Ed, I think your efforts to improve the Dope have been a failure so far.

About This Message Board
61

Well, folks, the bottom line is that while Ed owns the board, he isn’t interested in the board in and of itself. Sure, he’s interested in it as a potential way to maybe make some money, either directly through ads or subscriptions, or indirectly as a way to pump book sales.

But Ed isn’t interested in the community. Running this place isn’t fun for him, it’s a chore that he’d rather not do. And so he’s farmed it out to various people, only intervening when he had to. It’s not that he doesn’t like the idea of the place, only that participating in the community as a member of the community isn’t appealing to him, in contrast to most of our moderators.

But with the economic downturn and the parent company of the Chicago Reader going belly up and the newpaper business as a whole going down the tubes, Ed’s been reminded that this place could potentially be a money-maker. But to actually make that happen he’s got to put some effort into it and so he’ll have to get more involved. And the trouble is that he doesn’t enjoy doing so. There’s nothing wrong with that, but wading in here and improving the place isn’t going to work if everything about this place annoys him. And his attempts to improve the place amount to rules against doing stuff that annoys him.

I think much of the criticism is severely overblown. Do you people honestly need every moderating decision spelled out in advance, including lists of dirty words? Do you honestly crave absolutely consistent moderating? Do you honestly need detailed instructions on how not to be such an asshole?

But the core of rumbling, that Ed isn’t interested in the complaints is perfectly true. Ed hates the whining and complaining and carping, the whole point of the rules changes are to get rid of some of that. Given that Ed isn’t interested in the complaints, more complaints about how he isn’t interested in the complaints won’t help.

My personal feeling is that this will all blow over when Ed isn’t so worried about extracting value from this place, and therefore doesn’t feel like he has to spend time here. No time scale on that.

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To be more specific, on at least one occasion there was a thread asking people how much they’d give to the board to help keep it afloat.

I don’t remember if we got it up to $5,000 or $50,000, but Jenny (TuvaDiva, if anyone needed clarification) was beside herself with appreciation.

Then she said they couldn’t take the money.

And probably two years later, or maybe more (memory’s fuzzy), we went to P2P.

My understanding and perspective is that changes always have been presented as “That’s just how it is, and if you don’t like it, leave/don’t use it.” Now, granted, most businesses do not exactly hold public comment sessions with their customers (though this does happen in the public sector).

However, when you make changes to your product, and the business suffers, you kind of have to admit that or you end up looking pretty silly (I’d say more, but this isn’t The Pit – which used to mean something). Your customers/clients have to see that you acknowledge having made a mistake.

Nope. Stuff just changes, and it’s supposed to be OK because this is someone else’s board (though who exactly is generating the content that keeps people here?). Someone else’s board, and we’re guests, and we should all just be glad we don’t have to walk uphill both ways and that the servers aren’t as taxed as they were around, say, lunchtime back in summer 2000. (Though since I have no been around a hell of a lot of late, I wouldn’t really know if the situation were not analogous.)

But I’m sure this latest addition will do exactly what Ed wants it to do, at which point it will join success stories like P2P and the success of merging “No, you have to pay to give us content” with “No, you can’t pay us to remove the ads.”

And I’m sure the users this latest change doesn’t alienate will have lots of fun talking to each other for the next however long until Ed decides yet another change is needed, at which point the board will go through the same song and dance of people being totally surprised that the administration has all the heart (and business sense, for my money) of a rock.

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These things are not related, so it’s not accurate to present them as if they were: Creative Loafing (and the Chicago Reader) are not non-profits. They accept money in return for services, but can’t accept charitable donations, kind as it is of Dopers to propose offering money to keep the business going or make improvements. Here’s a link to one occasion on which TubaDiva explained this. That’s why donations aren’t collected when people say they are willing to just give money in this way.

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Lemur, I don’t think Ed is seeing this as a potential money-maker. I find it pretty clear from when he said that they are getting about $200 a week from ad revenue. Even if these changes somehow resulted in doubling the traffic, we are still talking about $20K a year, which is peanuts to a company the size of CL or The CR.

