It’s Been a Year

One year ago I retired AbsolutePunk.net and launched Chorus.fm into the world. I can’t believe it’s been a year. First, I want to thank everyone that’s supported the website for a full year and all of you that kept monthly payments on and re-signed up today with a new yearly subscription. Seriously, thank you. I had no idea if this entire endeavor was ever going to work, and all of the support has truly blown me away. I’ve loved getting to know so many of you over the past year and being able to share this experience with you. Again, I can’t tell you thank you enough.

One year in I figured is as good a time as ever to run down some of the numbers from the last 12 months:

• 5,145 articles posted on the main site.
• 1,004,735 words written in those articles.
• 895,137 forum posts.
• 34,766 registered forum members.
• 891,056 likes given out.
• 2,000 private messages sent per month (average).
• 27 podcast episodes recorded (and 3 bonus episodes).
• Over 160,000 podcast listens.
• 83,035,328 pageviews.
• A 6:40 average session time.
• 13 “first listen” blogs in the supporter forum.
• 365 days where I was happy with the choice I made.

Not a bad first year at all. As I wrote about when I posted up our new $3 per month supporter membership plans, I’m definitely in for another year of running this site, posting about music news, technology, ranting in the forums, and hopefully expanding our little community even more. The first year was the most fulfilling work of my entire career. The cloud that had been following me around for the past few years has lifted, and I’ve found myself more inspired and excited to work on this website than ever before. I think we have something very special here, and I’m as committed as ever to keep doing it for as long as all of you keep reading it and supporting us. The rest of the web feels like it’s getting louder, more crowded, more angry, more cluttered with junk, and Chorus to me has been a much needed antidote to the bullshit.

So, what’s next on the roadmap? I’m currently working on a bunch of changes to clean up the main website’s codebase. There’s some design tweaks in there that I think will make the main site much more intuitive to browse, find the information you’re looking for, and better organize our content. It’s also far more optimized for mobile and tablet browsing. I’m also working on improving our supporter perks so that patrons will be able to better customize their experience.1 After that gets rolled out I’ll be working on new features for our community. Of course we’ll still be posting content on a daily basis and hopefully adding even more new voices as contributors in the near future.

As always, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, email, or in the forums with thoughts, ideas, or concerns about the website. And if you like what we’re doing, please give our supporter options a look. If you can swing $3 a month to help us out, it would mean the world to me. It’s with the support of readers like you that we’re able to keep publishing and stay online.

We made it a full year, I’ll raise a glass tonight to everyone that helped make that a reality. Here’s to the next.