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Friday, May 12, 2023

Ten Years Completed of KoopaTV... but this anniversary is where it ends

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - An explanation of His Majesty's royal decree and what that means for KoopaTV.

Thank you, if you've been around KoopaTV for the ten years it has been established. Yes, KoopaTV launched on May 12, 2013. It's now May 12, 2023. I suppose it's unlikely anyone has been around since Day 1, but, eh, congrats if you've been close enough.

You may be wondering why KoopaTV has Round 50 (May 1 2023 to June 30 2023) of the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program be its last round. That would be because KoopaTV will not continue after that point. I'll get into the reasons throughout this article, but essentially, it's because the big man that we even have this site for, King Bowser Koopa, no longer believes it is a good use of Koopa Kingdom's resources to continue to operate KoopaTV.


By the way, this is the real King Bowser Koopa. With real scales, not a Trojan cardboard fake (like the last time “Bowser” demanded KoopaTV end). We confirmed this as the Big KoopaTV Staff Meeting in April, and that's when we got his official orders. That also means that we have finally ended our Sierra Leone office lease. So... why is this happening? A lot of the problems are around product-market fit.

Basically, no one outside of Koopa Kingdom ever asked for KoopaTV's existence. Lord Bowser expected that by ten years in, we'd be as big as the popular (FAKE NEWS) mainstream outlets like Kotaku or Polygon or IGN. Our actual size doesn't really matter—it's our ability to influence the public to believe in the things that we want you to believe in. Of course, just throwing propaganda into the realm won't succeed. So our strategy was to write about broader, even seemingly unrelated issues. Koopa Kingdom's point of views and pet issues would just go and seep into those pieces, and through cultivating a repeat and loyal audience (this was the justification for the existence of the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program), we'd be able to slowly make an impact into Earth's humans.

Unfortunately, it didn't work like that. We took the edutainment and staffing model from CainTV (the late Herman Cain's website that we've lasted longer than), and we've made a site that is unlike any other we've found in our ten years of existence. Unfortunately, that also made KoopaTV... difficult to explain to people. I mean, it's not like people take a liking to hearing that we're a propaganda outlet for Koopa Kingdom, so we've always had to come up with other, unconvincing phrasing.

KoopaTV has been growing every year (in terms of page views and other metrics. But you should expect that with daily content. The problem is that the growth comes from evergreen articles and less from the newest releases, and it's far behind the amount King Bowser wants. Things like the Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Logs continue to be popular reading. The whole purpose of those was their tie to Team Koopa's participation in the Tokyo Olympic Games and having readers get an attachment for Koopa Kingdom's athletes. ...It fell apart when we lost without getting any medals, though.

But if you don't read everything (the whole series and surrounding articles), you'll never get the propaganda context and you'll miss out on the KoopaTV experience. That's why I like to say every article is worth reading. We're masters at callbacks and references and establishing a lore, but at a point long before our 10-year point, I admit it's likely unmanageable for new readers to expect to ACTUALLY go through EVERYTHING (over 2,670 articles now), even if that is what we believe that's what you need to do.

There's a basic issue that, unlike in 2013, most people don't actually READ things anymore. It's all about video essays. King Dad actually requested that KoopaTV move to being a video essay site (which people probably think we are anyway, given the site's name), but I refuse to do that. I hate video essays, which is why I went as far as to promote an AI-based tool that lets you skip watching them and read them instead. In retaliation, King Dad commissioned TEC-XX, the supercomputer, to write an article about his favourite topic. If it was up to him, every KoopaTV article would be strictly on-topic and in the Enlightenment Movement category, directly describing why Koopa Kingdom is amazing, the Mushroom Kingdom is managed poorly, and that Mario is a cruel evil man. ...Though...no one really went and read that TEC-XX article, and of any article published in April, it was dead last in terms of people going and reading another article on the site. (Perhaps that's related to it lacking hyperlinks to other pages.) It had poor views, and poor engagement time-on-page.

Anyway, no one reads things, and the essays that people do engage with are ones I loathe and won't deal with. Despite being home to a very unique experience on the Internet that pushes the blog format further than others even dream with consistently excellent content, KoopaTV hasn't met its strategic goals. It not only costs money to run the site, but more importantly, time and resources. For example, Lord Bowser believes it'd be more effective to go back to just trying to kill Mario directly than inspire a mass loathing of him among the population. Since I'm one of Koopa Kingdom's best minds, I basically have other things I could be doing.


