Oh, my.
But …yeah. That’ll work for me.
I knew it was year but mistyped “month”. My bad.
But, unless I missed the announcement, you can’t figure out a way for this site to accept our money?
Here’s a real money-making idea Ed, bring back The Barnhouse…
I like this idea. I’d be happy to read new content from Cecil, and I’m fine with paying for it. I understand that the old model wherein Cecil wrote a column for the Chicago Reader, which paid for it by selling advertising, no longer exists.
My quibble is with the paying members being described as the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board. I have too much respect for the original SDSAB, which included some heavy hitters doing some pretty solid research. I’m not worthy of their company by paying the footling sum of $30 per year.
Can we come up with some new title for the Paying Inner Circle? If we can, I’m in.
I’ve always been fond of ‘Wizard of Light Bulb Moments’, ‘Head of Schmoozing’, ‘One of the Main Maniacs for Sure’, ‘Culture & Geek Resource Manager’, and a few other taken from here. I was saving them for the day I found a way to contribute towards a silly customized title like all the cool kids have.
Charging for access will be counterproductive. Just tell us how much money is needed and put up one of those big thermometer graphics to track progress. Begging is good enough for PBS and Wikipedia it will work here too.
Exactly. It’s so obvious. The last time was a disaster. Why would this be better?
Well, I guess I’m going against the grain here. The only person I see getting anything out of paying double their money, in some cases almost 4 times their money, is Ed.
Wasn’t part of Ed leaving that the column wasn’t popular enough to bring in enough cash to pay for itself? So he decided to either refurbish barns or write about refurbishing barns. End of Cecil.
Fast forward a little, people are still paying for memberships, Tuba Diva is hard at work getting the Discourse changeover ready to go, but, sadly, passes. Ed comes back as a temp to help out.
Discourse is here. We make it thru the change, losing members, as expected, in the process. Things settle down, mostly working just fine, people getting adjusted, some are worried about their Charter Membership lapsing, thus questions about it in ATMB. We are assured that no one will lose their title and as for now, there is just no way for people to pay their $7.95/$14.95 each year.
A year goes by, and Ed announces he’s back and wants to write Cecil columns again. I guess neither the barn stuff or his ability to follow the ups and downs of Game stop have paid off for him. So, Ed tells us, suddenly a board that didn’t need and wouldn’t take money from it’s users for over a is not paying it’s way. Well, ant site not taking money from it’s members for a year may be in a little trouble. That’s understandable. Since Ed say payment options are going to happen, a good solution would be for posters to pony up their cash for membership, just like they’ve been asking to do for a year. I don’t think most of us would mind a little bump in price. Maybe add a donation button, which, again, posters have been asking for. Or the ability to buy memberships for those that can’t afford them, as we have asked for and even had for awhile. Also, people have been clamoring for years for Straight Dope coffee cups, tee shirts etc. A Cafe Press shop or something similar has to be as easy as Patreon to run. You have quite a few talented artists on the Dope, plus people like me that suck at it. Why not do ask them to submit a work, show them to members and let them have a vote. Hell, maybe the pros would do it just for a chance to have their signature appear on the items for a limited time. Do the contest every year and people would be buying that shit all the time. Trust me, anything Dopers come up with would be better than the solid blue Straight Dope masthead or anything put out by Slug. Last time anyone posted about the crappy old Dope stuff, someone said there was loads of it left because nobody wanted them 'cause they looked like shit with the same design year after year. With a Cafe Press type of business you don’t have to worry about unsold merch.
I think the idea of reviving the Cecil columns as a revenue stream is wishful thinking. Ed left the column a year and some ago and no one was clamoring to take over his job and nobody was standing in line trying to get his column in their papers. ( weren’t some papers even dropping the column) Hell, even all of us old folk on the board rarely mention Cecil. How often do you see someone link to a old Cecil column these days? It used to happen all the time, now you may see it a couple of times a year. I’d be surprised if a younger crowd, which we need, have ever heard of Cecil Adams, or ever will.
I’m at a loss why he would even need the SDSAB if they have nothing to do with the column other than the modern equivalent of clipping articles for Ed to read. And, they have to pay extra for the privilege. Certainly, Ed can read the Dope or newspapers or websites himself. It’s not like he will be turning out 25,000 word columns every day.
