Exactly 25 years ago, on 10th of June, 1999, our little site was opened to the world for the very first time. Back then, we didn't have any idea whether our site, focused solely on MP3 technology, would attract readers.
Turns out, it did. Sure, during the following years, we did shift our focus many, many times as technologies shifted. We covered the first Napster era and its lawsuits, the following P2P boom, upcoming video technologies, the golden era of DVDs, the rise and fall of various gaming consoles and much, much more.
Looking back, we had luck. Lots and lots of luck. But we had some serious misfortunes, too.
Our site's peak was sometime around 2012 - 2013, when we commanded tens of millions of monthly visitors to our site. But back then, technologies changes, user behaviour changed and, also, we did some very bad decisions.
From those years on, our site started to diminish, rapidly. Most important reason was the fact that Google started to .. not like us. Before that, Google loved our content. But after one particular update, that pushed many big discussion sites into oblivion, our site took a serious hit, too. Then, most of the online discussion started to shift to Facebook and Reddit, leaving dedicated niche sites into dust.
But our news and guide content started to wane too. Partially it was the change of times: things with PCs got easier to do and there was less demand for guides and instructions we provided. And also, the rise of mobile took the world like an avalanche, changing the landscape of tech for good.
After the golden years, we struggled to find a new course - for almost a decade. At some point, we simply ran out of resources and had to focus on something. Currently, we provide our tech news mostly in our native language, in Finnish, but try to publish some reviews and guides every now and then in English, too.
But yes, the English AfterDawn is currently mostly in its hibernation state, waiting for something to happen. We do have plans, but as our resources are nowadays very, very limited, taking those steps takes time.
We probably wont start pushing out 20+ news articles a day like we did back in the day, but we hope to carve a niche that we can cover - once again, just like we've done for 25 years.
But the fact that our little site still exists, after all these years, is a quite feat on its own. And I'd like to thank all of our readers, former staff members, moderators and partners for all these years.
Thank you. And we will be back.
-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn
Looking back, we had luck. Lots and lots of luck. But we had some serious misfortunes, too.
Our site's peak was sometime around 2012 - 2013, when we commanded tens of millions of monthly visitors to our site. But back then, technologies changes, user behaviour changed and, also, we did some very bad decisions.
From those years on, our site started to diminish, rapidly. Most important reason was the fact that Google started to .. not like us. Before that, Google loved our content. But after one particular update, that pushed many big discussion sites into oblivion, our site took a serious hit, too. Then, most of the online discussion started to shift to Facebook and Reddit, leaving dedicated niche sites into dust.
But our news and guide content started to wane too. Partially it was the change of times: things with PCs got easier to do and there was less demand for guides and instructions we provided. And also, the rise of mobile took the world like an avalanche, changing the landscape of tech for good.
After the golden years, we struggled to find a new course - for almost a decade. At some point, we simply ran out of resources and had to focus on something. Currently, we provide our tech news mostly in our native language, in Finnish, but try to publish some reviews and guides every now and then in English, too.
But yes, the English AfterDawn is currently mostly in its hibernation state, waiting for something to happen. We do have plans, but as our resources are nowadays very, very limited, taking those steps takes time.
We probably wont start pushing out 20+ news articles a day like we did back in the day, but we hope to carve a niche that we can cover - once again, just like we've done for 25 years.
But the fact that our little site still exists, after all these years, is a quite feat on its own. And I'd like to thank all of our readers, former staff members, moderators and partners for all these years.
Thank you. And we will be back.
-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn
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AfterDawn
