Around six months from now — on March 26, 2016 — ThePulp.Net will celebrate 20 years.
I’ve been pondering what to do with the website the past couple of years. That anniversary might be a good time to make some changes.
So, I thought I would turn to you, good readers, for ideas and suggestions.
ThePulp.Net isn’t the oldest website devoted to the pulp magazines, but it’s pretty close. Ever since it started (originally called .Pulp, on AOL’s web hosting service), the site’s focus has been mainly its pages linking to pulp websites and to sources for pulps and pulp-related items.
It has grown from an initial four pages to several hundred pages, and more than 1,000 unique, curated links.
In addition to the pulp-links pages, I’ve added an extensive pulp references bibliography, listing nearly 350 books and articles; a gallery of over 100 different vintage photos of pulps on newsstands and in the hands of readers; the marginally successful PulpWiki; audio recordings/podcasts of pulp convention panels; and two pulp-related blogs, my Yellowed Perils, and Michael Brown‘s The Pulp Super-Fan.
Other features have come and gone, such as the forums, the alt.pulp FAQ, pulp polls, and The Pulp Companion (which is still posted online, but no longer updated).
But in 2015, “surfing the web” isn’t quite what it was back when the World Wide Web was a relatively new thing. These days our online lives are more focused on social sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. So maybe links pages shouldn’t be the focus of ThePulp.Net any longer.
Changing times
Looking at the stats, monthly visits declined between 2008 and 2013. The number of visitors increased somewhat and stabilized in 2013 and 2014, but are tending down again this year.
Since I don’t run advertising on the site, my interest isn’t to boost visitor count as a way to make money. (Heck, ThePulp.Net costs me a couple of hundred bucks a year for domain names, webhosting and such, not to mention time spent maintaining it.) I use the visitor stats simply to gauge interest in the site since I rarely get email or other feedback.
I run ThePulp.Net as a pulp fan who wants to provide something useful for the pulp-collecting community, as well as to help spread the word about the pulp magazines.
There are some visual tweaks in the works — which you should start seeing over the next few days and weeks — as well as other additions to come later.
What can you do?
Now, back to where you come in. Should I consider shifting focus from links pages to articles about the pulps? Adding more blogs (if I can find writers)? Chucking the whole thing?
What would you like to see? What would you do?
Do any of you have any thoughts or suggestions? Make a comment below, or send me a note. I’m open to hearing all ideas.
I check once a week when I look through Bill Thom’s COMING ATTRACTIONS. If I don’t see anything new, I might not click on THEPULP.NET. But saying that, I do check the Site between Fridays when I’m looking for something that you have posted. So it has been beneficial. What could you do different? I don’t know. You might eliminate Pages that do not get hits, or are covered elsewhere by someone else. There does appear to be a lot of duplication on the Internet. Maybe just streamline and do some elimination.
Sorry for the delay in getting your comment approved, Tom. For some reason it went in the spam folder and I just noticed.
Yes, there does seem to be a lot of duplication on the Internet. Way back when I was first wanting to start at pulp website, I thought about focusing on just The Shadow or Doc Savage. But then realized there were other sites already doing just that. So, you make a good point there.
Hi Bill,
I don’t have any ideas for content. However, I would recommend something I see a lot of sites doing. It seems the future belongs to smart phones and iPads, not to PCs, so think how something looks on the small screen.
Hope this helps!
Darci
Hi, Darci,
That’s certainly something I’m looking at. With changes to Google’s search algorithm back in the early summer, websites had to be mobile friendly to continue getting high search rankings. ThePulp.Net met those standards, but there still needs to be work done to polish its mobile offerings.
Thanks for the feedback!
– Bill
First, congratulations on your 20th anniversary. That’s quite impressive because most websites and blogs tend to die or fade away as the years march on.
Unlike most people, I have just about no interest in the social media sites like Facebook, etc. I’d rather spend my time reading or watching an old movie. And I don’t care about smart phones either. I still use a desk top computer.
I would like to see even more posts about the pulps. And I’d like to see more comments and feedback from collectors. Your coverage of Pulpfest was outstanding and the links to the various reports of great value.
Whatever you do, please don’t chuck the whole thing. We readers and collectors need more sites like ThePulp.Net, not less. And more comments also…
Thank you, Walker. I always value your comments. (I need to follow your example, too, and post more comments on the blogs that I read.)
I’m considering ways to get more articles on the pulps. While I’ve always valued fanzines, I have thought of websites as their successors in a way. So maybe a pivot toward articles about the pulps may be the way to go. It would just require lining up contributors.
More blogs could be an option, too.
Bill, I’d go for more articles on pulps, or pulp reprints. I love the site, so I hope it doesn’t go away. Social media is pretty transient.
Thanks, Lohr. Maybe I can entice you into writing something. 🙂
Bill, I’ll add my congratulations as well. That’s impressive.
I love this site. When I first started researching and knew not one soul in the pulp world this site was the place I got all my information. It was a huge help to me and pointed me in the right direction so many times.
I’ve been handing out your postcards at all the comics conventions I’ve been working this year since I saw you in February. It will be interesting to see if that helps bring in more people.
I don’t have any immediate ideas but I’ll be thinking about this. My impression from the panels I’ve been doing at comic cons and bringing up the pulps plus selling pulp reprints–not just MWN’s–is that pulps are gaining more interest in the general public. So for sure, this website is important.
Thanks so much for the tremendous work you do. I know we all appreciate it so much!
Thank you, Nicky, for your help and support. I keep hoping there will be a tipping point for the pulps if someone makes a really good movie based on the pulps, or if one of the pulp-based comic books takes off.
You and I have talked about more articles, so that’s something that is high on my list.
Those visitor stats don’t tell the whole story. I follow Yellowed Perils via its rss feed and I assume that I’m not alone in this. Obviously we are not included in the viewer stats, even though we see every new post. Of course anything that encourages more comments would get us to drag ourselves over here, as I’ve just done!
Good point about the RSS feed, Dennis. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can do about the second part!