KoopaTV's last article will be published on July 3, 2023. It'll be the June 2023 review newsletter. The winners of the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program Round 50 will be announced then. KoopaTV will not do a Game of THAT Half-Year 2023, so that sucks for 2023's titles. KoopaTV.org (and ludwigvonkoopa.com, my vanity redirect) will continue to be up for the foreseeable future, simply because it'd be an enormous loss and waste for ten years of the Internet's finest written content (and I truly do believe that this site is literally the best... and it's been free the whole time!) to just disappear overnight. I don't like when websites do that.

I haven't figured out if someone will still respond to comments that people will make after July 2023. I also haven't figured out what happens to KoopaTV's social media accounts, nor have I figured out what to do with my in-game Splatoon 3 name of KoopaTVorg. Master Bowser isn't into those small details.

Speaking of... details, he also wasn't into us totally failing at building his LEGO set in front of him. I also don't think he appreciated our remarks of how many yellow pieces there were and that he needs a more varied colour palette.

We are now at a point where there are a finite number of KoopaTV articles remaining to be published. That puts pressure on us to (continue to) deliver outstanding content, including things I've always wanted to work on but for whatever reason, never have. (I have ideas going back to the founding of the website that never happened... and now I need to figure out if I still have time left to make those a reality or forever have those lost!)



This isn't an ideal 10-year anniversary article, but Ludwig has never liked the concept of anniversaries anyway. Feel free to try to convince King Bowser Koopa to change his mind, but ten years of quantitative and qualitative data are hard to overturn in a comment. Basically, you can attribute the decision to THE YOUNG GENERATION being worse than previous generations, as well as KoopaTV's literary model not being designed to last ten years. At least KoopaTV outlasted CainTV!


KoopaTV's nine-year anniversary talked about the values of free speech and the number nine.
KoopaTV's June 2023 review newsletter and final article can be found here.

22 comments :

  1. Noooooo! I wished I remembered how discovered this site (a few years ago certainly but nothing more specific) and even more so that I missed reading some articles. I do partially blame some of it on how, for some time, I wasn't getting them sent to my email properly, but still.

    This was the best current gaming site as far as I was concerned. I could trust what i was reading. No fake journalism crap, etc. Tumblr blogs went south ages ago. Forums too were dying. Facebook, eek! And I also disliked video essays. (Jokers on Youtube are another topic) This will be gravely missed. The saddest news I've heard all week.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I guess I get where you're coming from. I'll miss you though! I don't suppose I could stay in touch with you over Discord or something?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm keeping my Discord account, yes!

      ...Though Discord is gonna force everyone's usernames to change, which should be the subject of a new article because I don't know what to do for that.

      Delete
    2. Lheticus#2460. Friend request me, please! I'd be more leery of just putting it in a comment like this, but as you alluded to, they're ditching the hash identifier system soon, so I don't think it'll hurt to do so.

      Delete
    3. "Lheticus#2460 is not accepting friend requests. They'll have to add you to become friends."

      Delete
    4. Eh? That shouldn't be. Ah, of course, I needed to turn on "Everyone" in the "who can send me friend requests" option. Try it now.

      Delete
  3. What?! Please say this is a delayed April fools day prank, because there’s no laughing here. I haven’t been here too long but it’s immediently become one of my favorite sites on the Internet. Please tell me you’ll continue writing somewhere, this is sad.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I haven't come up with my plans for what I'll do post-KoopaTV. I do know it's difficult for me to stay quiet and refrain from content, however.

      Delete
    2. Do you think you just need a little bit of a break, and KoopaTV will live again soon in the future?

      Delete
    3. That wouldn't resolve the issues King Dad has.

      Delete
  4. I just discovered this site, and I'm sad. I'll bookmark it anyway. I hope you keep the archives up so we can read them for at least a while...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Nooooo. :( It's the end of an era... (After already suffering one end of an era this year with the 3DS & Wii U eShop closure!)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree with the sadface.

      Fortunately, your writing career will live on. (Right?!)

      Delete
    2. Here's hoping. No sign of it fading yet!

      Delete
  6. Sad to see...I discovered this site way back in the Pokemon Online days when you were a user there, your Switch username reminded me of it so I checked back only to see the news. The internet is a sewage drain now :( Best luck to your future endeavors

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm STILL a user of Pokémon Online!

      But thank you.

      Delete

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