- Joined
- Jan 29, 2018
- Messages
- 1,343
Once upon a time, there was a manga aggregator called KissManga that ruled the manga aggregate scene with uncontested authority. Not even Batoto ever managed to pull ahead of KM, to my knowledge. It was an unconquerable mountain. But I can report today that MangaDex has not only scaled that mountain but we've reached its summit and planted our flag there. Between a combination of porn ads, malware ads, adblock disablers, banning adblock users from viewing manga, grievous mismanagement, and greed on KissManga's part, MangaDex has finally climbed above KissManga in Alexa rank, which is an internationally recognized set of rankings and metrics designed to gauge the popularity of a website. We have maintained a stable lead over them since.
There was stunned disbelief and then wild joy when @Plykiya reported the numbers. Our hard work had paid off! But, my dear readers, there is no denying that we couldn't have done this without you. Without your conscious decision to support scanlators by reading manga on our website, your financial support to help keep the lights on and running, and simply reading and enjoying our content library, there's no way we could have come this far. We also want to take the time to thank scanlators who've chosen to support us by uploading their work here. Our success is yours also. So we want you to share in our accomplishment! Be proud. You're part of a great achievement.
When MangaDex was first conceived of, none of of us in our wildest dreams thought we'd become as popular as we currently are. MangaDex started off as a side project done on a whim after hearing about Batoto's death. It was developed in one week and funded for the first four months by sdbx.moe. At the four month mark we had already surpassed Batoto's level of traffic and had a big decision to make. Instead of choosing to close our doors and only allowing users with accounts to read manga like Batoto did, we decided to accept financial support from our users and upgrade the infrastructure to meet the increasing demand. Despite weekly DDoS attacks and an exponential level of visitor growth, we've managed to grow our infrastructure to the point to be able to handle enough traffic to beat KissManga in a little over a year's time since then. Thanks to the work put in by staff, scanlators, and users, we now boast 7.5 million monthly visitors as well as over 350,000 registered users. These are some truly amazing numbers we didn't expect to ever have when we first started the site last year. @Holo's initial creation of MangaDex and the additional development from our devs @Teasday, @rdn, and @icelord is nothing short of amazing when there's been no incentive to improve MD beyond the personal satisfaction of a job well done and a desire to be able to read their favorite titles on a non-ad infested reader.
The most dangerous thing a project like ours can face, I believe, is stagnation. We could have rested on our laurels, content to have surpassed Batoto's visitor traffic within the first few months of the site's creation. But @Holo was more ambitious than we took him for. His dream has been to prove that a manga reader *can* be successful by not allowing ads, respecting scanlator wishes, and refusing to allow official translations to be hosted. I personally had doubts. On the whole, readers don't generally care where they get their manga, so long as they can get it. It seemed common sense that the aggregator with the most complete manga library would win. How could a site that had chosen to hobble itself like we have ever come close to beating those sites? But @Holo believed that we could succeed and eventually made believers of all of us. And so we've worked with that single goal in mind: to surpass unscrupulous aggregators and become king of the hill. Rather than being content with just following Batoto's example, we've improved on their past mistakes and innovated along the way. We've allowed hosting of hentai, let users upload chapters without needing prior approval, expanded the dev team, released our beta drama-cd reader, created MDList to eventually compete with MAL (the importer is currently being worked on!), added volume cover galleries, added links to the official publishers, implemented genre filters, and the list is so long and full of future projects that I'm not allowed to mention yet that your jaw would probably drop.
Our growth has been monstrous and nigh unstoppable. We have effectively doubled our infrastructure and capacity every several months since the first day of operation. We've suffered through CloudFlare throttling, persistent DDoS attacks, jealous competitors, and the testing of new features on production (we love you anyways Holo!). It has only made us stronger in the end and has even landed us an amazing sponsorship from Path Network for our North American image servers.
But we're not stopping here - with your help, we will continue growing. So please spread the word and get all your friends reading here too!
With heartfelt thanks,
Zeph and the MangaDex Team
There was stunned disbelief and then wild joy when @Plykiya reported the numbers. Our hard work had paid off! But, my dear readers, there is no denying that we couldn't have done this without you. Without your conscious decision to support scanlators by reading manga on our website, your financial support to help keep the lights on and running, and simply reading and enjoying our content library, there's no way we could have come this far. We also want to take the time to thank scanlators who've chosen to support us by uploading their work here. Our success is yours also. So we want you to share in our accomplishment! Be proud. You're part of a great achievement.
When MangaDex was first conceived of, none of of us in our wildest dreams thought we'd become as popular as we currently are. MangaDex started off as a side project done on a whim after hearing about Batoto's death. It was developed in one week and funded for the first four months by sdbx.moe. At the four month mark we had already surpassed Batoto's level of traffic and had a big decision to make. Instead of choosing to close our doors and only allowing users with accounts to read manga like Batoto did, we decided to accept financial support from our users and upgrade the infrastructure to meet the increasing demand. Despite weekly DDoS attacks and an exponential level of visitor growth, we've managed to grow our infrastructure to the point to be able to handle enough traffic to beat KissManga in a little over a year's time since then. Thanks to the work put in by staff, scanlators, and users, we now boast 7.5 million monthly visitors as well as over 350,000 registered users. These are some truly amazing numbers we didn't expect to ever have when we first started the site last year. @Holo's initial creation of MangaDex and the additional development from our devs @Teasday, @rdn, and @icelord is nothing short of amazing when there's been no incentive to improve MD beyond the personal satisfaction of a job well done and a desire to be able to read their favorite titles on a non-ad infested reader.
The most dangerous thing a project like ours can face, I believe, is stagnation. We could have rested on our laurels, content to have surpassed Batoto's visitor traffic within the first few months of the site's creation. But @Holo was more ambitious than we took him for. His dream has been to prove that a manga reader *can* be successful by not allowing ads, respecting scanlator wishes, and refusing to allow official translations to be hosted. I personally had doubts. On the whole, readers don't generally care where they get their manga, so long as they can get it. It seemed common sense that the aggregator with the most complete manga library would win. How could a site that had chosen to hobble itself like we have ever come close to beating those sites? But @Holo believed that we could succeed and eventually made believers of all of us. And so we've worked with that single goal in mind: to surpass unscrupulous aggregators and become king of the hill. Rather than being content with just following Batoto's example, we've improved on their past mistakes and innovated along the way. We've allowed hosting of hentai, let users upload chapters without needing prior approval, expanded the dev team, released our beta drama-cd reader, created MDList to eventually compete with MAL (the importer is currently being worked on!), added volume cover galleries, added links to the official publishers, implemented genre filters, and the list is so long and full of future projects that I'm not allowed to mention yet that your jaw would probably drop.
Our growth has been monstrous and nigh unstoppable. We have effectively doubled our infrastructure and capacity every several months since the first day of operation. We've suffered through CloudFlare throttling, persistent DDoS attacks, jealous competitors, and the testing of new features on production (we love you anyways Holo!). It has only made us stronger in the end and has even landed us an amazing sponsorship from Path Network for our North American image servers.
But we're not stopping here - with your help, we will continue growing. So please spread the word and get all your friends reading here too!
With heartfelt thanks,
Zeph and the MangaDex Team
