By this point, the website was garnering around 300,000 additional page views per day, and with the supplementary editors was managing to post a greater number of updates with increased frequency, though still primarily of fan fiction. By the end of June 2011, the site's staff had been expanded to include two more blog editors, an 'interviewer/YouTube organizer', and a corps of pre-readers for fan fiction submissions, all drawn from the user base of dedicated blog followers. Though Scotellaro ran it solely himself to start with, more and more fans began sending news and updates to him, and the workload increased. Īfter its creation, the blog began to gain attention from the fan community.

Posting a message containing the word 'pony' became a bannable offense, and this was the final stimulus that had prompted Scotellaro to launch Equestria Daily. Towards the end of 2010, when the fan-following was still in its infancy and confined mostly to the /co/ and /b/ boards of English imageboard 4chan, all pony-related content was banned by a moderator who had enough of the flame war that was being waged between those who enjoyed the show and those who did not.

He has explained that he believed the show needed a unified fan base at the time, as he and many other older males had recently become supporters of the show – known as ' bronies' – and an overarching concern was that Hasbro would not be authorizing a second season. In order to establish the site, Scotellaro had to cut back on his community-college classes in order to run the site out of his parents' house in Glendale, Arizona.

Shaun Scotellaro, a 23-year-old Arizona college student, established the website back in January 2011 to collect fan fiction and news specific to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Jayson Thiessen (left) and Shaun Scotellaro ('Sethisto') at BroNYCon 2011

Banned from equestria daily fan game