2008 Retrospect, Business

posted by Jeff | Thursday, January 1, 2009, 9:22 PM | comments: 0

I feel like I'm obligated to myself to look back at the year and make some kind of overall assessment. In keeping with previous years, I'll do one for my biz and one personal entry.

I think this year I'll keep the career stuff in the personal entry, because it has a lot more to do with my personal life than the business. POP World Media did about the same it did last year, despite some otherwise ugly statistics. Ad revenue was down, but not as much as traffic was, so on a per page and per user basis, things were actually better. That's how I'm choosing to view it, anyway.

Two years ago I would've said how cool it was that there were so few coaster and amusement park sites out there. With less competition, you can get more of the pie. But I had the realization this year that the competition isn't within the niche, it's Facebook and Tumblr and RSS feeds and a number of other things. It had not occurred to me that this was the case until I realized my own Web surfing habits. I spend a lot of time on all kinds of sites, and not nearly as much on my own as I used to. People have a finite amount of time, and the niche isn't nearly as interesting as it used to be.

The solution to replacing that, in my view, is to expand into other niches. I've got two in mind. I've got a goofy experiment I'd like to try for a subscription based service too. I'm not sure, however, how to make the time for them.

Getting laid-off from ICOM in July was difficult in a lot of ways (I'll write about that in the personal brief), but one thing good that came out of it was a commitment to finally, after far too many years of talking about it, rebuild CoasterBuzz. With a lot of possible gigs out there, I took it slow, I relaxed, and I tried to spend four or five hours a day working on it. Most of the time. OK, grand total, it probably was only 80 to 100 actual hours of work, but on September 1, I relaunched that sucker. There was much rejoicing. Maybe not for everyone else, but certainly for me. My inability to get through that project for the better part of four or five years was not good for my self-esteem.

There weren't a ton of super clever things that I did for the site, though there were some fun science projects here and there. It got me engaged again in writing code. It assured me that I could finish a project. Granted, I had no day job to go to, but I really got into it. The metrics since then show some promise overall. People are hanging out longer, and those who find the site are spending more time there.

In February, Walt and I conceived of a new project, and it hasn't come to fruition yet. I blame myself, because I'm the code guy. In October I came up with what I felt was "the" feature to help it stand out, and since then it hasn't moved because I haven't made the progress on it. It's still the next thing in the queue.

Probably the most important thing I did with the business this year, despite not being sexy, is get it to be debt free. It's the first time it happened since, well, I think since it became an LLC in 1999. It had peaked at $30k in credit card debt in early 2005 when I bought all of that video gear.

I actually ended the year with some debt, as I bought a little more gear to shoot some video in the fall. But it was totally worth it. While not the most incredible or glamorous stuff, I was pretty excited to finally post very high quality HD. My HVX200 is now almost three years old, but now that P2 cards are (relatively) affordable, I can finally shoot the way I always wanted. I bought a 32 gig card in the fall, which allows me to do 80 minutes of 720p/24. Consumer gear can't touch the images that thing can make!

So overall, I'm fairly satisfied with how things went, though I obviously need to expand the work to new sites to keep up the revenue. I'm disappointed that Cedar Point isn't building anything new this year, because that would've made a difference. My goal for the forthcoming year is to at least get the project with Walt live, though I'm still trying to feel out how to balance the day job with my own projects on nights and weekends. The fact that I won't likely be doing a lot of coding on a day to day basis will probably help.


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