This is a little weird for me. I am writing this Behind The Scenes post well in advance of when you’ll actually be reading it, because I’ll actually be out of the country for a while. I’ll be in Germany throughout late November and early December, with no laptop or other tech around to edit posts on. If I did my job right then all the reviews and articles should have gone up as normal, though it’s not like I can fix it if they didn’t. Fingers crossed!
October and November have been incredibly eventful. Since last summer, Reasons to Anime has struggled with a steep reduction in traffic. The daily amount of visitors was cut down to a quarter of what it used to be, which was a huge blow to morale. A lot of fellow anibloggers jumped in to offer advice, but implementing it all across a backlog of over 300 posts has proven to be incredibly time-consuming. It has been tedious work that I am still busy with to this day, but some months down the line it has started to show results.
Traffic is back up, with some days in November seeing a similar amount of visitors as before the apocalypse. A lot of this has been centered on a number of new articles that did exceptionally well, but things are starting to look up again in general. New subscribers are coming in (welcome!) and the rest of the site is steadily recovering.
In a way, it feels silly to fret so much over how well this silly website is doing. Reasons to Anime has always been a hobby first and foremost, but seeing other people enjoy my work has been immensely satisfying. It’s an extra layer of fun on top of my passion for critiquing art. So thanks again to everybody that helped me figure out how to revitalize the website.
December is going to be interesting. We’re closing out the year on 3 very different reviews, all of them with very surprising conclusions. These come with some juicy articles to back them up, including a look at a manga series not produced in Japan and my thoughts on a social justice controversy that unfolded quite recently.
I am taking the last week of December off, though hardly for relaxation. I am planning a BIG new year’s special this year, which requires editing a video together as well as a lot of writing and research. I am also planning to go all out in January with several big reviews back-to-back, so that’ll require some setup.
