In late July, anime recommendation engine Anime-Planet got a shiny new makeover. But while the site looks glossily professional now, I know better. Its creator, Kim, known online as sothis, is an anime fan who built this up during her free time.

I’m not an active user of either, but it seems to me that Anime-Planet and My Anime List are the two major contenders when it comes to organizing your watch list. Anime-Planet came first, but My Anime List got a lot of buzz after it was acquired by men’s media company CraveOnline.

Since Kim doesn’t have that kind of corporate backing, I thought it’d be cool to interview her and learn what it’s like running an anime resource hundreds of thousands of fans use—all while managing to live a somewhat normal life!

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Otaku Journalist: When did you first get into anime?

Kim: Unlike many people who’ve been watching anime since they were kids, my journey began much later. Back in the olden days when I was 19, Pokémon was brand new and airing on TV. I happened to catch an episode or two and loved the cute monsters, but shortly after, a friend of mine suggested I watched Evangelion since I’ve always loved darker genres, and I got immediately hooked! I think my third anime was Fruits Basket, which was brand new at the time.

When and why did you first launch Anime-Planet?

People ask me this a lot and tend to be surprised by the answer. The site’s initial incarnation was around December of 2000 and started out on a whim. I used to hang out in a series of Direct Connect hubs called “Anime Planet” (the site’s namesake) and always wanted to take a more active role in the community there. I’d dabbled with HTML in the mid/late 90s during the Geocities era and decided I wanted to learn how to design databases, so I created a super basic V1 of Anime-Planet that consisted of nothing more than a user picture database, a forum, and a quotes page. Here’s a picture of it, on Facebook.

About 6 months later I had noticed a trend of people coming into chat and asking “I like [this anime], what else would I like?”, and wanting to expand my database skills further, I created the first iteration of the recommendation database. I never advertised the site outside of the hubs (which had a few hundred people at most), but word started to spread because a recommendation resource didn’t exist anywhere (and continued to not exist anywhere until one of our competitors launched their own rec system around 2007-2008). The site has grown ever since and now includes the personal lists, the multiple video integrations, etc.

Let’s get a little nerdy for a second. What kind of programming language, framework, and back end database does a site like this use? And how much time do you spend working on this stuff every week?

To answer the latter part of the question first, basically any time I’m not at my paying job, I’m working on Anime-Planet in some way. Whether coding it, training moderators, speccing out new features, fixing bugs, adding/writing site synopses, adding new videos, anything.

Spec-wise right now we run on 4 servers via DigitalOcean droplets. The site is a beast and continuously outgrows its resources, but I’m hopeful that on DigitalOcean’s infrastructure we won’t have to move again for awhile. The site’s core database is PostgreSQL and we maintain MySQL solely for the forum software, which we hope to integrate with the core site accounts soon. The site’s primary language is PHP and with V4’s launch we upgraded our CSS to leverage Pure. We also use LESS as of V4.

What are some exciting stats about Anime Planet? Like, how many people use it, how much traffic does it get, how many anime and characters are listed on it?

About 500,000 people access Anime-Planet every month from across the globe. We have around 6,500 anime, over 61,000 characters (with in-depth tagging and other categorizations) and a little over 15,000 manga. There’s also the 26,000+ legal anime episodes available to watch on the site.

That’s a lot of people! So you’re making a ton of money from Anime-Planet, right?

Definitely not :)

At Anime-Planet’s size and age, people assume it’s a corporate-run site with tons of resources and a huge staff. In actuality the site is run by a single admin (me) and a handful of volunteers, and I’ve never paid myself a dime. We have a small amount of ad units up on the site which help pay for the always-growing server costs, but that’s about it. Any dollar that comes into the site, whether it be through an ad impression or a user donation, goes straight back into the site in some way.

So if you’re not making money and it takes so much of your time and energy, why do you run Anime-Planet?

Anime-Planet was, and always has been, a labor of love. It started out as a random side project and has blossomed into something much larger, and is still a site run by an anime fan, for anime fans. My goal is to provide a friendly, welcoming place where anyone can watch, discuss and get recommendations for new anime and I’m grateful for each person who decides to join our community. I hope to continue building features for many years to come.

