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Jan 01 – Site Update - Posted By Adam
Happy 2015 and a Recap of 2014
On behalf of the staff I'd like to wish you all a happy and healthy and fulfilling 2015.
While this wasn't a great year for theO proper, I am proud of the work our team has done with theO's satellites. The Facebook page almost has 3,000 followers (up from 1,000) and some posts get over 50 comments. The newsletter is going strong, with 5,000 people opening every issue. We have a Twitter presence. We've cleared out the mod reporting backlog completely. So there was some movement forward.
Another positive for 2014 was that we've done a better job of anyone else of promoting our artists. Someone who submits a great work:
(1) Will get that work featured on our homepage
(2) Will get that work featured in our newsletter
(3) Will get that work featured on social media
Those are three extra promotional areas that didn't exist the year before.
I'm thinking about a few directions to take theO proper this year. One direction would be to make our main page mirror our Facebook page more, with a lot of social fun.
An obstacle is that the anime industry just isn't what it used to be. Advertising dollars have dried up since people don't buy nearly as many DVDs as they used to (why bother when everything is free on Netflix or Hulu?), companies have scaled down or gone out of business, there hasn't been any major hits in a long time (Attack on Titan is certainly a hit but it's not nearly the scale of Naruto or Bleach). Manga is a fraction of what it used to be. I can't think of much positive on that front.
Some enthusiast sites have relied on Kickstarter or Patreon to help provide the financial support to reinvigorate things. That's a tougher road for us because our audience is much younger and anime fans are typically frugal spenders (myself included!) and even if our site reinvigorated, the anime industry is still in the mucks.
So that's where we're at.
Anyway, a question for you all as we ring in the new year: What anime, manga or games do you look forward to experiencing in 2015?
