This is the first post in a while that is not about me visiting places and having fun. Up until yesterday, I had a blog called A Product of Wasted Time in which I wrote about anime and manga, and it was hosted on Blogger. That blog is now no longer exists because Blogger had recently received a number of DMCA complaints about my blog for copyright violations. Apparently just writing about particular anime episodes and manga chapters is infringement. I have never shared full episodes or chapters on my blog; I only write about the series I was following. At most, I had a couple of screenshots or one/two pages of a chapter included per post so I can put funny captions. But hey, I understand Blogger has the right to police their service, and I’m not mad about having the blog deleted. But still, R.I.P., A Product of Wasted Time.
I write this post here so that years in the future, I can still remember what I’ve accomplished with A Product of Wasted Time, so this is a bit of an obituary for the blog. So here is the story:
The blog originally started as my Xanga site, back when Xanga was the social networking service du jour. I originally just wrote about my life and happenings to share with my friends/classmates, but then I started watching anime/reading manga. At the same time, I came across various blogs focused on covering anime and manga series, and thought I could do the same. I wrote on Xanga for a while, but then found out that it really wasn’t that good of a blogging platform, especially if I wanted to reach a wider audience. Therefore, in 2008 I officially started A Product of Wasted Time in 2008 on Blogger.
In the 7 years between then and now (Aug 2015), a lot of has happened. My anime blog actually got much more popular than I expected. Of course, it wasn’t really that popular even when compared to most anime blogs out there, but at its peak I was getting over 1000 unique visitors per day, which is more than all of my other websites combined. Over its lifetime, A Product of Wasted Time amassed almost 2 million unique visitors and over 3 million page views. Not a smash hit, but not too shabby. I am proud of the fact that I spent the effort to build that blog up. Back then, I had the enthusiasm and energy to post a lot, and also to connect with other bloggers in the same area, and that really helped me bet established. At this point, that blog is by far the most visited website I’ve ever had. I was also pretty happy with the final design I had for that blog. I drew all of the header and background artwork myself, and I had a JavaScript-powered rotating theme which I thought was pretty neat.
In the last two or three years, I had lost of some of my enthusiasm for blogging manga and anime. I grew older, and with that came grad school and now a full time job, so I had less time to devote to blogging. And because I write slow, blogging anime and manga actually took up a considerable amount of time. Sometimes I feel like I’m posting on that blog because I feel obligated to, not because I really enjoyed it. From that standpoint, I’m a little bit glad that the blog got deleted, since that’ll stop me from wasting more time. Now you know why I named that blog “A Product of Wasted Time”. I would have stopped anime/manga blogging eventually, but certainly it would have carried over for longer, and now I have more free time on my hands… to post on this blog lol.
I see the end of A Product of Wasted Time as conclusion to a stage of my life, since I’ve been writing on that blog for so long. I still have backups from Blogger up to about a month ago, so most of what I wrote on A Product of Wasted Time still exists on my hard drive. I’m not going to build a new website and restore the 2000+ posts I’ve made over the last 7 years, but I might put up some of the series/movie reviews onto this site, given that I do have a Reviews category that I haven’t posted to in a long time. I will continue to watch anime and read manga, but I officially retire from the anime and manga blogging business. I definitely wasted a lot of time on my anime/manga blog, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Damnit TJ. I was trying to get your review on the Kaido reveal.
You, I , They, We knew it was going to happen. You yourself stated that the blog days were counted in one way or another but it was a great run.
We’ll see if you post any updates pal.
Thank you for following along for all this time, Daniel. It was kind of disappointing that they suddenly deleted my blog, but yeah I was on my way out of the anime/manga blogging scene.
I might post a series review here and there on this blog. It’ll probably be another decade before One Piece comes to an end though hahaha.
Great loss to the anime blog community. I was just trying to visit the site today to catch up on Bleach. Truly there will never be anything like your blog again. You covered some of the less popular (or at least less written about, i.e. Sekirei, Claymore) anime and manga. The great shame is that all your written words are gone. Blogger truly is evil to just cut people off like that without a chance to appeal or protest. I’ll keep “Product” bookmarked on my browser until the end of time, or my hard drive dies, whichever comes first. Best of luck, and happy trails amigo.
Thank you for the support, fan77. I don’t think my blog was ever popular enough to be a “great loss”, but I’m glad there are people such as you who got enjoyment out of reading A Product of Wasted Time. It made the effort worthwhile.
When I tried to visit your blog moments ago and found out it was gone, I was shocked. I immediately Googled to find out what happened, and landed on this page (the first search result).
It’s saddening to see your blog gone.
When it comes to you losing enthusiasm and moving on, I understand your sentiments. I had a forum nearing 100k replies in 30k topics. It was my one and only website. However, I had been losing enthusiasm for keeping the forum going, and had far less time now with work and school than in the early 2000s when all I had to worry about was taking out the trash. Although the forum lost a lot of its activity it still saddened me greatly to close it down, to the point of tears, as it was not just content but community.
The infringement issue is also saddening to me. I have been hearing a lot about it from people who post playthroughs on YouTube, but this is my first hearing about it on a blog where the overwhelming majority of the content is just your thoughts on it.
In any case, I wish you all the best, and thank you for your most enjoyable blog.
Thanks for the support Kevin. Getting the blog deleted was a little shocking at first, but I knew the end would come sooner or later. Must have been tougher for you to close down your forum.
Oh man, what a loss, I never posted much on your blog, (I was an anon)but I always followed it since 5 years ago… so thanks for the memories, I had a good time reading your blog.