I can't remember the exact year. It was some time in the late 90's when I first started stormthecastle.com. And at that time things were very different.
Websites were small in size because the owner of the website had to pay for traffic. What I mean is that the larger the pages, and the more traffic to the website, the more it cost the webmaster (me).
It was only natural in those early days. Bandwidth was at a premium.
And there was no such thing as advertisements. They didn't exist. - Those were good times! The web was quickly growing and there was an amazing amount of creativity, exploration, and trial and error.
You could find amazing and unique gems. You just had to spend the time to look around.
And I had to overcome some hurdles over the years.
Mysterious disappearance of the website
In an early year my website simply disappeared one day. And I had no idea why? I tried contacting the server company and they were gone! Totally disappeared, along with my website and I would imagine other websites too. And I couldn't transfer my domain name (stormthecastle.com) because the server company had to sign off on it. Internic ran the web and they needed verification from the server company.
The web, back then, wasn't what it is now. And there were no cell phones. There was almost no way for me to track down the server company. But... what I did was go to my local library.
Every company in the USA has to register with the federal government. And all those companies are listed in a series of books. And libraries carried those books. (The Dun & Bradstreet reference book of American Business)
I found the company listing and the name and telephone number of the president of the company. Yup!
So, I went back home and used my wall mounted telephone with it's spiral cord and I called the guy!
And I asked him to sign over my domain name with Internic so I could transfer the website to another server company. And he did it! Yay!
Email hacked
At one point the email company I was with got hacked and tens of thousands of emails, along with passwords were compromised. And it all showed up on the dark web.
Somebody purchased my email information and took control of my email, changing the password. It caused a cascade of problems with many of my other accounts that used that email for verification. It was a terribly nefarious thing.
And the email hosting company tried to keep it quiet. This was a very bad look for them.
And it was a very harrowing experience for me.
It took me a week and a lot of actual phone calls to re-capture everything. Until then I had no control of my email or my website.
But I got it all done.
That was almost the end of the whole www adventure for me.
Youtube shadowbanned me
After more than ten years on youtube I got shadow banned by my partner manager over at youtube. I don't know why. I never got a strike against me and I never posted a video that was even remotely controversial. No politics, no religion, no opinions, no nothing other than creative arts and crafts, travel and how-to's.
I was doing really well on youtube and had accumulated almost 100 million video views. And I was making a modest living. And my channel was driving a lot of traffic over to stormthecastle.com
The thing that really hurt is that my partner manage lied to me. Told me that she was going to help me build my channel. But what she did, for some reason, was kill my channel. That was eight years ago and I had up until that time 355,000 subscribers and I was doing 2+ million views a month.
I used to post a video and within an hour it had thousands of views. Now when I post a video it never gets to a thousand views, even after a year.
I still have, eight years later, 355,000 subscribers just like I had then. Youtube was recommending my channel between 7,000 and 8,000 times a day. And it suddenly dropped to 2-3 recommendations a day. Not 2-3 thousand, but 2-3.
I had no idea, at the time, what was going on. I just kept working very hard, 14 hour days every day trying to save my channel. I didn't realize there was nothing I could do to save it. Youtube wanted it dead.
I rode it all the way down, working myself to exhaustion and I ended up losing everything and homeless. That was a bitter lesson in trust for me. I devoted my life to youtube and paid a heavy price for it.
Amazon betrayal
Amazon used to pay 8% of the sale to people like me. This is for referring a sale to their website. One day I got an automated email from them saying that they are changing that to 4%. Nothing I could do about that. If I didn't like it then too bad for me. A year later they notified me again that it would be cut to 3%. Oh well, they don't need me anymore. Just like that my amazon income was cut 67 percent of what it was. Amazon didn't need people like me anymore.
The homeless adventure and another shutdown of the website
For a period of time there things were really bad. And my savior was the Veterans Administration. They placed me in a group home for homeless Vets. Possibly saved my life.
But, financially I was in ruin and there was a period of time (almost a year) when I didn't have the money to renew my website hosting so the website went down. There was no stormthecastle.com for almost a year.
Now it's google and the threat of AI
For years google was simply a search engine. It gave you a listing of potential websites that offered what you were looking for.
Then they started placing ads at the very top of the search listing. That changed things a lot. It siphoned off web visitors to all websites.
And now google is outright stealing the web from everybody. Their AI scours the whole internet; finds the information relevant to your search, re-phrases it a little bit and puts that right at the top of the search listings. So, you don't have to go anywhere but the google page.
Any listings I had on google are now pushed way down on the page; if they show up at all. I used to be the very first google listing for many different topics. Now I have pretty much disappeared.
Chinese hackers
A few years back I got a telephone call from my server company. They were having a serious problem on all their servers with hackers coming out of China that were mass attempting to break passwords on website hosting accounts. They were looking for my permission, and highly recommended all IP's coming out the country of China be blocked. So we did that. I wasn't getting any real traffic out of that country anyway.
Nefarious bots
I had a problem for a while with a whole lot of bots that were hitting my website with nefarious intent. They were hitting my advertisements in an attempt to skew my numbers and get my advertisers to close my accounts. Fake clicks! That was a serious problem that took many back and forth telephone calls and emails with my server company.
Theft of Intellectual Property
Over the years I have had an enormous amount of my copyrighted material stolen from me. This includes hundreds of web pages, a whole website, books, articles, tutorials, Amazon product listings and more. As a little guy what am I to do? I don't have the money to hire a lawyer. And any email I send about this is met with no response. I have spent an enormous amount of time and energy to create original content. And unscrupulous people simply steal it - with no consequences.
The problem with human beings
Part of this trend with all the problems and challenges I have had just being a guy with a website is the loss of humanity.
With this whole internet thing it is very easy to lose the humanity of people on the other side of the screen. It dehumanizes everybody. And it becomes so easy to cheat, steal, hack and do bad things. And there is very little risk of punishment for people who do these things.
The internet is separating us and changing us. We are fast evolving from people into account numbers.
Since the beginning of humanity we have been wired for personal, face-to-face interactions. It keeps us in check. We have now lost that.
Don't be evil
I remember a story that went around the web many years ago. It's a true story about google.
In those early years google had no way to monetize the website. And the whole operation was run by engineers who weren't concerned with making money. They were concerned with the beautiful thing that the web was becoming.
Well, the story goes that in a very large conference room the big shot engineers had a big meeting. And they could see the tide was changing. And they knew that right after them the big shot marketing people were taking over the conference room - with big plans on making money.
One of the engineers left a message for them on the chalk board. It was "Don't be evil".
Well Google, (Now Alphabet inc.) you have a market capitilization of over 3 trillion dollars and in so doing you have become evil and ruined that beautiful thing that the web almost was.
email, spam, fraud, account hacking, identity theft, corruption, deception, and people defrauding, tricking, and bilking people out of billions of dollars.
It's a darn shame. If you are like me you have to clear out fraudulent emails from your email account every single day. It isn't right. The whole thing is just getting worse. I have seen it getting worse and worse over the years.
And now....
I think my website is beautiful. It still maintains that sense of wonder and exploration that the early web had. And I am going to keep it that way... for as long as I can afford it, or until I die. Then it becomes just another forgotten footnote and testament to what the web could have been.
I used to make an honest living with youtube and stormthecastle.com. I don't anymore. Combined they earn me an average of less than six dollars a day (And that's going down). But it's enough to keep the website up.
Thanks for stopping by. I hope that in some small way I can inspire you.
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