Going on our eighth year, CelebStoner is one of the oldest marijuana blogs. When I started it, our only competition was High Times, Cannabis Culture and Drug War Chroncle. Now there are dozens of pot blogs, making it a very crowded field.
I launched CelebStoner.com in 2006 while I was still working part-time at High Times. My long association with the magazine was coming to an end and I needed to make a next move. Blogging was just catching on. I decided going online and leaving print behind was the right direction for me.
Thanks to a cousin of mine, I learned the content management system (CMS), Joomla. He designed the site in a rudimentary blog format. In December of 2006, CelebStoner was born. One of our first posts, P. Diddy smoking a blunt at a club in Toronto, received pretty good traffic. Celebrities and pot, that would be the main focus of the site.
I was a celebrity chaser when I worked at High Times. I had pretty good luck, scoring interviews and cover stories with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson and Ozzy Osbourne. I also had a background in marijuana reporting, being that my first job at HIgh Times was news editor. Further, I had began my professional writing career as a music journalist. So my idea was to combine celebrity, news and entertainment, all connected by marijuana - a site loosely based on what I had learned at High Times, but with my personal spin on it.
Several years later it was time for a redesign. I found a web expert via Craigs List. His sophisticated approach to CelebStoner took the site to new levels of quality. Traffic was increasing and so were ad revenues. CelebStoner had become a modest success.
After several years, the designer left to pursues another career, leaving me without technical support for about a year. The site needed help. I found it in the person of Garret Overstreet, an Oklahoma marijuana activist who I met at a NORML Conference. He was giving a talk about the web and blogging. Afterwards I went over and introduced myself and told him I was looking for someone to come aboard and give CelebStoner an update and a fresh look.
Garret was game for the challenge. He kept telling me about a new CMS called MODX, that he hated Joomla and wasn't a big fan of Go Daddy, our server, either. After about a year, we started having major problems with Go Daddy. They said our files were corrupted and we basically needed to gut the site and do it over. It was Garret's chance to shine. So this past February we shut down the site for two months and Garret rebuilt it. We switched to a new server, Skytoaster. Garret streamlined the site, making it easier to look at and simpler to navigate. He optimized it for mobile use and made sure we had all the requisite social media bells and whistles. On 4/20, we relaunched. After working out some kinks, the site was up and running again. We truly started over, with only a handful of posts left rom the site's previous incarnation. It was tough to let the archives of six years go, but it was necessary to move on. This version was not loaded down with a lot of old posts; it was brand spanking new.
Site traffic has rebounded to previous levels. We have a solid audience, which I thank all of you reading this for. Like I said at the top, we have a lot of company now, which means the sundry marijuana blogs must compete for increasingly smaller chunks of the ad revenue pie. But if you run a lean ship and provide quality information, you should be able to survive. Hopefully, the new businesses in Colorado and Washington will soon flex their financial muscles and start spending promotional dollars in the marijuana blogoshere. One thing is for sure: CelebStoner is here to stay.
I want to thank the bloggers who regularly contribute to the site: Tommy Chong, Doug McVay, Preston Peet, David Malmo-Levine, Patrick Hall, Alison Margolin and Beth Mann. We're especially looking for a blogger based in Colorado. If you'd like to write for the site, please contact me at info@celebstoner.com.
In addition, I'd like thank all the advertisers who support the site, starting with WeedMaps. We really couldn't do it without you.
Also, in 2013, I started hosting The CelebStoner Show (Fridays, 2-3 pm ET) on the Time 4 Hemp Global Broadcasting Network. Thanks to Casper Leitch for the opportunity.
Let's legalize it in 2014!