I think this idea is totally backwards. Instead of having the SDMB make enough money to cover Ed’s salary and expenses, why doesn’t Ed’s column bring in enough money to support itself, and have the additional benefit of drawing new readers to the board that are likely to sign up. If the Cecil Adams name is the big draw he seems to thinks he is, let him prove it on his own, not at the expense of us on the board. As I said above, posters are more than willing to pony up cash for the Dope, they’ve been begging for years to be able to donate. Just give us a dollar amount you think you need to keep the SDMB running each year, I have no doubt that it will be reached. Let Ed raise money on his own for his column.
I’ve gotten a lot of value from this place over the past year, being cooped up at home during the lockdowns. Don’t know if I’ll have much use for the Boardroom, but I’d like to subscribe if only to keep the site alive, and maybe get a custom title too.
This. New users are unlikely to pay to post. There’s reddit and other places to do this. Also users who have dropped out during the last 1-2 years and want to come back might be discouraged by a “pay to post” model.
For existing users who can’t pay, there are probably enough people waiting in line to provide gift memberships.
I’m happy to contribute financially to keep Straight Dope afloat and hope that people who cannot contibute financially can still post.
And while we’re talking money, make sure that international payments will be accepted.
Having one forum out of a dozen restricted is hardly “pay to post”. New users won’t even notice.
For $30–I’ll pop
I’m in! When do we start eating the babies?
This is how I feel. If a payment-for-some-posting-privileges is going to happen, it couldn’t be that much harder to re-implement something very like the old membership system alongside free guest posting with ads.
Which isn’t to say that a new forum with extra-special-paid-membership on top of the old ones is a bad idea, I just don’t think it would bring in the most bucks.
Ditto for donations and swag. All are reasonable - again, there isn’t a downside to trying to sell merch through instant-inventory places. But just doing the math it seems like the percentage of people who would pay twice as much to post in one special forum, or the percentage of people who would similarly buy a $30 piece of memorabilia once a year, is just not going to compare to the people who just continue their modestly-priced membership.
All of these can help, though, and won’t hurt.
With regards to the column per se, there’s still a space in the world for a snarky know-it-all. For a while I had high hopes for What If by Randall of XKCD, but then he moved that particular column to the paywalled NYT without even mentioning it, just radio silence for years until I found it out randomly, and I’m not going to subscribe just to see if his well has run dry yet and I sort of resent him just stopping writing with no explanation.
But the fact that I would still read What If if it were still on the XKCD website shows that I for one still have a desire for a regular feature of facts mixed with humor.
I’m gonna have to sell a few more subscriptions to Grit but, hey, I’m in.
Well, that right there made me laugh outloud.
See what I mean? If I laugh at something written on the Dope and was charged $1 a pop, over the year I’d owe $100s
Then there’s the ‘things I’ve learned’ over the year. $1 for each truth/lesson. Again I’d owe $100s.
Of course I’ll pay.
Stone the heretic! One does not ask for evidence from the Perfect Master.
Well, I’m in. For many years, I actually couldn’t afford even the rather modest subscription to be a member, and received a fair amount of content in return.
Now I finally was in a position to contribute, and I no longer could. That was a bit sad to me.
As far as models go, I like Sean Carroll’s Patreon model, where essentially being a paying member gives one the ability to ask questions that he may respond to in his monthly AMA. That’s what I think is the idea here as well.
I don’t know that I would call it the Advisory Board, as that was people who helped to answer questions. A different name would be appropriate for those who are proposing questions to be answered, like “The Teeming Inquisitors” or something.
I’d agree that it wouldn’t be productive to answer questions that can be easily googled, but I believe that we can think of inquiries that are not so straightforwardly answered.
There are very good questions in GQ that get answered as best as amateurs on the internet can do, but there is certainly something to be said for having a somewhat more authoritative position on them. At the very least, collating the responses into a more cohesive narrative.
Maybe as another perk would be that the columns would be accessible to paying members a week or so before they are open to the public. It’s a small perk, but one that certainly has some value to it.
I’m not having dinner at your house, thank you very much.
$30/year = $2.50 a month? Hell that’s cheap. Would we get custom user titles if we ‘participate’ in the Boardroom Discussions?
Tripler
Future ‘War Correspondent.’