TOY GURU — Is he still here?
I was hoping to contact him.
seems the better question might be "is anyone on here?"
this place is DEAD.
I know, right? I haven't been here in at least 6 months, until my post the other day. RTM used to be a daily stop, even several times a day. After the switch, it lost its timeliness, urgency, and energy, along with most of its users, it seems.
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
While the format change was certainly a factor in forum traffic being down, I think that there are other things contributing as well.
The biggest is the way Twitter has grown. What you looked at the old Toy Buzz (say 4-5 years ago) for is the same thing you get from Twitter, except you can very easily modify who you listen to there. Here, you got everything whether you wanted it all or not. Twitter is something you can get on your phone, has immediacy and let's you easily get many messages you can check up on.
The Toy Buzz message density was lowering consistently since 2008 or so. Really it was dropping before that, but not as much. Add in our problems with spam (the more open your format, the easier it is to spam) and it has been ongoing for at least 6 years.
Another driver has been the general decline of action figures at mass market and smaller, independent companies. This is a very large trend overall and despite the fact that there are more toy-friendly movies out it hasn't resulted in higher sales. This is due to collectors aging and either getting out or moving on to more expensive and high-end collections.
There are also many more specialized sites and forums around today than even 5 years ago that offer alternate places to interact.
The more I have looked at the forum history, the more I believe the 'old' Toy Buzz peaked in the mid 2000's, around 2005-6 or so. If I had to pick a year it really dropped, I would say 2008 but it started before that.
At that time the Toy Biz Marvel Legends line was over and moved to Hasbro. This had a larger impact on the overall toy market than I think most people have realized.
There are certainly other factors as well here.
I'm sure everyone's perspective is different, but I believe the nostalgiac 'old Toy Buzz' has been mostly gone for at least 5 years. I think it was more about people and events at the right time versus format.
-Rob
Oh, one quick item about your original question.
Toy Guru never read this site or posted here. It was even difficult to get Q&A's back from him in e-mail (which was why we stopped doing them and they never even noticed).
Try to contact him at Mattycollector.com, where he is a member of the forum.
-Rob