Reread what I said. I said I knew nothing about rights and I made no comments on rights. I was talking about the ease and cost of converting a book to an e-book. Since many people do it at home and give away the product to anyone that wants it, the cost and ease must be fairly low. Not to mention people that self publish. Whatever the cost to get their e-books online cant be too cost prohibitive.
The Dope books suffer from the problem that they would need some serious editing for out of date or just now known wrong information. I’m sure we all saw the many times someone pointed out wrong info from the columns to TubaDiva that she had to correct. And that’s just the ones I saw on the board. Who knows if she got PMs or messages on the column page.
What as he answered that had any solid information? Saying you need x*y is not information. Saying they need $1000 a month to run the board is information.
How? He hasn’t said a single solid thing. He won’t even how he plans to advertise any of this.
And I suspect all the details are already known and this thread was just to break it to Dopers. He has shot down every piece of advice in this thread, except for the ones that go along with his plan.
Sorry, you made the same mistake I made, thinking that he actually wanted input and questions when he opened this thread asking what we thought.
Keep this up @Martin_Hyde and people are going to think we’re friends because we agree so much.
I have no problem with Ed trying for a comeback. Nothing but best wishes for a successful return. What I have a problem with is using board money to fund it. For the last year people have been asking to par and we were told, not set up for it, we are doing fine. Suddenly, the board is on it’s last breath, and needs money desperately, but instead of making sure the board can run for another year, we are supposed skip over the boards needs and help Ed launch his new column instead.
Just separate the two, let people pay for the board if they want, and if they want they can pay a separate fee for Cecil columns.
Looking at the board traffic, we’ve been running around 800K visits/month this year, with an average of 7 pages/visit. So that’s well over the 500K views/month allowed under the Business plan.
I also suspect our migration from the old site fell under the Custom Migration available only in Enterprise.
I disagree with most of your post, but I want to highlight this for emphasis. Nobody is insisting that you toss in 30 a year to restart the column. You can continue to be a charter member to support the board for 7.50 $15 per year (or free, as it is now). If you don’t like Cecil’s column, don’t become a boardroom member. Simple. So the part about milking money is ludicrously wrong.
As far as TBTB are concerned, this message board is rounding error, until it isn’t. It’s a placeholder for the Cecil Adams trademark, which might be worth something someday, but very well may not. There’s no milking here, no draining, no bleeding, just providing members with an option to pony up some funds. No skin off any one else’s wrist.
Based on codinghorror’s revelation that we are not on an enterprise plan, the Discourse pricing page, and the assumption that moderators are volunteers, the cost to run the message board should not exceed $3,600/yr ($300/mo).
That would be 120 subscriptions at the new price of $30/yr, or 180 subscriptions at the old price of $20/yr (I don’t know how many charter members we have but apparently the discount was 50%).
I believe Google AdSense pays about $0.15 or so per pageview on average. So if there was an ad on screen at all times for every person, an average of 2,000 pageviews per month would cover operating costs for the message board. Assuming your average site visitor visits eight pages per month, that calls for 250 active site visitors each generating $1.20/mo in ad revenue. That would be with all users seeing ads.
A more realistic scenario, with $20/$10 member/charter subscriptions and total revenue of $304.83/mo:
400 monthly pageviews from lurkers or signed-out users ($60/mo),
800 monthly pageviews from registered guests, or about 100 guests with 8 pageviews per month each ($120/mo),
50 member subscriptions ($83.33)
50 charter subscriptions ($41.50)
In this scenario increasing the base subscription price to $30/yr, assuming the same number of subscribers, nets an extra $62.67/mo in revenue.
I have reason to believe the message board is or could become sustainable. Unless my numbers are off, I’ve never been too good with numbers…
This isn’t a standard business-customer relationship, tho. We’ve been asked to come up with ideas on how to better monetize this board, which is not something that happens to me @ McD’s. And this isn’t the first time one of these OP’s have been penned, and, each time, the question comes up: ‘well, how much money are we talking about?’, with the answer never forthcoming.
But it’s critical to know this $ amount as to shape the ideas - suggesting a bake sale when the capital requirements are $10k/month just makes the suggestor look stupid.
Well it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because I suspect the allusions are accurate. This board is rounding error and probably a net liability for corporate (whether or not the boardroom is installed). The only justification for this place for corporate is the possibility that the SD asset might be worth something somehow someday. IMHO this has always been the case.
That said, I’m glad Discourse isn’t too expensive. If things go sour, the mods can always pick up their stakes and move somewhere else.
I first caught wind of the Straight Dope around 2000, back when I was a very young IT person new in his career. I was looking for stuff to read on the Web during idle times and the WWW was still quite a raw place back then, quality stuff wasn’t easy to find. The Straight Dope and Snopes were my go-to places to read regularly, and I read every article from every site, and regularly checked for updates.
Eventually I ended up on the SDMB because I commented on a couple of the articles on the web site. And I also lurked around GQ because there were interesting discussions there, and I learned some interesting facts while being entertained much like the articles themselves did. I was just a lurker for the most part until around 2010, then I began participating regularly. I would read the articles still, but most of my time was spent on the forums and that became my main draw. I also subscribed at some point because I felt that I spent so much time here that it was only fair to contribute. (I didn’t need the ad-blocking since my browser plugins took care of that for you, I only did it because it felt right.)
