Anime Motivation began in 2016, around May of that year. By June 2016 anime quotes content was being pushed out to the public.
Before that in May anime quotes content was being tested on Facebook group pages, and to my surprise, people loved it overwhelmingly which led to the decision to make it official.
But what happened before Anime Motivation was created?
- Who influenced Anime Motivation?
- What websites Impacted the decision to start Anime Motivation?
- Who inspired the idea of Anime Motivation?
That’s what this post is designed to answer: the influences, though very few, which came about before 2016.
Very few people in the industry (or any industry) admit these things out loud, which makes this kind of post even more relevant.
Let’s talk about it.
Non Ranking Order:
1. Honeys Anime
Honeys Anime is a website I’ve known about since 2015 at least. This was less than a year after I decided to start an anime related business or website after pondering what business I should go with.
My main goal was to start reading through anime websites to get a feel for the space as it stood back in 2015, and in actuality, there weren’t many “different” anime websites compared to 2024.
I searched for anime and Honeys Anime was the main website back then that had any sort of visibility for recommendations, top 10 content, and things of that nature.
It was more the fact that I was seeing if any websites were doing quotes, and Honey’s Anime was one that came up despite not having that like many others even till this day.
In some small way from reading through various websites talking about anime, Honey’s Anime played a role in the formation of Anime Motivation despite the angle being ultimately different in general.
2. animequotes.net
This website doesn’t even exist anymore but when it did, it had a handful of quotes on their website from the more obvious shows like Fullmetal Alchemist, DBZ, maybe Berserk and various other shows.
The one thing I noticed from this website in 2015 was how dated it looked. It looked like it was made in the 2000s or the late 1990s if we’re being real about it.
This was something I took into account when deciding what I would do different with my own anime website that would be catered to quotes.
animequotes.net wasn’t being updated much either, so there was that element to consider.
This gave me the idea to present the quotes a certain way, as in using images instead of only text which is what they were doing.
They shut down a few years later and that was the end of it. Maybe they were tired of running it or had no interest anymore.
3. Ranker
As pointed out by Wikipedia:
“Launched in August 2009, the site was founded by Clark Benson, who created Ranker as an alternative to user reviews available on ecommerce sites. Ranker offers crowdsourced polls and lists across a variety of topics, including rankings of food, drinks, and celebrities.”
Ranker is a website that I assumed has been around for longer than I know, proven by the 2009 date above. It’s not an anime website by any stretch of the imagination, but they do cover a lot of anime which can’t be denied.
Their main thing is the voting of each point made when doing anime posts or anything entertainment wise.
Of all the websites back in 2015 that weren’t anime dedicated, Ranker was the one who covered anime in a genuine way I’d like to say (considering how the space changed with CBR and the like).
Ranker, similar to Honey’s anime, did what is now typical these days but wasn’t back then (top 10s, etc), but Ranker also had very few quote pages for certain anime shows.
Maybe DBZ but I can’t be certain.
Either way, I took note of that and this played an influence in shaping Anime Motivation and forming it at some point in 2016.
4. Less-real.com
Finally, the 4th site to influence Anime Motivation was Less Real, a website that decided to shut its doors around maybe 2019. Keeping the lights on but not bothering to maintain it so to speak.
But then during the pandemic or after they shut it down entirely, and it’s no longer accessible.
They, similar to animequotes.net, had quotes on their site but Less Real had more and they’d been operating since the 2000s at some point. Literally an OG anime website.
But similar to animequotes.net, they didn’t do images and only did text quotes. So of course, with the extremely limited amount of examples, it was easy to take notice.
This influenced and played a role in Anime Motivatino being what it is today, and more importantly, what it was in the beginning.
Despite these 4 websites influencing animemotivation.com, it is also true that I already tested the idea of image quotes back in late 2014 with a separate website I have.
The style and design of those images are where I got the idea in the first place (as far as the style) once I started digging into the anime space.
I just copied the design from my other site down to the detail but applied it in an anime context.
In the end, animemotivation.com would have existed anyway once I had the idea back in late 2014, which evolved as I started watching BLEACH in 2015, as well as Inuyasha, AOT, and of course, researching the space.
But there is no denying that despite the few examples available in 2015, these 4 websites (Ranker, animequotes.net, Less Real, and Honey’s Anime) played a role in influencing and shaping the end result.
This gave me better ideas and ways of going about building the content.
