Ten years ago today, this weird little blog of mine launched. While it is far from being my first, it is the longest continuously operating one. That said, there is no denying it has the same largest problem all of my other blogs had over their short lifespans: a lack of time and lack of content to blog about.
That’s why I never actually intended for this to become yet another short-lived blog. I originally envisioned this being some sort of content aggregator, taking content I was already producing elsewhere and bringing it to a centralized location. In 2011, that was a very messy idea. Some of it worked… poorly. For a time, a weekly summary of my tweets were collected. These went along with weekly posts of what I was up to the previous week.
As you’ve probably noticed, neither of those are still around. The weekly tweet recaps failed more often than they ran, and when they did actually work, they were text-only with no media pulled in. So, after less than a year, the idea was killed off in February of 2012. The weekly series lasted a little bit longer, but ultimately they were never regularly published for particularly long; they just required too much of a time investment to publish such a small amount of content.
So, I gave up on the idea of this being a kind of portal to my other social media accounts and trying to be a community itself (yes, at one point there was a forum on here.) However, I’ll admit that is a contradictory statement when you consider my Instagram posts now make up the majority of content on here – by far.
While I’ve never had the time I would have liked to have to really invest in this crazy blog, I’ll be honest that I’ve never really had many ideas for content either. Those are two problems I’ve had for much longer elsewhere, specifically YouTube. I never intended to arguably be an unboxings channel when I started that in 2007, but there is no denying unboxings make up the majority of my channel.
So what does the future hold for this often neglected blog of mine? Looking at the posts that have done the best over the last ten years would seem to indicate I should review anime more often, as I certainty never would have expected a review I did of Your Lie in April back in December of 2015 to do as well as it has, especially when you combine its performance on both desktop and mobile devices. In fact, the first post to go “big” on here was my review of Time of Eve in February of 2013. I suspect being quoted on the Kickstarter campaign for Time of Eve: The Movie helped there – and I definitely never would have been expected to be quoted in a sizzle reel for anything, let alone anime. I also never would have expected to work on the subtitles for Pied Piper’s second anime release, Skip Beat!
But it wasn’t anime that almost broke the site one day. That would have been July 11, 2015, the day I published a review of the Pebble Time. It remains my first – and only – review to go immediately viral. With 224 views in a matter of hours, it is still the best day the blog ever had. No other day has even remotely come close. While my review of Your Lie in April has since overtaken the Pebble Time for most views of all time, it is still the second most viewed post I’ve ever made.
While it took several years later to get there, 2015 overall has been the best performing year the blog ever had. While nothing on here ever took of quite like a video I once took of a flash dance mob (which took off many years after publishing), the statistics from the blog continue to surprise me. This has always been more of a place for me to experiment than a regularly maintained blog, but I’m happy to see a lot of content on here aged better than I would have ever expected. While most of the ideas I’ve tried out on here over the course of the last ten years have failed – some in spectacular fashion – I am surprised at how many of actually done well. While my review of Pebble Time was the best day the blog ever had, that traffic lasted exactly a day. Your Lie in April has done steadily well over the last three years, charting almost every day this past year.
So, while this never became what I originally set out to do, it has been a playground that has served me well for ten years, and I’m very happy to see that while it is far from a significant number, some 15,000 of you have – hopefully – also gotten some value out of this blog of mine as well.
Here’s to the next ten years of infrequent postings… and frequent enough experiments.
