Unreality TV

I haven't made much fanfare on here about becoming self-employed.

Oh, in my head I wanted to write a sermon about how good it feels to be achieving a lifelong dream. The last few months at Howden, I was becoming more and more aware of how bogged down in paperwork we were becoming. It's hard to be passionate about something when you can't move for filling in forms.

So yes, leaving to work on my own business has been a great feeling. Liberating. Empowering. Lots of big motivational words like that.

But I'm a realist too, and I don't want to pen some high and mighty words that'll come back to haunt me later. It's a fact of life that the online advertising market is contracting at the moment. Revenues so far have been fine, but you'd be a fool if you thought that money just comes flooding in when you've got a website that's doing well.

On Wednesday 24th September, I handed in my notice at work. As of the 1st of November, I'll be a free agent. And I'm not going back into paid employment for the moment - I'll be working for Unreality TV.

A little over three years ago, Lisa and I started a little blog about Reality TV. I was working for Cleaver Fulton Rankin and doing a bit of web design work in my spare time to bring in extra cash.

Unreality TV has had its share of ups and downs. The first year was the worst, as we balanced the growing readership with the relatively poor revenues the site would bring. We toyed with having a forum. The forum failed twice, then caught on in its third incarnation.

We spread ourselves too thin, trying to start blogs in different areas, then realising that we didn't have the time to commit to them all. After a crisis discussion, we decided to scale back massively and concentrate on Unreality since it was our biggest (read: only) successful brand.

Two years of further hard work (mostly on Lisa's part) have resulted in a very successful site, averaging a million pageviews per month and a couple of thousand forum users.

I finally tipped the scales with my music blog yesterday. We've been edging toward 4,000 pageviews on Unreality Music over the last month and after coming close a few times, finally tipped the scales yesterday.

That's a milestone for the blog and I'll set my sights now on achieving 5,000 pageviews per day. Hopefully within the next month.

For the second year running, we were invited over to London for the final of X Factor. This time however, Lisa was able to come across with me and attend the press screening and conference afterward.

For me, this series of X Factor has been a washout. Possibly the worst series in its four year history. My own intelligence tells me this, but so did the sight of the assembled jaws of the press, dropping to the ground as Leon Jackson won the competition. The talent competition, I hasten to add.

Thankfully, attending press conferences is still an awesome buzz. You get to mingle with people who write this stuff every day for the tabloids. You get to share opinions and there's more than a fair few cutting remarks about the contestants.

Despite the weak show, I personally hold the publicists in awe. If I could be reborn in a different career, I'd love to do their job.

Haven't posted here in a while, but there's a lot of good stuff going on with Unreality TV and I wanted to share it here.

Unified Themes

Unreality TV has experienced some excellent coverage in the news recently as a result of the Jade Goody/Shilpa Shetty race row. Lisa's taken a lot of calls from radio stations, TV and newspapers looking for her take on the situation and to find out what our readers are saying.