You are most likely wondering why we have done this rather significant change. It's simple. Otaku World costs between $300 and $400 a month for the privilege of living on a web server and using up bandwidth. Dov spends a great deal of his time maintaining the Anime Theme Guide and the Kisekae Area (among others). I spend about 8 to 12 hours a week keeping the Toy Chest and Kamishibai areas up to date as well as normal system administration duties. Jennifer spends a fair portion of her time looking for new toys and what-nots for Otaku World. All in all, we put in collectively around $2500 worth of our time a month on Otaku World. It's not cheap putting on a site with this level of quality. And we know Otaku World is a quality site because we hear it from you time and time again in your e-mails to us. Thank you, very much.

However, Otaku World hasn't been paying for this. Until now.

In February, we had an average of 6300 visitors per day. Being such a small site in the overall scheme of things, we can't get the advertising or sponsorship required to keep Otaku World going. So we have joined with a group of other sites to help get those advertising dollars working for us. The only way we can do this is to increase our "ad avails", the number of "slots" for displaying ads. One way to do this is to put banner ads all over the pages, top, middle, and bottom, but that really creates an aesthetic problem. In other words, it's butt ugly! Or so we think.

The Ad Wheel doesn't break up the continuity of the individual pages and it allows us to present a number of different ads in a very effective way. When Accursed Toys created Happy Puppy Games OnRamp, Sandra Woodruff came up with the Ad Wheel concept and it was a major success. She is using the same basic technique on KickAss Games and we are now using it on Otaku World. It works.

It has always been our belief that the advertisements that appear on a web site should complement the site and provide benefit to the visitors to that site. This means not only presenting products and services that are relevant to those visitors but presenting them in a way that doesn't detract from the web site. Now, advertisers are still not too clear on this concept. In fact, an awful lot of web site designers don't get it either. We understand this, we really do.

We here at Otaku World will do our very best to adhere to this precept of providing ads for products and services you would be interested in. In fact, one of the results of Otaku World's first contest was to gather information to make sure we are getting advertising that will give the most value to you. If you see something that catches your eye, explore it! See if the advertiser can do something for you. Who knows? You may actually find something via the Ad Wheel that you wanted to get all along!

Bandwidth Piracy

On a similar theme, you may have noticed that in the Toy Chest area, we have changed how we do downloads. We added a level of indirection by using a CGI script to allow for downloads that originate only from Otaku World. I found out from recent log file analyses that about 13% of our downloads were not originating from Otaku World. This means that there were links to the files themselves as stored on Otaku World but the links never went to any of the pages on Otaku World itself.

In exploring this more fully, I found a number of sites that had created their own Anime-oriented sites using selected files from Otaku World. One site used virtually nothing but Otaku World files! Most of these sites were dedicated to a specific genre of Anime or even some special show or video. These sites linked only to those files that were of interest to those visitors. However, the number of these small sites has been growing. This in itself is not a bad thing. I encourage it because it makes the Web more diverse. The problem was in the amount of bandwidth that was being stolen to give these sites the ability to have downloads.

Stolen? Yes. Accursed Toys pays for the server and the bandwidth which Otaku World uses. Advertising will eventually allow Otaku World to be self-sufficient in this regard. However, when someone links directly to a file without going through Otaku World, the person doing the downloading won't see the advertising we present here and therefore that "visit" won't be "paid for". Accursed Toys was paying for someone else to use our bandwidth. Accursed Toys didn't authorize it therefore it amounts to theft of bandwidth.

For those of you who actually create sites on the web that are dedicated to anime, I have no problem with you getting any files you want from Otaku World -- just so long as you put them on your own server for downloading from your site! Otaku World can no longer afford to subsidize other people's web sites. If your ISP doesn't allow for downloading, see if the files exist on a known ftp server such as ftp.cdrom.com. You can link to them since that is what they are there for. Just give them credit for being there for you. If such sites don't have the files you want to link to, upload them to those sites! These sites are pretty good about making them available in a few days.

I don't mean to come across as an ogre. I'm just faced with the realities of running a web site. I love working on Otaku World as Dov and Jennifer do. We all love the wonderful letters we get from all over the world. It makes us feel like it's all worth the effort. Thank you! But it is getting more and more expensive to run a web site such as Otaku World and the money has to come from somewhere. So please, please work with us on this.

Thank you for listening.