I don't do milestone posts too often, unless they are about the fantastic Hardy-Ramanujan number, which I celebrated when we hit 1729 posts and deserves further celebration when we hit 1729 threads, 1729 registered users, 1729 files in the lore, you get the idea.
It's February 1 in this corner of the world, though, and that means six months of Mizahar. Our first six months. We launched on August 1, 2009 and it's been a great ride. Most play-by-posts don't even last this long; they die within the first few months as the initial drive runs out and people move on to the next great idea. My worry when we started Mizahar wasn't that we would fold, honestly. I knew we wouldn't, because what causes a site to collapse is the admins/owners abandoning the project. I like to think I'm someone who gets things done, and so are the other Founders. My worry was that we might have a lot of trouble attracting people to the site, partly because of the difficulty in advertising a PbP and partly because of Mizahar's nature. The decision to keep Elves out the door did not come without a discussion on appeal and demographics. In truth, we didn't really know much about our 'market' as we didn't play on a lot of sites before Mizahar.
It turned out I'd underestimated the RPers on the web. I think the setting is now one of our main selling points, so to speak. The other side of the problem was a little more frustrating. Advertising a new PbP is kind of hard. Advertising without taking affiliates is even harder. You always start out at the bottom of all lists, surrounded by tons of dead sites. I think a lot of sites die while in the process of climbing through the piles of deader sites. I won't even talk about all the rejections I got from specialized directories, and the huge waiting times elsewhere. That's why I did Google ads for a little while, and they helped us a bit, bringing a few really cool people to the site.
But yeah, startup's not easy. We tried a banner exchange, only to discover...
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