When the new articles stopped, it was disappointing because I really enjoyed them. But at least I still had the board and that was the main thing that I cared about.
So now we’re being shown a way for articles to come back in some form, and an opportunity to contribute financially again. I am equally excited about both. I am also very interested in being able to somehow contribute to the new articles. Sign me up for all of that.
Nevermind, my numbers for ad revenue were off by a factor of twelve, and then some. Using Google’s ad revenue calculator set to North America and Online Communities, it seems to be about $0.13 per year for each monthly pageview.
That would be 28,000 monthly impressions if ads are enabled for everyone.
With 50 chartered subscriptions and 50 member subscriptions, it would take approximately 16,200 monthly ad impressions from guests or lurkers to generate $300/mo to host the site. If we had maybe 1,500 active guests…
But I don’t know. We might have a lot more subscriptions than that.
Unless there is a big misunderstanding here, membership is being raised and then you pay even more to do Ed’s research for him. So all he has to do is comes on here and openly state that membership money only goes to board expenses, and none trickles into his side project. I still think his plan seems to be a poorly thought out , but as long as his money comes from the people that pay extra to do research for him, and not membership fees, I would be absolutely fine with that.
I think the more room between the column and the board, the better.
Does the site get any revenue from people actually clicking on ads? If so, we could have a click day once a month and really run up some revenue
On other hand, the ad rates seem so low that we could just jettison the whole idea of ads, like we are with coffee mugs and t-shirts. Not worth the effort.
And some people seem to read a lot. @Guinastasia tops the chart, having apparently read 7.7 thousand posts this week. If an ad were to show every twenty posts, generating $0.01083 per ad, she alone would generate $16 per month for the board.
Take a look at the top 35 guests, you will see they read a combined total of ~527,910 posts in the last month.
Table A, '35 most well read guest dopers'
Username
Posts read since May 14 (in thousands)
The_Other_Waldo_Pepper
31
BippityBoppityBoo
28.2
Guinastasia
24.8
Mikkel
23.5
MrAtoz
19.6
carrps
18.17
Folly
17.2
Chingon
16.8
scudsucker
16.2
Cassie_Beth
15.84
BigT
14.2
gnoitall
14.2
hogarth
13.9
Senegoid
13.6
bernardch
13.6
keeganst94
13.5
Vimp
13.4
thorny_locust
13.1
Cesium
13
digs
12.8
ZonexandScout
12.7
MrDibble
12.7
beandog
12.6
slash2k
12.6
TriPolar
12.5
emu2swan
12.3
Stanislaus
12.3
Folacin
12.2
TokyoBayer
12.1
MrStrangeloop
11.9
nightshadea
11.6
Riemann
11.5
Reindeer_Flotilla
11.5
D_Anaconia
11.4
k9bfriender
11.4
Total:
527.91
Even if everybody more well read than BigT were to get a subscription, just going from BigT to k9bfriender you still have 332,440 posts read per month. Assuming an ad is shown every twenty posts, and the board generates $0.01083 per ad shown, that’s worth $180/mo. Add $33.33 for the twenty guests who we assumed would buy subscriptions, then add $83.33 for an estimated 50 charter members. We’re already at $296.66, with a goal of $300, before counting people who are already members.
TL:DR, the message board should be able to get by on the old business model of subscriptions at $20/yr, charter subscriptions at $10/yr, and ads for everyone else.
Nobody has mentioned it yet, but there used to be an option called “Friend of Cecil” where one could give any amount to the SDMB for no reward whatsoever. I think the return of such an option would be infinitely better than ‘click the ads’ day.
I think fake clicks can get you in trouble with the ad services. They have metrics which detect that and the site can be penalized. Click if something interests you, but clicking on everything just for the ad revenue can be counter productive.
It may be a custom addendum that covers increased usage, but if the 800k/mo is unusually high traffic (eg: JohnT’s nahemployment topic, which he managed to get placed on Alexa rankings), Discourse has this FAQ:
What happens if I go over the plan limits?
Your site will never stop working! We understand your site can get a lot of visitors quickly for any number of reasons, and success is something to celebrate! If your site exceeds plan limits for several months in a row, we will contact you to discuss flexible upgrade options.
The SimilarWeb report for the SDMB says that the data is estimated. Perhaps they capture a subset of data somehow and then extrapolate from there to get the full report.
Ok, but… it’s not your message board is it? You can start your own, you know. It’s been done before, several times. I’ve heard Discourse has economical plans.
When I go to McDonalds, I don’t insist that my purchase go to french fries and only french fries, whether or not I’m a Vegan. If I subscribe to a Substack, I don’t insist that the author spend X days per month on writing articles. Modern market economies present take it or leave it offers.
If the SDMB is ever purchased by a consumer’s cooperative, we can put these things up for a vote. But even then, 49% will lose a few of the ballots. I predict there would be even greater contentiousness under such a scenario.
Money is fungible. Posting and reading here is free, unless you want to pay for it. We’ve backed out a lot of the key numbers (notall). You of course have a right to ask for a full accounting from SunCoast Media, Twitter, or McDonalds. If they are a public company they will refer you to their annual report and thank you for your interest.
