All Good Things - the End of AnimWatch
As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and so it is with AnimWatch.
For the past four and a half years, I have tried to provide a place that took independent animation seriously, but found myself speaking to a mostly empty room. In the past year, I partnered with AWN.com and pretty much exhausted myself trying to build this site and its readership. I produced giveaway contests that were poorly attended. I created the AnimWatch Podcast which had very few listeners. And I created my answer to the 10 Second Club, The AnimClips Challenge, which suffered from very poor attendance, and extremely low participation. It was ultimately destroyed by another challenge site. “Steamrolled”, to use Keith Lango’s term.
I have been discouraged many times, and come near to killing the site several times in the past four and a half years. I’ve kept AnimWatch going despite its personal cost to me in terms of time, energy and money, because I felt a site like this was important even though it cost me far more than it gave back. Yet, the whole site continues to suffer from chronic low readership. After all my work to change that, I guess I can look myself squarely in the mirror and admit I tried everything and nothing worked. If there were an easier way to run a site like AnimWatch, someone else would be doing it. The fact that no one else is doing it should tell me something.
So, this is the ragged end of low readership. I built it, and few came. Considering its lack of readers, AnimWatch is not worth the work it takes to run. OK. I get it, already. Uncle.
But the biggest reason I’m making this decision is that I’ve come to the conclusion that where films are concerned, there are only two kinds of people: those who make films, and those who only talk about it. And after four and a half years of talking and writing about other people’s films, I need to take that energy and put it into telling my own stories. So, that’s what I’m going to do.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be removing many segments of the site, only leaving up the feature articles and spotlights, because I consider those valuable resources. Not sure how long I’ll leave them up, but probably until mid-2008 anyway. But virtually everything else will be coming down, including the forum, in the interest of removing distractions from my life.
I’m sure many of you will find this disappointing. I’m sorry to disappoint you, and am genuinely grateful to so many of you who have cared, who have been loyal AnimWatch visitors from the start. It’s a shame there weren’t more of us. But, oh well. I know there’s nothing quite like AnimWatch out there, but there are still plenty of other forums, and places to talk about your films.
I’ll see you Out There.