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AfterDawn's 8th birthday

10 June 2007 7:28 by Petteri "dRD" Pyyny | 45 comments

Wow, yet another year has passed and our little website is having its birthday again, for the 8th time. Yes, that is correct. Exactly eight years ago our site was officially launched.

I've written these "birthday journals" year after year and it always gives me an opportunity to take a look in the past and analyze what we, as a company and a site, have achieved during the past year or so.

As most of our readers know, year 2006 was rather bad for us as a site, as our home country, Finland, adopted the EU copyright directive to its legislation, forcing us to remove tons of content from our site. Since then, we've tried to "reinvent" our site slightly, tried to figure out what bits and pieces our site is currently missing that would benefit our users. That led us to launch an "innovation contest" last year where we asked our users to tell us what they'd want to see on our site in future. We got hundreds of suggestions and have tried to go through that list, tried to put all the ideas into larger picture and to build a framework where we want to take our site in the future. One of the most visible changes sparked by the innovation contest feedback was the redesign of our homepage last autumn.

To answer to many of our users' pleas, we strengthened our English content team since last birthday with two new members -- vurbal and DVDBack23 -- and also hired a new content writer, malagant, to join our Finnish news team. With these new people on board, we've managed to push our news output to completely new level where we can honestly say that we cover very big part of the news in our own "niche" nowadays.

Furthermore, discussion topics about multimedia devices and hardware products became increasingly popular on our forums and to assist people to make "educated" purchases, we launched a completely new hardware section a couple of days ago to have people's reviews, product prices and tech details nicely under one umbrella.

In these birthday journals, I've always shared some of our internal stats as well. So, here's something for you guys who love all kind of statistics:

In January, 2007 we broke our previous traffic record with 33 million page impressions in that month alone.
Our users have posted 2,226,551 messages to our English discussion forums (and further 705,160 messages to our Finnish forums)
Our users have downloaded 82,493,746 software items from our software section.
We have 660,097 registered members (who have activated their accounts).

But basically I simply wanted to post this news article to thank all of our staff members, moderators and you, our users for helping us to survive for whole eight years in this ever-changing dotcom world. Thanks.

On behalf of AfterDawn Ltd,

-Petteri "dRD" Pyyny, webmaster

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Discuss this article!	There are more user comments available, read them here
Riotard (Inactive) 10 June 2007 13:25
Happy Birthday AD Its been a good one! [ + quote]
pstamer (Member) 10 June 2007 14:05
Happy birthday; love you AD. Thanx for all and may you have many more. [ + quote]
lecsiy (Senior Member) 10 June 2007 14:23
Been with you since 2005 and have no plans of leaving any time soon! [ + quote]
borhan9 (AfterDawn Addict) 10 June 2007 14:50
Happy Bday aD. I really love the new hardware section. :) Heres for about 8yrs to come and many more :) [ + quote]
PeaInAPod (AfterDawn Addict) 10 June 2007 15:05
Happy B-Day AD, we've seen some members come and some go but one things remained constant and that is the excellent site that is AD. [ + quote]
Cfusion (Newbie) 10 June 2007 15:58
This site rocks.. Thank you [ + quote]
Spartan28 (Member) 10 June 2007 16:22
Happy Birthday Afterdawn.com Great site and may many new members to come over the next years! Love this site cuzs its so helpful! [ + quote]
Nealio (Member) 10 June 2007 18:32
Hhhhhaaaapppppyyyy Bbbbbiiiirrrttthhhddddaaayyyy! I've only know about this site for a few years, but I use it almost every day now! [ + quote]
bomber991 (Newbie) 10 June 2007 18:39
I ususally don't leave comments to these news articles, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I think I've been here since 2003. [ + quote]
georgeluv (Member) 10 June 2007 20:31
....and those restrictions didnt even slow you down one bit becuase that thing the eu adapted didnt cover users postings, wink wink [ + quote]
rainofire (Newbie) 10 June 2007 21:26
Happy BDay, if only i can mail the gift. [ + quote]
lawndog (Member) 10 June 2007 21:39
Happy Birthday Afterdawn, You guys are my number 1 source for most things. Hell, most days I just come here to read the news articles. One of the few places that will tell the things "popular" media won't. But one question, what was the winning idea of the innovation contest and when will it be introducted?? LD [ + quote]
dsgtrain (Member) 11 June 2007 0:33
Happy Birthday!!!!!!! Originally posted by lawndog: But one question, what was the winning idea of the innovation contest and when will it be introducted?? Good Question (something i'd be intrested to know, maybe hardware section)?? [ + quote] This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 11 June 2007 0:34
little155 (Member) 11 June 2007 6:13
Congradulations AD, keep up the good work. [ + quote]
cam_1 (Newbie) 11 June 2007 7:12
Thank you so much Afterdawn for everything, you have been invaluable over these last few years of school. [ + quote]
blackvamp (Senior Member) 11 June 2007 8:32
Happy 8th AfterDawn! [ + quote]
hughjars (Inactive) 11 June 2007 9:04
H B AD. Many thanks for all the help you and your writers/contributors have given. It's very much appreciated. This site is a fantastic resource. [ + quote]
trexxus (Newbie) 11 June 2007 10:21
Happy Bithday Afterdawn! [ + quote]
salinger (Member) 13 June 2007 13:48
Happy brithday to EVERY MEMBER of afterdawn...after, we the members make this happen; Big thanks to whoever had the idea of making this site. [ + quote]
boxer37 (Newbie) 15 June 2007 11:42
happy birthday [ + quote]
morguex (Inactive) 15 June 2007 15:28
Happy Birthday Afterdawn!! Cheers to 8 more Thanks for all the great articles and forums, given me alot of good laughs. Best site by far. Peace all [ + quote] This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 19 June 2007 13:20
Sythun (Newbie) 15 June 2007 16:30
Happy birthday afterdawn [ + quote]
kwlakey (Newbie) 15 June 2007 20:07
Happy birthday Afterdawn! [ + quote]
brainstrm (Newbie) 17 June 2007 23:03
Happy Birthday ! 8 ) [ + quote]
Unfocused (Junior Member) 30 July 2007 22:21
A little late, but Happy birthday. I've only been a member for a little while, but I've been coming to this site since the early days. keep up the good work. [ + quote]
pernal (Junior Member) 30 July 2007 22:47
Happy Birthday [ + quote]