The Board

Sexyloops turns 23 tomorrow! For those of you who weren’t around in the early days this is how the site looked in 2001…
99% bollocks, 2% inspiration!

Cheers, Paul

Underestimated on both counts :-)

Congratulations anyway!

Congrats!

Thanks

Just realised something, Sexyloops is older than Google by 5 days!

No wonder the better ánswers in a flycasting search comes from searching SL rather than Google :-D

Congrats again

Cheers
Lasse

Pre-Google, search engines were pretty crap although we were high ranked despite this. We actually had to submit pages to search engines! Google is quite amazing really. As far as I can tell it was simply about ranking pages according to how many clicks they got and whether new related searches followed and after how long and what words were used. That’s what I would do anyway. But to go from that simple idea to what it is now is truly remarkable. What I dislike about it, is all the tracking and information gathering - which of course in part is why it’s so effective. Also it’s now very commercial, as one would expect, but that skews results and undermines their usefulness.

As far as I’m concerned however, the real “damage” that has been done is the social media platforms. Quite a few sites that were very active 20 years ago have disappeared and discussion forums have also taken a real hit. That’s why I wrote that you had to adapt. There were opportunities back then for a fishing ISP provider. I think that would have cornered the market at that time. It’s different now. I did have the idea to give everyone a personal website space on Sexyloops. A bit like the FP format but multiplied by 100 or 1000 even. But long-term direction for me was always a brand. Sexyloops really was about building a brand to couple up with putting fly fishing on TV. It has become much more than this of course. But that was always the original intention 23 years ago and is why we have survived when others haven’t.

Now I have a longer term vision too, where a large chunk of Sexyloops income can go towards other projects such as the indigenous Orang Asli Sungai Tiang project, sponsoring the world championships and so on.

Fly fishing was always seen as a bit “stuffy” in the UK at least. I wanted to change that. I can tell you one thing though, it’s really enhanced my life! There has been some luck involved. I originally tried to buy flyfishing.co.uk and was very lucky that it had gone some two years prior. I was also very lucky to buy Sexyloops.com when I did and not only Sexyloops.co.uk because about one month later a porn site appeared that would undoubtedly have taken that domain name

But it’s the fly casting manual and later the Board that allowed Sexyloops to establish itself. And going seven days a week back in yr 2000 was a good move. We have had fabulous writers over the years. Kind of the who’s who of the funky fly fishing world. It’s wonderful really. And I reckon the next 25 years are going to be off the planet

I have a big job coming up of reorganising old content. The current CMS is 10 years old now. And there is 13 years of content that’s not even in there. I would like to build a comprehensive fly fishing glossary that connects and updates Sexyloops content. I think I might employ someone to do this very exciting work!!

Cheers, Paul