire permanent staff on liveable wages, and be a place that can stand on its own two feet financially without risk. However, our primary reason and one we do not plan to forget, is that we are here because we want to make a genuine contribution to our community as a place to find support, resources, others like you, and to find media that inspires you.
So thank you for all your words, whether from a place of kindness or criticism, as they show us how to be the best we can be for you.
What We Got Wrong (and Are Fixing)
We published inconsistently for stretches of the first year—some weeks two posts, some weeks none —which isn't fair to anyone trying to build a reading habit around us. We also leaned harder into definition and glossary content early on than the deeper, more personal writing that actually reflects why this site exists, mostly because the definition posts were faster to research and easier to plan.
That's changing. We've since built out a real editorial structure behind the scenes — a mix of search-driven explainers, deeper community and culture writing, monetisation-minded guides, and personal essays that don't owe anyone an SEO justification. You'll feel that shift in what shows up here, not just hear us describe it.
Our own internal organisation was messier than it should have been too, if we're being fully honest — categories and tags that didn't always match how a reader would actually search, posts that overlapped in confusing ways, and no consistent system connecting one piece of writing to the next. We spent real time this year cleaning that up and plan to keep doing so, so the archive works less like a pile and more like a library.
We also used to treat every post as a one-off. We're getting better at building things that connect — recurring series, callbacks to older pieces, a sense that this is an ongoing project rather than a pile of disconnected articles that happen to share a domain.
And early on, monetisation was almost an afterthought, bolted onto whatever we'd already written rather than planned into it. That's part of the change too: we're being more intentional about which posts carry affiliate or ad potential from the outset, without ever letting that decide what gets covered in the first place.
The mission still leads. The monetisation follows it, not the other way around.
What's Coming in Year Two
More of the writing that made the quiet-but-engaged list above: personal essays, deeper community pieces, and honest coverage of the parts of non-binary life that don't fit neatly into a "10 things to know" format.
A recurring short-form series for the questions that are hardest to even type into a search bar — the ones that don't have a tidy resolution, just company while you sit with them.
More global and cultural coverage that doesn't treat "queer" as a default synonym for "American."
A recurring culture and music series looking at queer and non-binary artists through a real critical lens, not just a celebratory one.
And yes, still the definition posts — they clearly bring people through the door; we'll keep working harder to make sure they leave with a reason to stay.
We're also planning more coverage of the practical, unglamorous stuff that doesn't get written about enough: parenting, grief, ageing, faith, and the systems — housing, healthcare, law — that quietly make life harder than it needs to be. This is the content we want to actually show up in your inboxes when you tell us what you wish existed.
None of that happens without you actually reading it, though, so if there's a topic, a question, or a gap you've noticed that we haven't covered, we genuinely want to hear it. This isn't a one-way broadcast. It never was supposed to be.
Thank You for the First Year
We started this with no idea if it would find an audience. A year later, the honest answer is: it found exactly the audience it was trying to reach, even in the ways we didn't plan for.
That's not nothing. That's the whole point.
If you've been here since the beginning, thank you for staying. If you found us three weeks ago through a slang definition and you're still reading, welcome — that's exactly how this is supposed to work too. If you sent us a message this year, even one we never got to reply to properly, thank you for trusting us with it.
Subscribe if you want year two in your inbox, and tell us what you want more of. We're building this with you, not just for you.
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