TAG | netcot
I’m not sure how, but my Netcot Podcast has continued to be a featured podcast in iTunes for 2 1/2 years! It amazes me that as many people listen to it each week as they do. It thrills me that people write comments/reviews, stop by the website and message boards or shoot me an email. All of that fuels my drive to keep cranking out new episodes for people to hear.
The other big driver for me to keep it up is seeing it appear randomly throughout the internet. This week that meant seeing it on my own iPhone as I tried out some of the new features of the latest iPhone software update. See for yourself below. 
No pictures. No videos. Nothing terribly random in this post. Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!
We’re celebrating this year with Johna’s parents who are due to arrive any moment. My brother, John, will also celebrate with us – so there should be plenty of people to eat what appears to be plenty of food.
On another topic, I’m behind in posting videos and pictures due mostly to a suddenly crazy traveling schedule. While in LA, I took a bunch of video to use for Netcot with the hopes that I’d be able to crank out one new video episode. So far, it looks like I might have enough for 3 or 4 episodes!
That’s great! Except that EDITING all that video is always what takes the most amount of time. What’s more, since I’m now fully in the HD world, I need to edit it using some more advanced software than I have in the past. Thankfully, John has been guiding me through it to help ease my learning curve. Of course, once those videos are done, I’ll post some links to them here.
Back to the point: Happy Thanksgiving!
Netcot.com (my Disney site and the source of my alter ego) has been around for a LONG time. Like since ‘94 or something. In that time, we’ve been with a lot of different ISPs. Infact, in that time, we’ve even been KICKED OFF of at least two of them (one for traffic, one for content).
And now another ISP (anhosting.com – whom we’ve had for well over a year) falls into the category of ISPs that once were. I really liked this company initially but in the last few months I’ve lost count of how many odd problems have occurred on their servers leaving Netcot.com off-line. So, last week I made the decision to pick up and move shop.
Only one problem: the day I scheduled the move, the ISP went down again. Doh!
Last night, I began the move process to GoDaddy.com, which is an ISP LOTS of people use. Because of the size and amount of hits (traffic) the site gets, I was forced into one of their higher plans, meaning more out-of-pocket cash on a site where I just haven’t been able to translate a big audience into big revenue. I ran into two issues right out of the chute and the tech support left something (more than something, really) to be desired.
I woke up this morning with sudden clarity: this one isn’t meant to be. I’m having trouble setting things up; tech support isn’t helpful (and takes a LONG time to get back to me); and its costing me nearly 4X what the previous service was.
So this morning, I went to plan B (which, for the record was plan A – but as I did research, I realized nearly all other Disney fan sites use GoDaddy.com – so I thought I’d do the same). I’m now in the process of finalizing the setup of Netcot.com on the new ISP and I’m anxious to see how things go now.
I don’t want to admit how much effort I’ve put into moving this site – its been a lot of work. Hopefully it’ll all be worth it.
One of my goals with Netcot this year is to really take advantage of the renewed success that its seen in the last couple of years. For those of you who don’t know, it was actually one of the very first Disney fan sites on the internet and for a period of time considered to be one of the Big 5. As more sites came on-line, we tried to differentiate from the rest of them as much as possible.
Netcot quickly became the opposite of everyone else. If other sites put watermarks on pictures to prevent you from re-using them on your own website or computer – we put up twice as many in higher quality without any watermarks. If other sites banned people, we encouraged people to speak their mind and be constructively critical about EXACTLY what they thought of Disney-stuff. The format worked. People found Netcot to be a refreshing change … except other sites, who seemed to see us as an enemy. To this day, I don’t understand why we couldn’t just all get along.
We then hand the brilliant idea to massively redo the site with a new design that was unlike anything else out there. It was an ambitious idea… and it didn’t work. The site eventually launched (on our 4th design concept) 3 years later than expected. We came back on-line and found that only a small group of core fans were still there waiting for us. (There was also a whole “legal” incident related to a misunderstanding of our satirical approach on ride reviews – but I’ll save that for another day).
We regrouped, retooled and restarted.
The latest generation of Netcot started a little over 2 years ago when we launched the Netcot podcast. Since then, Netcot has become bigger than ever! The podcast has been one of the featured iTunes Music Store podcasts (on iTunes & AppleTVs) for 26 months in a row (“Kids & Family” category)! Tens of thousands of people download the show each month. Our first-ever video podcast episode also continues to attract attention over at YouTube.com.
Last June, we launched the newest version of Netcot.com, this time determined to be one of the best sites to find the biggest and most interesting Disney news. In the last 6 months, well over a million people visited Netcot.com and the numbers continue to grow every week. Google’s news site polls Netcot.com frequently and often uses Netcot as a news source in their Google Alerts system. We’ve even been told that some radio station DJ’s have mentioned Netcot as their source of a Disney-related story.
We’ve even attracted the attention (in this case, GOOD attention) of Disney themselves, who recently wrote us to clarify confusion of Netcot visitors over details of a press release we covered. We got advanced notice of these corrections a full day in advance of the press release being corrected and re-issued to the media!
There are a number of people that have also stepped forward and offered to help at Netcot. We have 5 people on “staff” that donate their time to helping out with the site writing editorial articles, covering news stories and publishing original artwork for the site. We have a number of sponsorship deals in the works, including one with an upcoming book publisher. And today, our first full page ad hit a targeted magazine audience…
The site continues to grow in popularity and I continue to be amazed and thankful to everyone who follows it, listens to the weekly podcast and participates in the message boards. Their passion for Netcot fuels my late nights of keeping the site updated and cranking out a podcast. Long after Johna and Kyler have been asleep, I can be found in the “studio” working on last minute editing before that week’s show is launched.
I’m thrilled about where the site is now and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here…
