I don't want to be negative because I promised Pugz I wouldn't give him abuse as long as he did what what he said he would, and so far he has, so I won't diss him at all in this. I'll just say my personal thoughts on it.
Firstly, people are falling out of this. Back when I started there were loads of sites with loads of people. Now, essentially there is Letsbeef, Netcees and Body Bags Ent that actually have a sustainable about of traffic.
But that aside, LB could have evolved and grown along with the industry. As Student said, the first thing you have to do is blame @X about Fly Hip Hop. This was essentially "LB V4". It was a new site with a professionally made skin, with brand new features all pertaining to rap battling and the rap culture in general. I don't even know why he didn't go for it in the end, but why weren't those features added to LB? Instead he applied them to Rocbattle.
Actually, all in all it's down to X. X once hit me up after I said he didnt care about LB. He said this was his first site and that I was wrong. Within one year he wanted to close it down and Pugz said he'd take over. X obviously is busy in real life. Rocbattle was this big thing. Grammy award winning producer linking up with X. X was a hustler back then. Lil Flip being involved and everything. X was making moves. But look now. He sold Rocbattle and Beatdisk is absolutely nothing. He's just not into it and took too long to pass LB over.
Pugz didn't have the experience with the site to initially make moves, so we were stagnant for a long time. What was bad is that Pugz thought he could survive with the tournaments he was running. This didnt work because the users of the site had pretty much done EVERYTHING. We've all ran our own tournaments. We've done it all. So Pugz couldn't really just keep the site going with that because it'd already been done.
Two more big downsides were MFD and ClassicK. MFD's 2009 domination meant that there were NO crews being made by vets, and crews are a big incentive on the site for activity. The site was left without any of that rivalry for a long ass time. ClassicK had most of the active guys and every one of them were the friendly uninteresting kind of people, so the forums turned into a clusterfuck of guys being best buds and guys like me were turned away from actually coming onto them cause my interest in the forums were the heated rivalries from the 2008 days.
What Pugz needs to do to keep LB on top is treat it like a business. The event was a good start and is something which needs to be capitalized on. Think back to the X days at the start. He made connections with big name people, and I think Pugz once told me that X was a normal dude mainly posting on web design and javascript websites. He made all these connections from nowhere. Pugz done it with the live event, but it has to be branched out. Try and turn LB into some form of hip hop and rap battling social hub. Work on advertising with other events and stuff. Probably a forums revamp would be needed too.
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