If anything, I would accept the contrary argument. That Ed figured that he is stuck with this site and since he cannot get out, he might as well turn it into something he likes, even if that means alienating half the customer base.

Even if you don’t take Ed’s word for it that this is not about money, make the math for yourself. This place cannot even make a fraction of his salary, let alone be a profit center for the parent companies.

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That is small thinking from such and intelligent staff then. 80% of the posters on this board know that a fictional fee could have been created for something as silly as a title to accommodate donations.

Joe Poster wants to give $50, He gets to pick from any of 12 titles or any such simple plan. It is never hard to “donate” money to a company and I think you know better than what you just posted.

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I could be in over my non-CEO head here, but I think the goal is to make the board into a successful business venture, not one that relies upon thinly-disguised charitable donations from members to survive. The board went to pay-to-post for a few years, it’s fortunately back to free posting now, and “pay $50 for a useless title” doesn’t strike my non-Wharton brain as a business model that’s going to be sustainable year after year.

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I’m not sure where you are getting this info; I can’t get Alexa to separate boards.straightdope.com from straightdope.com itself (Ed confirms this). However, the SD seems to have signed up for Quantcast stat tracking, and according to them, straightdope.com gets 10M pageviews and 720K visitors per month, whereas boards.straightdope.com gets 7.2M pageviews and 29K visitors. So on a per-eyeball basis the main site is doing 96% of the pulling, and on a per-impression basis it’s still got more than half of the traffic.

Also, I think the Alexa stats are showing a more severe decline than is in fact happening since they reflect market share, not absolute numbers. The Quantcast stats only go back to September, but while Alexa shows the SD/SDMB as a whole losing ~1/2 its pageview rank over those six months, Quantcast suggests that the SDMB (but not the SD) had about a 15% decline in actual pageview numbers. Still a decline, but not nearly so large. Big Boards shows no decline in post rate, although they do see a decline in the rate at which we are acquiring new members (or I think that’s what the fourth graph is…). It’s a pretty fast and consistent drop, so maybe it has something to do with the free membership change (when did that happen?).

Incidentally, Ed has vouchsafed to us that the amount that the SDMB makes off advertising is hilariously insignificant, so the whole “the SBDM isn’t about the SD columns and we have a different culture here” argument is largely irrelevant; if the SDMB isn’t selling the books, and the SDMB isn’t selling itself, then unless you think our corporate overlords should be supporting this place as a public service, it doesn’t matter to the bottom line what kind of culture we do or do not have.

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Well, I’m not married to the moneymaking angle, just that Ed’s active attempts to manage this place correspond pretty closely to the implosion of Creative Loafing. It seems to me Ed’s decided for whatever reason that he has to pay more attention to this place even though doing so is a chore, and so he’s trying to make changes so the chore isn’t quite so annoying.

And

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Marley23, all businesses prosper on so-called “charitable donations” from their customers, as customers have a choice about where to do business, and generally are voluntarily choosing to associate with business A over business B. And really successful businesses take from their customers as much money as those customers are willing to spend. No, the majority of posters might not have been willing to pay $50 for a particular useless title (heck, many weren’t willing to pay $7.50 even for the basic functionality of posting), but a substantial minority of Dopers back in the day WOULD have paid that (and some, such as myself would happily have paid even more). MANY would have been willing to pay for added functionality such as “you get to use an avatar with your posts if you pay $10/year”. That’s the fund-raising model Public Broadcasting uses, and a model some other social network sites successfully implemented - but for whatever reason, TPTB at the Dope were unwilling to even consider it.

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A slight hijack here: a few people have mentioned the books not selling as a puzzlement or implied it must be due to the economic downturn, which surprises me. Could it be that the books aren’t selling because there hasn’t been one released in ten years? I don’t buy any books because I have them all already. If there were a new book – or several, as the old ones came out on intervals ranging from one to six years – I would buy them, and I think most of us would.

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Not related … yeah. That’s the ticket.

