(left) and Shaun "Sethisto" Scotellaro at
BroNYCon 2011
Shaun Scotellaro ("
Sethisto"), a 23-year-old Arizona college student, established the website in January 2011 to collect news and
fan fiction specific to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. 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. He has explained that he believed the show needed a unified fan base at the time, as he and many other older fans had recently become supporters of the show—commonly known as
bronies—and there was an overarching concern that
Hasbro would not be authorizing a
second season. Towards the end of 2010, when the fan-following was still in its infancy and confined mostly to the
/co/ (comics and cartoons) and
/b/ ("random") boards of
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. Posting a message containing the word
pony became a bannable offense on 4chan, prompting Scotellaro to launch
Equestria Daily. 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.
Equestria Daily has also partially branched into other forms of media dissemination, currently possessing a
Facebook page,
YouTube channel, and
Twitter account, though all updates are still hosted on the originally-established
Blogger site. As of July 2012, the site has boasted over 220 million
hits since its creation in January 2011. In an interview with
CBC Radio in December 2011, Scotellaro stated that the site was reaching more than 500,000 views per day. The site receives enough pageviews per day that it is able to sustain itself through advertising revenue. The site was designed by Knighty, and the site is maintained by the site's developer Gameleon. In June 2014,
Equestria Daily reached 500 million total views. In 2014, the
Library of Congress selected the site to be archived as part of their "Web Cultures Web Archive Collection" by the
American Folklife Center. The collection was established for the purpose of "documenting the creation and sharing of emergent cultural traditions on the web". This archive currently covers the website's state from June 2014 to August 2016. ==Official response==