Can someone tell me what effect paid subscription has had on board useage. It seems to me that there are about as many posts as before, but with significantly less responses. How does daily useage (visits and posts) pre and post compare?
Thanks for the link, Jonathan. As my chart shows, posting activity has been declining since early 2003; the steeper decrease seen in Jan./Feb. this year may be caused by a deliberate restriction on our bandwidth from the Reader’s staff, as TubaDiva explained in that thread. What’s interesting is that after activity picked back up, it then peaked around late March or early April, coinciding with the introduction of the subscription plan. However, it is difficult (for me, anyway) to discern from the graph whether our current downward slope is merely an extension of the long-term trend started in 2003, or whether the subscription plan put a halt to the upward trend we saw in Feb./Mar. this year.
Thread creation activity very closely mirrors posting activity (the correlation coefficient is around 0.97), so it has been in decline as well.
A very rough estimate of the viewership shows that subscription has had no effect. Going back a year, the number of views per day is around 94,000 (up to 2004-03-22), and that number is around 100,000 per day since subscription started. As I look into the data in greater detail, my conclusions may change, but as it is, since it costs nothing to read this board, it makes sense that subscription will not affect the read-only traffic.
FWIW, I first signed up for the mesaage board in 1999 and made about six posts in five years. Since things switched to a subscription model, I’ve made about 60. Whether that’s good or bad, I leave up to others to decide.
I wouldn’t say that ponying up the $5 makes me feel obligated to be more active. I think that I simply have become more aware of the resource, the interesting subjects that are discussed here, and the seemingly endless supply of informed answers,
dauerbach, this is already being discussed in the thread referenced by Jonathan Chance. Please use that thread for further discussion.
Please note that questions related to this message board belong in ATMB, not in GQ.
This is closed.
-xash
General Questions Moderator