I’ve got a post in the linked thread on about 9/26/02 that reprints a list of easily chargeable vB options that Anthracite listed over on Fathom. Private messaging would work as part of such a package; avatars wouldn’t. Others that would are posting polls, editing posts (which wouldn’t be a problem if the window for editing were restricted to, say, 5 minutes), and posting to a SDMB calendar. Existing services that could be made part of such a package include viewing profiles and searching.
Ed Zotti has in the past argued against any solution that wouldn’t allow some level of free posting. (I’m in his corner on that one.) From all accounts, a fix that would allow some free posting, but would charge for frequent posting, wouldn’t be trivial.
But there are a few non-intrusive things that could be tried, that haven’t:
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The aforementioned suggestion that the SDMB charge for some sort of ‘perks’ package. If 500 users (of the estimated 2000 active users) were willing to pay $30 a year for such a package, that would be $15K.
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Selling banner ads. www.baseball-reference.com does something like this in the way of allowing donors to sponsor pages in return for donations. (I’ve got fifty bucks’ worth of page sponsorships over there right now; I’d love to do the same here, where I spend much more of my time.) Their situation is far from directly analogous to the SDMB’s, but there are ways to modify their system to our situation.
At any rate (see my earlier link in this post), the CR’s off-the-top-of-the-head guesstimate is that ads might bring in $9K/year.
- Merchandise. I’m not the only one who’s less than crazy about owning Slug’s artwork. Why not have a contest to design SDMB merchandise (T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads), as distinct from Straight Dope merchandise? Then take orders.
These are things that the CR could do with minimal upfront investment, that would (a) start bringing in some money directly attributable to the SDMB, (b) give us a chance to finally turn our enthusiasm for this board into financial support, and © finally get them (and us, if they’re kind enough to share the info) some hard-and-fast numbers on how much revenue this place can bring in to offset its costs.
At the same link from above, Ed estimates the costs of the entire website (the column and the MB combined) as running between $35K and $45K annually. While I’m hesitant to endorse that figure without a more specific breakdown, it’s a starting point. Ed says that, as of a year or so ago, about 63% of the page loads were at the MB, and the remaining 37% were at the column’s part of the site. If we take the $40K midpoint, 63% of that is $25K attributable to the MB itself.
I don’t know if this place can raise $25K a year between first-class memberships, banner ads, and merchandise sales. Maybe it can, probably it can’t. (I’d bet that it wouldn’t pull in that much, but I’d also bet they’d bring in $15K or better.) But whatever it can bring in has to be a whole lot better than the $0 it’s bringing in now.
On the expenses side, a more reliable server would surely reduce the portion of Jerry the Tech God’s time attributable to the SDMB, cutting that expense somewhat. And the existence of a steady stream of revenue would surely reduce the time Ed would have to spend trying to figure out how to make this place viable. (Ed says he’s the main labor expense of the website, but whether that’s a real expense* or a bookkeeping convenience, I don’t know, nor do I know the split of his time between the Straight Dope column website and the MB website.)
Main thing is, I hope that the CR tries some of these ideas, or variations on them, soon. Unlike solutions that involve paying to post, there’s no real need to be cautious in trying these out. And there’s two bad things that happen every month they don’t move on these ideas: (1) money that they could have collected from the SDMB membership gets left on the table, and (2) we continue to not find out just how much money this site can raise, which means we’re no closer to solving the board’s problems.
*[sub]“Real” as in “They gave Ed a raise when the MB came into being” or “they’d cut his pay if they pulled the plug on the MB” or “they’re paying someone else to do stuff Ed used to do before the MB came along,” or something along those lines, any of which would indicate the extent to which the CR is actually out-of-pocket due to the time Ed spends overseeing the MB. (None of this questions Ed’s value to the MB; I’m just pointing out that we have nothing to go on regarding whether Ed’s attention to this MB represents an objective cost to the CR.)[/sub]
