If Jesus can come back from the dead, then why can’t VegasRex?
About a year ago, I pulled the plug on this website.
In the course of 4 years, I developed the single largest repository of independent, original Las Vegas content on the Internet. Even when you compared my site with large, corporate, profitable Vegas sites, I typically had more exclusive content than they did.
When all was said and done, I published over 100,000 photographs, and I distributed over 200 movies which were filmed, cut, edited, and soundtracked by yours truly.
At the peak of the site’s popularity, I was pulling in over 20,000 unique visitors per day. Not page views … but unique visitors. Raw hits exceeded 1 million daily, and page views were over 100K.
Since some of the content I published was “risque”, “controversial”, or non-PC … my multimedia-hosting accounts (YouTube, Flickr, etc) were frequently restricted, suspended, or banned. This forced me to self-host everything.
Through it all, however, I tried not to let money taint the site. I published ad-free for years, and I turned down a very large amount of money at one point to keep the content out of the hands of corporate beancounters. I paid very dearly out of my own pocket to keep it all running.
Fortunately, my forum members helped me keep things going, but in the end, the cost was overwhelming. I learned the same lesson that Pearl Jam did during the Ticketmaster thing:
It’s pearls before swine.
Nobody cares about ethics, people just want their shit.
Americans don’t care if you try to keep ads out of their face and they could not care less if you take money to lie your ass off. They just want their shit. If anything, people respect you less if you don’t try to take their money.
Now, we have Ed Vedder bopping around in Target commercials and charging people $75 to watch him play a ukulele — and I don’t blame him one bit.
If Steve Wynn called tomorrow and offered me $500 to get onstage and dance with LMFAO, I’d say “Yo, what up baby babies?!”
Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots.
Now where’s my goddamn money, bitches?
It may take some of us longer than others, but eventually, we all learn.
Suffice to say that if I had to do it over again, I would do things differently. I’d get mines, as the sideways-cap wearing honkies from Bothell say.
Anyway, since I spiked the blog, I’ve gotten a lot of emails, and I still get tons of traffic to dead links. Believe it or not, after all this time, there is still a great deal of demand for the old VegasRex content.
Now that I have a few degrees of separation between me and the dirt farm, I realized that it was probably a waste to leave everything sitting on a hard drive. I figured that I could restore the less bandwidth-intensive content without breaking the bank.
The problem is, when I nuked the site, I really nuked it. The database is literally in pieces, and recovering the content must be done manually. Therefore, it will take some time. I’ll put articles back up as I recover them, and I even have a couple of ideas that will yield new, fresh content.
In addition, if you can believe it, I have a ton of content from that town which I have never published. I just never got the time. Photos, videos, and articles. Eventually, they too may see the light of day.
In any event, that’s what’s going on.
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