Anime Bliss was born out of a discussion between Galaxy, Twilight, and Gollum on the 6 hour car ride home from Anime Boston 2005. Gollum had spent 5 years working for the Anime Agency and Twilight had spent about 3 years moderating. Gollum was sorry to see that the Anime Agency was no longer a complete site, just a message board, and wanted to try to create a site that was similar to what he had worked on. Twilight and Galaxy were excited to be the beginning of this goal. Gollum ran straight to his computer when he got home and ordered the web address www.anime-bliss.com. Within a couple weeks Gollum had managed to get a site designed and built, while Twilight and Galaxy organized and set up the message boards. Twilight also began to recruit a staff of people to take care of reviews, image galleries, and other sections of the site. SirHellsing420, Priestman, Eimii, Aspirations, Amai, Manathern, Piro^kun, and Asakura were among those who came from Anime Agency to give us a hand with Anime Bliss. On June 1st, 2005 we opened our doors and began to run as "The Perfect Web Community"
About 3 weeks before our 1 year anniversary in 2006, Gollum realized he had to do something to try to revitalize the site. Unfortunately, we had lost a bunch of our original staff and most of the rest were very busy and unable to update. Then Gollum had a brainstorm, why not open up the site like Wikipedia so that any user could contribute. This would allow us to make use of lots of people who had a few things to contribute, but not the time or resources to actually work on the staff. He did a complete redesign of the site (which was a headache, but in the end was well worth it), and launched the new site a couple days before the 1 year anniversary on June 1st, 2006. Not only was the color scheme nicer, but also with the help of Dark Alchemist, we had new graphics which are much nicer. Anime Bliss Version 2.0 was branded "The Perfect Anime Community, for fans by fans".
On July 20, 2006, it was brought to Gollum's attention that the Anime Agency was offline, and had been for a few days. Gollum contacted Locke, the webmaster of the Anime Agency, and discovered that he had closed the site but not announced it to anyone. Gollum proposed redirecting the web address, animeagency.com, to Anime Bliss so that all of the Anime Agency members had a place to go with familiar faces. Locke agreed and the change was Anime Agency members were offered a new home.
Things continued pretty uneventfully, and even a little bit slowly until October. On Oct. 25, 2006, Anime Bliss entered a new medium when Gollum released the first episode of the Anime Bliss podcast. The podcast featured recaps of the weeks news, upcoming releases and conventions, reviews, and other anime and manga related segments. We became the first full service Anime Community to also have it's own weekly podcast. Up until that point people either focused on a podcast or a site, not both.
Things again slowed down a bit in December of 2006. The podcast went on a month long hiatus and Gollum stopped having time to keep the site up to date. The problem was that he was finishing up college and getting ready to graduate and enter the real world. Luckily, he quickly found a job and as of January 9th he was able to resume the podcast and began to redouble his efforts on the site. With school out of the way he had more time to try and breathe new life into the site.
In February 2007, Gollum decided it was time to start thinking about the 2nd anniversary of the site. The first thing he did was look at the stats and realized that the redirection of animeagency.com combined with the podcast had caused our monthly unique hits to jump to 4,500 per month. He was impressed, and realized that there was now enough traffic to push to become truly mainstream. He contacted many companies and began an advertising push. He also began to get contacted by conventions and advertisers.
Also in February, Gollum began work on Anime Bliss 3.0. Originally this was meant to be large scale backend and content changes to make Anime Bliss a bigger online presence, with a little bit of cleanup to the layout. However as he got started on the minor layout changes, he began to tinker and tweak more and more. The result was a complete layout redesign with multiple themes that users can select, or the ability to just use whatever random theme the site assigns at a given time. This layout also included a pulldown menu at the top of the screen that made navigation much easier and more organized than it was previously. Backend changes included the addition of a convention calendar and press release section as well as adding links to index pages to purchase an item and mapping feature to the Traveler's Guide to Anime Shopping.
This brings us to June 1, 2007. We have undergone major revisions since Gollum, Galaxy and Twilights original concept at Anime Boston. This is no where near the end of the story however. There are still a lot of ideas on how to improve and we hope that you will join us, if you haven't already, and make this the Ultimate Anime Community.