What is your advice to other fans who want to build something useful for the anime community?

Something I’ve learned over the years is that many projects succeed because they fill a gap. In Anime-Planet’s case, a recommendation database didn’t exist back then and everyone wanted one, and that ultimately led to its success. Nowadays there’s a lot of competition in the info database/recs arena, but there’s still plenty of room to innovate when it comes to anime and manga, or the community as a whole. Pick something you’re passionate about and run with it!

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Read more interviews with anime fans on Otaku Journalist:

• I’m a professional anime localizer and erotic fiction editor! An interview with Narelle Battersby
• It’s ‘The Onion’ for anime! An interview with the editor of Anime Maru
• A Q&A with cosplay photographer and author Ejen Chuang
• I’m a professional anime journalist! An interview with Lynzee Lamb

Just took what has become my near-yearly pilgrimage to San Francisco Japantown, one of my favorite places on Earth. Where else can I watch Yowamushi Pedal at a restaurant, photograph cosplayers at the dollar store, check out the Peace Pagoda by night and eat salted cherry blossom sweets?

I couldn’t bring Japantown back home with me, but I certainly tried my best. Here’s everything that fit in my carry-on. Click the photo to see a larger view.

Dark Keroro figure — For the most part, you can buy the same models in Japantown that you can anywhere online, so it’s not worth that valuable suitcase real estate. Every now and then, however, I’ve found gems I can’t get anywhere else. Sergeant Frog figures like this one haven’t been made since 2008, and yet this one just happened to be lying around.

13 Secrets to Fluent Japanese — Before my trip, I asked my translator friend Katriel if there were any books she recommended I pick up at Kinokuniya Bookstore. Without skipping a beat, she suggested this one. So far I like the mix of no-nonsense advice and visual manga storytelling.

Kanji Practice Notebook — This is definitely for children, and features illustrations from Tales of Moomin Valley on the front and back and a grid of large, ruled squares on the inside. Now that I’m learning kanji in Japanese 102, I’m hoping to perfect my handwriting by practicing in here.

Foil origami paper — There’s a speciality shop that sells nothing but origami! I bought these cute little aqua squares in order to write unique thank you notes for Otaku Journalist-related correspondence.

Omocat “Shota” shirt — I discovered Omocat’s anime-inspired designs on Tumblr after seeing Crunchyroll PR girl Sailor Bee wearing one of his shirts. I bought this subtly subversive shirt for John and I to share. It didn’t come cheap though; at $30 it’s now the most expensive shirt I own, and it was one of the least expensive of Omocat’s offerings.

Lucky Star origami kits — Like many apartment dwellers, I don’t have a Christmas tree. Maybe this will be the year I finally get a small one. In anticipation, I bought these kits for making larger-than-usual Lucky Stars that come with strings to be hung up just like ornaments.

Korean beauty masks — There aren’t any Japanese beauty stores in Japantown, probably because everybody knows Korea has the rest of us beat at the beauty game. You can see Faye Valentine putting on a similar mask in an episode of Cowboy Bebop, but I can’t find a screenshot. Not pictured: the one I already tried. It was… slippery.

False eyelashes — These are some of the least dramatic ones they had, without any glitter or feathers or gems, but they’re fancy enough to be special-occasion-ready for any evening I want to feel like a K-pop idol.

Purikura! — 13 Secrets to Fluent Japanese tells me that purikura is a Japanese abbreviation of “picture club.” I went to Pikapika with two of my coworkers where we tried both an English language and Japanese machine. Our photos ranged from cute to pretty darn weird!

Stuff I bought but couldn’t take home: delicious Japanese food like onigiri, pork katsu curry at the anime-themed On The Bridge, and a green tea latte. You can pick up bento lunches and wagashi even at the grocery store there!

Have you ever been to Japantown? What would you buy if you went?

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More of my Japantown travels:

• September in Japantown
• Otaku Journalist in Japantown