NOTE: Post has been bumped up. There are newer posts below it.
You've all seen the news by now. Season 9 has officially been confirmed as the final season of Friendship is Magic. While Hasbro does have plans to continue things after the fact in other, un-announced ways (possibly with the mane 6 and friends), the actual nine year running series will be ending.
Will Equestria Daily be closing it's doors after season 9 ends?
Is everything collapsing?
Is the end of the ride officially sitting out there somewhere in 2019?
Let's dive in and talk about it!
From the EQD Side - No, We Aren't Closing
I've gotten a ton of emails asking if the site will be closing down.
Do you even know how far my obsession has gone?!
For the past near-decade, we've been here servin' up cartoon horses every single day nonstop. There were two days in our entire history that we didn't, and it was due to a massive outage at our host that didn't let us post pone. Have things slowed down? Sure. You can't really use EQD as the perfect gauge though. Half of this site is literally built around sending people away. We bring people in with news and to showcase the best stuff in pony, then give you a link that fires you off elsewhere. It's the unfortunate side effect of being a news/creative spotlight site first with community features second rather than the other way around.
So yes, EQD will struggle and has always struggled. That's why I opened the Patreon a few years ago. It got us through the last year, and as more people hop on, it continues to help tremendously. The ad revenue drops and Patreon picks up the slack. I wish there were some better rewards we could do, but I'm out of ideas there that wouldn't corrupt it in some way with pay-2-win nonsense. That's not happening.
The site takes a crazy amount of time to run with all the nonsense that explodes behind the scenes, posts to build, articles to write, submissions to review, and endless digging for stuff to show off. But as long as I can devote all of my time to it, the only thing it will do is improve. More events, new posts, new ideas. If you have any, be sure to send em my way.
Even if the patreon died, I'd still do my absolute best to keep the news going at the very least. The actual archive of the stuff we've posted will remain for as long as Google allows it, and we have an entire backup in the works of everything if they do shut down our platform.
We will cover G5 unless it is absolutely terrible.
And If that happens (please no)...
We will just stick with covering the fandom.
And if everything collapses entirely for some catastrophic reason, It was an awesome 9 years and I'll always remember it as some of the most fun I've had in my life.
Also Trixie is a mane character now and all my personal goals are COMPLETE.
Bats are next~
So spread the word. Let people know we exist. EQD's first goal was to show off the fandom and get people creating. There are new people discovering pony every day and they have no way of finding us due to our terrible pageranking with Google. Apparently Equestria Daily should have just been called "MY LITTLE PONY BRONY TOP 10 WEBSITE FRIENDSHIP COMMUNITY.com" As long as you keep supporting the site either with patreon or spreading the word, we will always be here.
EQD Aside, the MLP Fandom Will Never Die
That catastrophic fandom collapse I mentioned up there? It will never happen.
Even if G5 is the worst thing ever, we've never really needed the actual episodes to keep our creative train going. Hell, half the stuff I sort now days in the submit box is OC pony content. We've built our own worlds. Created our own cast. Taken the concept of My Little Pony and expanded it to every corner of the creative spectrum. A bunch of 22 minute snippets once a week for a third of the year isn't what has kept us fueled. Lauren Faust laid the groundwork during season one. From there, we built the skyscraper.
It turns out, a lot of us are just addicted to pony. They are fun to draw, fun to write about, fun to make music for, fun to animate, and overall just a blast to work with. The top of Deviant Art is still covered in our art. Songs from the show still hit a million views on Youtube. Even the furries continue to piss and moan about how much we spam them with horses. I remember the days when they only had foxes, dogs, and wolves. Now everything has hooves~
We've already survived eight hiatuses. I guarantee you are still going to have things to ponyponypony with long after season 9 ends.
The NEVER-ENDING Creative Train that Other Fandoms Are Jealous Of
Pony has lasting power. It's something other fandoms want more than anything, and almost none of them ever come close. Look at how much stuff has popped up and died creatively while we chug along with insane amounts of content. Undertale, Five Nights at Freddies, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Rick and Morty, Gravity Falls, the list goes on.
Undertale's Deltarune popped up a few months ago and a flood of art and music happened. It lasted a month then slowed to a trickle. Season 8 of My Little Pony ended in OCTOBER and half of it leaked long before that. How are we doing on content? I literally fill an art post up with 40+ high quality drawings a day, another one on top of that with 30+ anthro/humanized drawings every few days, an open art post with 50+ a week, and if we went out and gathered all the stuff kids and new artists are making we'd be dropping hundreds more. None of these other fandoms do that. Not even Star Wars when the first of the new movies released had that kind of creative energy. And that's just a single category here.
The reality is, we moved on from needing the show a long time ago. It's good for a bit of a new idea injection, and it keeps EQD's news side sated and is about all we pop up on Google with, but the fandom itself absolutely thrives on creating on it's own.
Conventions that close end up replaced by others. Meetup groups that close offline find homes online. We live in the age of information, and if there is one thing this group of horse lovers is good at, it's bombarding everyone with an overwhelming amount of it.
In the end, it's up to you to keep your connections in place. If you burn out some day, that's fine. Not everyone is as wacked out as those of us that have plastered ponies all over our desktops for 8 years and hold weekly rituals praying to Celestia for guidance while sacrificing a blindbag. Just know that it will always still be here, with huge communities still doing things in the name of equine domination. And EQD will be here spamming bats at 3AM and taking April Fools way too far.
As long as you keep ponying on, others will do it too. There are hundreds of thousands of people all still very much obsessed with these characters clamoring for content, and thousands of creators all ready to deliver it. We might see dips and rises, but people will always be writing, drawing, editing, and overall celebrating pony long into the future.
(tl;dr your soul belongs to poni)
