A couple of years ago in the scene i’ve belonged to online then, it was more or less customary that everyone starts a fansite or a “shrine” for the anime or band they loved. I still see some point in shrines. A shrine is a tiny website with only a few pages, a largely graphic design and minimal textual content devoted to the topic.

But a fansite is large(r), with quite a lot of work put into it, whatever the form of site is. Just writing the content and hunting down some rare images takes ages. I mean it, from experience. But just now i realised that i’ve never been to a fansite with the purpose to check out some info, or just read about details. And that’s the static content the writers (usually) put such insane amounts of work into.

Static content just won’t make people stay there. Once they’ve seen it all, without anything else to do they leave and probably never come back. What makes people stay and/or come back is dynamic content.

Forums, where on the one hand, they can interact with other fans, and on the other, generate unique content. News feeds, which is pretty much the same as writing a thematic blog. And if they still need the info, a cross-linked wiki is surely there in the blue with tons of data (part of which is user-contributed) on the topic. I wonder if other websites (anything beside communities, shrine-types, blogs and wikis, and of course webshops/download portals) would have a chance to survive at all. Like, at all.