Before I say anything else, I think it’s important to tell you that Immortalliumblog is coming to an end. I set up this blog back in 2019 with the intention of running it for three years to see how it would be received. Unfortunately, even when many of my goals went unfulfilled, I persevered and continued to produce content until this year when I finally decided that the time spent writing and maintaining Immortalliumblog is needed desperately elsewhere. However, I didn’t want to stop without first explaining myself so I decided to write one final article in which I would not only be looking back at Immortalliumblog as a whole but also how you’ll be able to access this content in the future.
Let’s start with a brief look at what some of my goals were. From the beginning, I was hoping to foster a community who would hold active discussions with me and each other about the various topics I wrote about, helping to highlight potential subjects to discuss and expanding on any questions I’d have from researching for the article. Unfortunately, this was an area which failed to materialise over the lifespan of the blog with only the occasional comment.
This was quite disappointing as the graph shown above reveals that Immortalliumblog actually had decent readership that, at times, actually exceeded my expectations. As you can see, my blog actually managed to attract tens of thousands of viewers per year which is something that I feel quite proud of. However, not only did this not result in an active community but it also wasn’t enough to sustain the blog financially either. My sources of income came from a combination of affiliate links and advertising but I was never able to meet my goal of the blog being self-sustaining and it has continually run at a loss since its inception.
While most certainly disappointing in those regards, I do want to highlight some moments when I was pleasantly surprised. My articles ended up being cited in several major/notable online publications with perhaps my favourite being in mangasplaining where they used a photo I’d taken of the Japanese and English language volumes of Bakuman side by side while linking to the article where it was used. I was also overjoyed to have conducted an interview with a pair of OEL manga creators which I think went very well and am continually proud of.
So you may be asking what’s going to happen to this blog? Even though it didn’t end up becoming what I wanted it to be, it still represents a very large body of work of mine and its preservation has been paramount to me. Therefore, not only am I creating a local collection of the blog but I also intend to go through my blog as comprehensively as possible and archive the pages using the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive. In the event that something goes wrong, I will be quick to inform you about it and what actions I am taking.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk and amazon.com for all of your needs!