Is it true that your project was founded on Eminem’s birthday, on October 17th?

Yes, we started our project on October 17th, 2011. On that day our domain was registered and first version of the site was launched. Accidentally, that date happened to coincide with Eminem’s birthday. Full version of the site started to work on January 21th,2012, but we still consider October 17th , 2011 to be project’s official birthday.

How was the idea of «Eminem.Pro» born?

Me and my friends, we were into Eminem’s work since early 2000’s, to be mo specific, since “The Marshall Mathers LP” album. Over the years we have gathered a big amount of interesting material (physical and digital), containing huge collection of Shady’s live performances. In 2006 I’ve decided to publish it on torrents.ru ( now rutracker.org, blocked in Russian Federation). It was a great selection of video with Eminem. For several years I was maintaining this topic, but even forming it was taking too much time. By the way, at that time I was reading eminem-world.ru, it was the best site in Russian internet, and from foreign resources I chose Eminem’s official site of corse, and the site of D12 (it had a great forum).

Later, due to the changes in rules of torrents.ru, I wasn’t able to update my topic , and the reason was pretty strange. They have been banning updates because of the “low quality of some videos”, it surprised me, as most of the videos were from 90s. So I stoped updating the topic, and soon closed it. By that time Eminem and his friend Royce were very active after releasing album «Hell: The Sequel» ( as a duo Bad Meets Evil), and i had the idea to create an archive site of materials about Shady. I registered eminem.pro domain and begun developing site’s first version.

This project brings you good profit, doesn’t it?

This must be the most popular question from our readers. Listen, this project doesn’t bring any money, as it is 100% non-profit, but on the contrary, it requires very big investments to be kept in working condition and to grow. We pay for domain, for server resources, which have to be widen every year. It’s a big sum of money. But the main and the most expensive resource is our time. We spend a lot of time on this project, for each member of the team it’s like a second job, which we take seriously. I’ve noticed that I don’t even plan my vacations without considering ePro needs and including it into my plans. Eminem.pro is a big living organism, who can’t be left unattended.

How was the idea of EJ Magazine born?

At first we didn’t have it in plans. Our audience was rapidly growing since the very beginning . First issue of EJ ( under another name ) was out on April,2012. For Shady Records that period was also highly active, we all were anticipating Slaughter’s first album, and,of course, Eminem’s 8th album. Then we decided to make a small news digest, to collect all the recent news in it. Our readers loved the idea. We called it Eminem Journal.

One month later we have published the second issue. After we’ve read the reviews and analysed statistics, we thought that it would be cool to release news in this form monthly, and our target audience will be fans, who can’t follow the news on the site daily and for whom it might be more convenient to find it all in one place. Name EJ appeared later, if i remember correctly, in summer 2013. By that time we already had side projects apart from the main site, and our news range have widen dramatically, along with news about Eminem and his crew we were covering many artist, who we considered interesting and major music events. We have decided that name Eminem Journal was no longer suitable for our magazine, and changed it by shorten it to EJ.

At 2013 we began mastering our lay out, we tried to embed the newest stuff. I’m proud to say that our magazine’s lay is not inferior to foreign magazines like XXL and Rolling Stones. Now our magazine is available for free in App Store and Play Market. I also want to note exclusive covers from our designer Olga Olegovna, which make our magazine unique.

How do you manage to track all the news and to publish it first?

I wont open up all my secrets. We have several programs in our equipment, that were specially created to form news stream for us, and also we have our exclusive sources. We communicate with managers of different artists, not only from Shady Records, and not only hip-hop artists. And we have good connections with recording labels employees. We support them on our project, and they support us informationally in return.

What difficulties did you face in creating and developing ePro?

As i’ve already mentioned, the most valuable resource for us is time, which we have a great shortage of. I’d say it is the main problem that we face. Each year the project consumes more and more of our free time. Our second difficulty is funding for the project. With such a big traffic like ours, we have to rent powerful servers, and it is very expensive.

Have you thought about making you project chargeable?

