Petteri Pyyny
10 Jun 2004 0:45
Five years and a couple of months ago it was a yet another very boring working day in a Finnish new media company (one of those born in 1990s and already folded since that) -- and it was the coldest winter ever in Finnish capital, temperatures dropping to -40C. One web developer -- me -- with a serious addiction to MP3s felt very, very bored of creating yet another feedback form functionality for some furniture company's web site and felt that he needed "something". At that time there was a wave of great new sites appearing on daily basis, focusing on digital audio -- most notable ones for me were sites called MP3.com and Dimension Music. One provided indie artists a way to promote their music for free and the other was a niche site covering news that related to the MP3 revolution that had begun three years earlier.
Then I had a thought -- not a very original thought nor a very noble thought, but a thought anyway -- why not try to emulate those ideas, add couple of additional features to the equation, make it bilingual and see what happens. Obviously I couldn't do it alone -- not financially and not technically, so I needed help and started calling my friends. After a couple of phone calls, the team of eight guys was ready and we began discussing about our expectations for the site. The first steps in the history of the site were taken..
Name?
One of the major issues launching the site nowadays is to figure out a name for it -- virtually all dot-com domains have been taken and it doesn't make much sense to register anything other than dot-com domains anyway. So, we needed a name that sounded "cool" and had a domain free for it. Not an easy task, I can tell you.
The idea was to be a democratic community right from the get-go and I asked all the guys involved to find out ten or more domain names that they would consider to be "nice" and that would be free as .com domains. A bit later, we had an IRC meeting with all the guys -- you could call this as the first official AfterDawn.com meeting, although totally virtual -- to decide the name for the site. I sent combined list of names that everybody had came up with to all the participants and asked each of them to choose five names that sounded good. After everybody chose their five favorite ones, I combined another list based on those selections and submitted it back to everybody to vote for names. After couple of voting rounds, AfterDawn.com was chosen. It didn't mean anything particular, but sounded very good.
Launch
After spending couple of months coding and tweaking graphics, the first version of the site was ready to be rolled out. It was exactly five years ago today that the first public version of the site was released -- the first news article was rather short, but very important to us :-)
If you want to see how the first version of the site looked, take a look at here.
Evolution
At first, the site contained various stuff that our users nowadays would feel unsuitable for the current AfterDawn.com. Our site has been bilingual -- in Finnish and in English -- right from the beginning and the first version of the site contained stuff like the Finnish daily TV listings :-) We also had a couple of DVD reviews and several album reviews back then. No DVD rippers or guides, nothing like that. Back then, it was all about MP3s and digital audio, no one had even heard of DVD backups back then.
Slowly we started focusing more on news and software and also improved the layout slightly -- the "v1.1" layout can be seen here (sorry, only Finnish screen shot is available). The site used frames and all the non-standard neat stuff back then ;-)
I can't pinpoint exactly when or how the focus of the site started changing towards digital video, but it began in 1999 when the first DVD rippers were added to the site -- back then they were just minor additions to the otherwise-audio-dominated software listings and we didn't pay that much attention to them.
Our traffic kept growing, site evolved slowly as the technologies and our understanding of the site improved. Eventually, in September 2000 -- a little bit over a year after the original launch, we finally rolled out a new version of the layout, "v2.0". It was less graphical, it didn't have frames anymore and it focused more on the areas that we felt that the site belonged to.
The major traffic growth begun sometime in early 2001. We also rolled out our discussion forums in March, 2001 (actually, the very first version of the site had a cascading forum system, but it never got any attention from our users, so the original forums were dropped completely when the v2.0 of the site was launched).
The years 2001 and 2002 were rather difficult times financially and in various other ways -- the dot-com boom had died, nobody spent any money on online advertising anymore, sites were dying all over the Net and the whole MP3 phenomenon, ultimately sparked by Napster in late 1999, was fading. But our traffic kept growing. At that time, the site was funded by our personal credit cards / salaries and, in 2002, by users who donated to our site.
In late 2002, something changed -- can't really say what it was, but suddenly our traffic growth was something unbelievable and finally advertisers were crawling back to the Net as well. During the winter 2002-2003 it seemed that everything went just right and in May, 2003 we felt that the only reasonable way to handle the current situation was to set up a "real" company to run the site. AfterDawn Ltd was born. Still owned by the original team -- although one of us wanted "out" and thus we now have seven guys who own the AfterDawn.
The new layout, "v3.0", had been in plans since year 2002 and was finally launched in December, 2003. Several site areas have been dropped since the launch back in 1999 -- we don't have WinAMP skins anymore, our indie artists are not in AfterDawn.com anymore (but are located on our sister site at MP3Lizard.com) and like I said before, we don't have DVD reviews, album reviews or TV listings anymore :-)
Competitors?
Business that doesn't have competition, is a dead business. We have competitors and we have always had competitors. Since our focus has shifted towards digital video, I have mentally always used the term "Big Four" to describe the sites that I consider to be the biggest and the best digital video sites on the Internet -- AfterDawn.com, Doom9, Digital-Digest and VCDHelp/SVCDHelp/DVDRHelp/Videohelp.
I think each of these sites has something unique that makes them distinct from the others in the group. Doom9 is probably the best known site -- the only major site that I've ever known to be completely without ads as well :-) -- and focuses heavily on hard core development and cutting-edge video technologies. Definitely the best site around for "pro" guys. And I think everybody who has ever had a DVD player knows VideoHelp's DVD player listings. Digital-Digest has been around forever, publishes its legendary weekly movie trailers and is probably the site where most of the current "DVD ripping specialists" read their first ever VCD guides years ago.
I've been involved with various niche scenes in my life and I'm still amazed by the fact that all these great sites -- including also several good quality smaller digital video sites -- fight ultimately for millions of readers to justify their existence and yet the community has managed to avoid stupid cat fights between its members ("my dad's site is better than your dad's!"). I'd like to thank all of those in this great, global digital video community for making it something totally unique.
The size of our site?
We have grown over the years to something that I'd like to call "big". Compared to major sites like Google.com or News.com, we're a a small hobby site (which we are!), but considering that we cover only a rather limited technical niche, I'd say that we've done good :-) We currently have almost 150,000 registered members, have 3 million unique monthly visitors to our sites and over 12 million page impressions each month. There is still plenty of room to grow, but currently, we are already in position where I can honestly say that it has been worth the journey.
The future
We have several plans for the future -- new funky little additions to the site that hopefully make our users' lives bit easier. But as always, it is the A/V technology that ultimately makes the difference -- we can't predict what will be the "Next Big A/V Thing" in 2006, but whatever it is, I promise that we will be here to write about it.
The users
I can't go on without thanking those of you who participate to our site's development and growth on daily basis. I'd especially like to thank all of our moderators for doing such a great job on our forums just for the sheer joy of it -- your work is more appreciated than what I can put in words, thank you.
Additionally, I'd like to thank all of those long-time users who simply keep on coming back to our site -- whatever your reason is to do so, whether it is news, forums, etc. There have been times when our site has been tested -- sudden (luckily temporary) dramatic drops in traffic, financial difficulties, etc and that "core" team of users have made it possible to pull through.
Then, last, but definitely not least, are the casual visitors, people who simply wander to our site to read the latest news, download couple of software items or maybe to read some guides. The fact that we can provide useful information to such a large group of people is, in itself, a proof that we have done something right during the last five years.
Now...
...our team of seven individuals is about to have a night off and go drinking later tonight :-) Happy birthday, AfterDawn!
On behalf of AfterDawn Ltd's team,
-Petteri Pyyny, CEO
