Sunday, July 30, 2006

I Love Artists...An Important Post
I feel a strong kinship with artists. It might be because my mother/aunt/brother are artists. Or it might be because I've made friends with a lot of artists on the network.

Or it might be because I think artists and entrepreneurs have a lot in common. They both have to create something from nothing, have to leverage the resources they have available...

Anyway, my point: We are going to be focusing HARD on artists in the coming months. We want to do more for artists than anyone else out there. That's our vision. And by focusing on artists, we're going to create a substantially better destination for visitors.

However, to do this, sacrifices must be made. For example, we have two sites: Articles and Reviews that we're going to have to retire.

You might be thinking: "I understand about reviews, that site's been dead forever, but...

ARTICLES?!?!?! HOW DARE YOU!"

First, let's take a step back, so you can understand my reasoning.

In terms of traffic, our articles site is less than 1% of our traffic (way less). Also, articles are difficult to maintain; unlike art where you just hit the 'approve' button, you actually have to read and edit articles. Finally, if we're going to focus on art, having article links is kind of distracting...

Even more importantly, we have two different mechanisms in place for letting people share their essays/thoughts: OtakuBoards and myOtaku. I want to encourage more people to use these avenues.

And, just so we don't alienate our wonderful article writers, I intend to build a kind of 'Articles' feature in myOtaku. And if you write a really good/timely one about anime, you're more than welcome to send it to our news team. If it gets linked, that'll lead to 10x more exposure for your article than it would get on the articles site.

I hope you understand. This was a difficult decision, especially considering I have a ton of articles published there myself and am ranked the #1 'most popular' as well. The site will remain online, will just not be linked in the left-nav anymore.
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