Honestly? Before 2014 i haven’t. «Eminem.Pro» is a totally non- profit project, and this makes us independent. But now the cost of servers and virtual machines had doubled and continues to grow and i start to think about it. Supporting the project financially is becoming harder and harder, so we, naturally, are trying to find some compromise version of monetisation. It might be advertising opportunities in our apps, which are now very popular. Or maybe it will be an exclusive high-quality merchandise. Or closed section with exclusive articles. Don’t know yet. Now i know for sure- ePro was created and exists not for bringing money. It is our hobby, something we love doing, and financial matter is at the bottom of the list. But it’s impossible not to think about finances at all, because project as big as «Eminem.Pro» has impressively high cost.

Maybe you need to find sponsors, what do you think?

We get a lot of help from Microsoft company and from our friends. It includes help with maintaining and updating our sites, information support, help in accessing various media- events in our country and abroad, exclusive content sources. We are always open for cooperation and for joint projects. Over the years of work we have learned a lot and we are ready to share our knowledge. I am talking not only about finding sponsors for us. We are also ready to be sponsors and to help interesting new projects.

Where do you find materials for #SR15?

#SR15 is a big reconstruction of official Eminem sites with all its content from 1999-2008. Project contains a big amount of rare archive materials, which now can’t be found anywhere else. These sites have been unavailable for a long period of time, and 70% of material doesn’t exist even in internet archives. Partly information was taken from our private collections, and partly was sent to us by our friends and readers from different countries.

How would you briefly describe your project?

A living organism.

What was the most instructive mistake during five years of project’s existence?

I guess the main lesson I’ve learned was the conflict between our group moderator in “Vkontakte” and its readers. I won’t name participants, don’t want to cause any inconveniences. The story was simple: one of our moderators had an argument with subscribers of the group, and I took his side without digging deeper into the situation, in which he tuned out to be wrong. I don’t remember now what caused the conflict. Many active subscribers were banned. My lesson was to remain neutral in any situation involving readers and subscribers, because all actions of our team members affect our audience.

What is the key to success for project like yours?

The key to success for any internet -project – is a unique author’s content. If you have it, if you don’t copy someone’s materials- you will find your audience. I wouldn’t include creations collections or archives into this concept, though they usually have their audience too. Another words-you must create something unique, something that can’t be found anywhere else or attract user, for example, by conveniently organizing the content.

Did readers send you gifts? If yes, what was the most unusual?

Yes, we do get presents. I have an enormous collection of things, related to music, especially Shady Records’ music. Our friends and readers help me to replenish my collection with new “artifacts”.

What ways of communicating with readers do you prefer?

I love to reply to readers’ email, which they send to our editorial board address. It could be questions and wishes or just friendly correspondence. I stay in touch with a lot of our readers. Our editors and moderators regularly answer readers’ messages in all social media, where our project is presented.

At what moment did maintaining this project stop being a usual hobby?

I guess when the audience started to multiply, when we begun to have a huge amount of visitors during any big music event ( Shady -related or not, doesn’t matter). When the site has thousands and even dozens of thousands visitor daily, it makes you responsible. Readers are expecting us to provide quality content, and the expectations grow every year.

This year you’ve launched big affiliated project MHQ. Tell us about it and it’s first achievements.

MHQ -is our small creative startup, separate project, separate site. It is dedicated to the music we listen and the artists we love. I’ve created it in summer 2015 with our main editors – Elena Takmakova and Ekaterina Remina. Due to our connection to the music and our active communications in this sphere we had a great amount of different material, photo shoots, interviews with various artists from other genres, which are not related to “Eminem.Pro”. We thought that it would be good to have another platform to share this material without annoying the audience of the main site ( www.eminem.pro). And that’s how MHQ was born. Over the years of project existence we have done several major interviews, participated nearly in all Russian music events and created a lot of interesting content. Right now lack of time won’t let us actively develop MusicHQ, but we do have big plans for it. Subscribe to MHQ group to be sure not to miss anything.

What plans do you have? What interesting content does your team prepare?

We have a lot of plans. We will finish our “mini-project” #SR15 by all means, right now we have done 3 parts out of 7. Soon you won’t recognize it. We also plan to release a PC version of ePro, and an app for Windows Phone, we are searching for a developer. We have a lot of ideas for developing our site and apps. We are testing new lay-outs for EJ magazines. Also we have several secret mini-projects, but I won’t speak about them yet.