When enough years have passed, you can look back at them and recognize that each year has its own personality. I mean that for the world in general, and on an individual level. That’s partly why I’m conflicted about seeing 2011 go. On the one hand, it wasn’t exactly a banner year in the history of the planet – war, famine, upheaval, the price of a paperclip (anyone know what movie I’m referencing?) it seemed like bad news was waiting for us at every turn. Clearly, from that perspective, everyone should have breathed a sigh of relief when the ball finally dropped.

But as far as MyPod is concerned, 2011 was so exciting, it’s hard to not be a little disappointed that the year is over. 2011 was our first full year in business, and, like many paths, we ended up someplace far different – and far better – than where we started.

We began with the idea that MyPod Studios would provide a licensed video platform to B2B companies that wanted to use video to market themselves, but weren’t comfortable using YouTube. Not a bad idea, and still one we may explore one day, but we quickly discovered that the real potential for us was developing a more broad based video network for general audiences. So we set out on a path to gather content – not just any content, but content that we thought would be entertaining, informative, and interesting for people to watch.

And that’s when things started to happen. We forged new investor relationships, and are now a proud part of the Black Ocean portfolio of companies. We redeveloped our database and, after uncountable hours of non-stop work, finally launched our entire network in September. It was a pretty quiet launch - outside of our immediate family, not many people had bothered to stop by the site. But within a month we had hit our stride, and by the end of October we were starting to see some real traffic. We logged over 75 million pageviews in November, and another 85 million in December, and ended the year as the 190th most heavily trafficked site according to Quantcast.

Needless to say, it's been a crazy busy year, with a tremendous amount of changes. And all along, we've been hard at work getting together some of upcoming advancements that we plan to unveil in 2012. So while it may be hard to let this year go, we have a lot to look forward to in the year ahead. Which brings me to my next article...