Rant and 2017 plan below
I just finished reading everyones messages in here and it honestly saddens me to see that the board is not the magical place it used to be. I have been on the forums for a very short amount of time (May 2015) so I don't know what Coldplaying was like before. However, what I can see from reading old threads is that there was a huge amount of active users that were almost like a family. Nowadays there are not many active users and there isn't that excitement that I once got when visiting Coldplaying. There are a few things that caused this:
1. The Viva La Vida and Mylo Xyloto era were heavily teased which brought a bit of excitement and conversation onto the board. For A Head Full of Dreams we only got those posters in the tube. For me that was honestly the most exciting moment of my time on Coldplaying. The LP7 thread was buzzing and the large amounts of traffic on the site were enough to crash the servers (many times a day!). However Coldplay's methods of teasing things have changed in previous years. After AHFOD was released, I stopped visiting the board (even though I owned the site) and focused on social media.
2. Which brings me to my next point: Social media has replaced message boards and forums. When Coldplaying launched it's social media accounts in 2009, they were one of a kind. There had been no successful Coldplay news accounts before that. Coldplaying became bigger and bigger on social media and accounts like Atlas Project, Coldplay Brasil and Coldplayzone joined to make Coldplay's twitter presence even larger. Marc and I attempted to increase our presence even more last year and ended up gaining 110k followers on Facebook within 6 months. Nowadays casual Coldplay fans use Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to communicate whereas hardcore Coldplay fans will visit Coldplaying. That wasn't the case before social media. Coldplaying was simply the only place to go for Coldplay discussions.
3. Some of you are blaming the change in ownership as the problem. Although I never spoke to him more than a few times, Ian was an amazing owner and built the backbone of Coldplaying along with his family and friends. The Coldplaying team was comprised of family members and close friends. Nowadays it is made up of 12 team members who are very close, yet some of us have never even met. I can't fault my team members but only blame myself. Marc was also amazing and had big ideas for Coldplaying. He helped bring many new users to the site, completely changed our social media presence for the better and developed Coldplaying into a well marketed website that was fun for its users. I have only been owner for around a year but I have redesigned the website, brought back the wiki (currently being redesigned but not the biggest priority), I am currently in the process of reuploading all the files from the Coldplay Multimedia section and have also changed the way our team works. I could not have done any of this without the amazing team that put so much effort into this site. Our social media team work so hard on producing quality posts to publish on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The moderators are always working on the site, there is at least one moderator online at all times!
While Coldplaying's blog and forums only received about three million visitors in 2016, our social media receives double that every week. Coldplaying is not failing, it is only getting bigger and bigger but unfortunately the forums are dying. 2017 is going to be the year that I focus on the forums. Already I have uploaded a huge amount of concerts from the parachutes era in our new multimedia section. In a few months, Coldplaying should have hundreds of Coldplay concerts available to download from fast dedicated servers (no more waiting for mega!). The gallery is also being updated regularly by our social media team, we have spent a lot of money on licenses so we can add even more high quality photos to the gallery. The wiki may become available by the end of the year but no promises! Finally the forums should become a bit more popular. With a bit of work and co-operation, I think that we can work to bring much more users to the forum. Just please keep in mind that I am only 16 and this is the first site I have managed so please be patient :P Now let's get ready for this new EP which should be amazing!
