Goodbye To The Blog

During the Easter break, I had to think about a difficult decision that I knew I had to eventually make, I’ve decided to close the blog. Very recently, I’ve turned 30 years old and I no longer have the time to carry on with it, I feel that I’ve neglected more important things in life. For nearly five years, I’ve pretty much worked on the blog nearly every day, taking up hours of my time. I hope to continue on Twitter and hopefully YouTube, but I’ll be around less often. There has been a couple of times when I said I was going to end it, but didn’t carry it through.

With the blog, I’ve proud with what I’ve done, I’ve met people I’d never thought I would ever meet, those BAFTA screening events were really something. Cartoon Network’s press office, DHX Media, Corus Entertainment (CN Canada), Lego, BBC Press Office, Bardel Entertainment and many more all follow me on Twitter, my Twitter account is too precious now to get rid of. I’ve been a member of ToonZone* since September 2013, which is now a long time ago, next month it will be five years since running the Twitter account and will be five years since doing the blog. Things have changed, CN is a lot different now to when I started the blog, Adventure Time and Regular Show have ended, The Amazing World of Gumball has almost ended, the next generation of kids are a lot different to the time when I was growing up too, there’s even a difference between those in their early 20’s and those approaching their 30’s. I’m now in the top end of Adult Swim’s target demographic and miles past CN’s, if my 20’s went this quickly, I’ll be 50 before you know it. Five years is one sixth of my life so far.

To be honest, in recent months I’ve been watching less and less cartoons and felt slightly disconnected from what I was writing, I wanted to enjoy it but just don’t have the time to make the commitment anymore, I run the blog on top of a full-time job. The blog is costing me quite a bit money as it’s outgrown shared hosting, I always covered the costs, I haven’t set up a Patreon (to be honest, Cartoon Community news channels have Patreon accounts although they’re not the original news source, why should I pay someone to read the news for me, when I can read it directly from the source myself) or ads (although there was a brief AdWords experiment on the blog, although it wasn’t fruitful and the ads had no relevance to the content at all). I did not ask for a single penny from anyone to run the site. I plan to archive the site somewhere, hopefully somewhere cheaper as it will be used less often, I’ll just leave the site abandoned.

Cartoon Network’s old owners – Turner is dead, the old management has left what was known as Turner’s parent company – Time Warner (now WarnerMedia owned by AT&T), also CN is now part of Warner Bros. Warner Bros. will now not only include Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Adult Swim (with Toonami) and Adult Swim, but also Warner Bros. Animation, the anime streaming service – Crunchyroll, Rooster Teeth and VRV. I just don’t have the time to cover this amount of news, plus the monthly highlights as well as managing the YouTube channel which features the promos on the channel, which is something that CN/Turner/Warner Bros. etc. should really be doing themselves with a much bigger and better PR department. On-demand streaming is CN’s eventual end goal anyway and I predict linear television will be dead in the United States and most countries in Western Europe within the next 15 years, there will be no point in uploading promos, bumpers and continuities as there will no longer be any.

I plan to continue on Twitter and share news, this will be less time consuming for me and it’s something I usually do anyway. Due to drastic changes at Cartoon Network, Turner and WarnerMedia as a whole, I think this will be a good time to end the blog, tomorrow night, I plan to post a list of links where you can find info about the latest Cartoon Network/Warner Bros. Animation news. To be honest, it’s time for someone else to step up to the challenge and takeover what I was doing.

People in the “cartoon community” (The only community I belong to is where I live) prefer to hear what CN Confessions, CN Schedule Archive or The Rise of Fall of Nickelodeon (who also covers CN News) etc. has to say anyway, it’s sad that people want rumours, opinion, drama, criticism and controversy more than straight news. I guess my blog was more of a broadsheet newspaper and everyone else’s a tabloid. I never understood the obsession of schedules in the “cartoon community”, these days you can watch shows anytime you like, I wish that was around when I was a kid.

*ToonZone is now known by “Anime Superhero”, after the name change, I felt they’ve sidelined Western Animation, a niche that they specialised in and attempted to go mass-market into the popular but yet oversaturated market of Japanese anime and superhero movies and comics news websites.

Goodbye To The Blog was originally published on RegularCapital