A couple of days ago we were offline for two days or so. The reason: my hosting package was exactly one year old and my provider managed to screw up my continued subscription, despite that I had already paid the fee weeks ago. As reported, it made me run up against the walls, despairing as I was. Not only was I worried about losing everything we’ve worked so hard to build up, it would also have been a major bummer, to put it incredibly mildly, to not have made our first birthday. Because that’s what it is today, I found out in the nick of time, as it’s evening already over here.

Exactly one year ago, at 8:21 in the evening I put this blog’s first post, basically a welcoming word to the site. Nobody read that that day and the only reason, I suspect, anybody ever did is because I put it up as an official page to explain The Baboon’s mission.

The first music post put up was the track Celestial Furnace by the Italian Melodeath formation Disarmonia Mundi, a band I was ‘totally into’ at the time and which still rocks my boat today when I put it on. It’s also a band of whom we’ve put up much more stuff in the past.

As you can see, the posts developed since then. Where they started out as two, max three, sentences of text and a simple video, they evolved and started diverging: where music videos and so-called static vids were the posts we used to put up most of the time, reviews, interviews and music posts are our current most frequent post categories, but there are more categories as you’ve probably found out.

What hasn’t changed a bit, on the other hand, is our mission: to strive for the noble goal of spreading the word about every good Metal band we can find out about ourselves. It helps bands and saves you from having to search for new stuff yourself. Of course we also attempt to stir through some humourous entertainment and we like discussions, such as below this post with ElvisShotJFK as well.

Now just in case by now you start to question our motives because we’ve got some ads running on the site as well, I can tell you this: over the course of just over eight months – that’s how long we’ve got these ads up – you rabid cheap-ass Metal bastards have clicked those ads for a total worth of about €23.-. By comparison, I just paid over €95.- for the hosting subscription. If you’ve got any feel for economics at all, you’ll acknowledge that isn’t anywhere near the type of profit margin that makes people or companies filthy rich. I don’t care. I do this out of love the music – and the occasional package of albums to be reviewed – and not for the cash. If I was doing it for the dough, trust me, I would have bailed out ages ago!

Somewhere during the year we also made friends with the guys over at NCS – who also recently celebrated their first anniversary – with whom we developed The Bass Drop Deluxe a.k.a. The 808Burger – name courtesy of Dan, who received a stack of albums as thanks – a luscious burger featuring thick juicy beef patties, cheese-onion (or just cheese or onion buns), bacon, cheese, pineapple, fried eggs and some other stuff, including the must-have accompanier, Grolsch beer. A recipe we highly recommend you try! The food coma will take you out of the running for days. Fuckin’ Metal as Islander at NCS would say.

Up to now, I’ve mentioned the word “we” a lot. By that I do not refer to myself as ‘royal plural’. I do refer to those guys that have, over the course of the year, helped me out to varying degrees with writing and posting material. Byrd36 was the first to join me back in March and though he has been held hostage by his job in the last few months, his contributions, suggestions and feedback have been invaluable. The other guys that have been delivering material are, in order of appearance, Kebabhasse, Tarkan, Motig and last but not least CroOZza. To all: thanks so fuckin’ much!

Who else to thank are all the bands and labels that sent over their stuff, took time to answer stupid interview questions and stupid questions in general and gave permission to upload some of their material so it could be featured in posts on the site. But our main thanks goes out to you, the reader/viewer of all our senseless crap and commenter on our material. If you don’t read stuff, our stats module shows us low-value numbers. Numbers we don’t like and we get demotivated and eventually stop writing. The fact that this hasn’t happened says it all! You may now applaud yourself.

Some modest stats that I’m nevertheless very proud of and that I had never hoped of achieving just a year ago. In one year’s time, we’ve put up 1,552 – including this one – posts, featuring bands out of 68 different countries worldwide. We put up 37 album reviews and had 17 interviews with bands.

All that was read by a grand total of more than 23,000 unique visitors out of fuck knows how many countries. Just about all of them I reckon. On our busiest day we had 213 bloodthirsty individuals roaming the site.

Now, for the next year! We look back on a rich year, stacked to the max with new Metal discoveries and loads of other stuff. We can only hope next year will be able to match up and for this we need you. Keep coming back, keep feeding back and we’ll keep going. If you want to contribute a piece, send us a band name or help us out in any way, you’ll have our eternal gratitude and we’ll credit you appropriately. But really, the most helpful thing you can do is spread the word about The Baboon. More readers = more traffic. More traffic = higher hosting expenses. And you understand now that higher hosting expenses totally fuck over our profit margins. The power to decapitalize is yours! Seriously though, spread the word and our audience might grow and that, and not money, is what really motivate The Baboon.

The musical accompaniment today obviously is a Metal birthday song!

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Textual Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.