Friday, December 14, 2007

Challenges + Solutions
When I left my job to usher in Version Vibrant, I knew that I had a laundry list of difficult challenges to face:

* The US anime market is imploding, for dozens of reasons. This affects us because when a company has to reduce expense, often the very first cost that's reduced is advertising. I can't, in good conscience, steer us down a river that that looks increasingly like it's leading to a waterfall

* Our own numbers have been flat for many months now. The Otakulypse did a great deal of damage to us in this regard, but that's only part of the reason.

* We face unparalleled competition both in the number of sites out there that are similar to us and the high quality of them. There was a time when we were cutting edge on technology and design, but that was years ago

That said I'm confident about our future, especially now that I'm "back" like the days when I was in middle school/high school/college:

(1) Anime issue: That's OK, we'll still cover anime, but we're going to emphasize manga and gaming to a far greater degree. Manga is growing by double digits, and there's never been a better time to be a gamer. Better: 90+% of our audience love manga and video games as well as anime.

(2) Flat numbers: We haven't innovated in a long time. Our new version will introduce many fun social features and bold new ideas never done before anywhere else (we have a long, long, long history of innovation, so it's nothing new).

We're also going to cap submissions per day so that people get more attention per submission. I'd rather have 50 great works of fan art a day that each get a ton of comments than 500 in-progress works of fan art a day where 90% of them are ignored

(3) I'm not worried about competition. I joke sometimes that we want to kill this website or that website, but we rare ever compete against anyone. We just create new stuff and eventually come out ahead. Art Of Otaku is a good example, something unique and solid, well-executed
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