The COW’s History
Twenty Years of Service to The Professional Video Industry
https://vimeo.com/572885228
Creative COW (Communities of the World) entered the pastures of the world on April 11, 2001 and its history is filled with many notable accomplishments during its two decades of life.
Soon after opening, it was being visited by over a quarter-million unique people a month. Today, and for many years, it has been a site that draws over a million unique visitors a month.
In less than a year, we were responsible for signing nearly every expo partner who showed at the New York DV Show’s expo just four months after the tragedy of 911, in January 2002. When we signed on, not one company had yet signed up due to the prevailing conditions in NYC. We called every company we worked with and convinced them to join us in New York. The show opened with COW leaders teaching in many of the conferences and with nearly 50 companies showing on the expo floor. Nearly all of them came from Creative COW’s dynamic outreach.
The next year, in February 2003, Creative COW held its own show, Creative COW West, at the Westin Hotel and Conference Center at LAX. The show brought in nearly 2,000 attendees for a first year show — the first industry event to focus on the then-emerging field of HD video. The expo floor was filled with most of the leading companies of the day: Adobe, Pinnacle Systems, AJA Video Systems, Matrox, Ulead, Sony, Promax, Media 100 and many others.
In 2006, into a glutted market in which 17 magazines competed in this industry, we launched Creative COW Magazine in print at a time when most print magazines were getting out of print. Creative COW Magazine became a great success and grew to become the highest circulation publication in the industry according to VOCUS surveys, earning its publisher the recognition of being named to the prestigious 2011 Folio 40‘s list of publishers leading the magazine industry into the future.
Over the last 20 years, Creative COW’s history has included serving hundreds of millions of pages to tens of millions of media professionals and aspirants around the world.
When we first entered the pastures in 2001, we served mostly Baby Boomers along with Millennials. Today, our main audience is made up of over 70% GenY and GenZ.
Things change and so has Creative COW. In late 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we abandoned our original proprietary codebase (which finally after two decades was beginning to fail) and under emergency conditions moved the community onto an industry-standard WordPress backbone.
The move took an enormous amount of work and we’re not sure what drained our team more, the pandemic or trying to move such a massive infrastructure onto WordPress. To be transparent, it nearly destroyed the company to face such a monumental and staggering migration during a pandemic. But we’re putting those issues behind us and getting our new digs under control. Stay tuned.
We hope you will join us for the changes we have on the drawing board. It’s going to bring many new additions to serve our community and its members, all from one of the industry’s most historically proven, forward thinking, and visionary teams.
One thing won’t change: we’ll keep on serving the media professionals who continue to be a part of Creative COW.
Moo.