What an absolute shame that when we were trying to give the board money, it was refused.

Nobody could come up with a way for dopers to help the board until we had to help or we got our posting privileges revoked.

We were ready to give them money before they required it.

The lack of creativity on the part of those involved, as What Exit? noted, speaks volumes to the quality of planning involved.

And apparently that lacking is still going strong.

Thanks, but I was there too. I remember the reasons various staffers raised as to why donations couldn’t be accepted:)

But I was pointing out, in the broader scheme of things, that there was an opportunity, if one was creative in managing the board, to sell avatars or creative titles or longer sig lines or whatever, and however many years later, we have … this.

You can just smell the creativity, eh?

You pay extra for the title for a certain period of time, and then you have to re-up. Sort of, in a broad sense, like, oh, subscribing to be able to post, in that it’s a feature you pay for.

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Marley23, I think you just changed your argument from the prior post. All I did was explain why the reasoning from your link was not sound. This argument is better, but if the board needed money and money was happily offered, a way to take it should probably have been found.

Observationally as I mentioned in my Op, the dope has slowed down.

You say we are insignificant and the community does not matter. I wonder if you realize that you are not doing **Ed Zotti **any favors with your posts? **Marley23 **is at least addressing the main issue and doing so without dismissing us, I am glad you do not represent the SDMB.

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That’s business, not charity. In the kind of threads we’re discussing here, people were seeking opportunities to donate money directly to the SDMB or its parent.

… and that’s a not-for-profit.

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To be fair, if a business is struggling, and many customers are offering money to the business, a Smart BusinessPerson will find a way to accept it. There are always more levels of service to create, more membership options to offer, more info-products to sell, more levels to sell access to, and so on and so forth.

Face it, the management of this place is not the best it could be.

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Funny, ISTR that the reason ads were installed was “to pay Ed’s salary” as the subscriptions weren’t cutting it.

[Karl Rove] You’re entitled to your math, while I’m entitled to the math. [/KR] According to Leo Laporte, Alexa numbers skew higher than many other sources, because Alexa doesn’t filter out bots. Given how untrustworthy TPTB have been about various things here, I fail to see why we should believe them when they say what the numbers are. Additionally, with the economy being in the toilet, if TPTB honestly thought that the SDMB would never be more than a money pit, the smart thing to do would be to just kill the thing.

This has been discussed in the past. The publisher is unwilling to print a new SD book because they’ve got so many unsold copies of the current ones. They cannot move the ones they have now, so they’re not going to come out with a new one. Mind you, TPTB haven’t exactly gone out of their way to pimp the damn things in several years, so it really shouldn’t come as much surprise that they’re not selling.

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I’m not saying the SDMB culture doesn’t matter. I’m saying that, as things stand right now, it isn’t making any money. The “I’m leaving and you won’t be making money off of me any more” attitude I’ve seen in some of these threads is, under the circumstances, pretty amusing.

In theory, we could go to a PBS, user-donation-supported model (which would pretty much require Creative Loafing washing their hands of the SDMB and cutting it loose), but as long as we’re part of a for-profit commercial enterprise, it would help a whole lot to engender “respect for the culture” from the powers that be if there were some actual profit involved. I’m betting that the business model Ed et al have in mind is to have the SDMB sell advertising; place more ads per page and drive up pageviews. Maintaining the board culture may or may not be a part of this plan.

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Surely you must realize that many successful online ventures are using *this exact * business model? I think your non-Wharton brain needs to go back to school and stop arguing against those of us with degrees and experience in eCommerce and related internet marketing experience.

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Nope. It was exactly the same. People were offering money to the SDMB because they appreciated the service it offered enough to want to financially support it. How is that not a business transaction?

So? What the Dope needs is to raise enough money to keep the server farm up and running and to pay for essential tech support (and possibly Ed’s salary). In that regard, it can function quite well as a not-for-profit, and the PBS example is apt. As even Facebook and MySpace are discovering, social network sites never generate much in the way of profits. If TPTB are going to try to turn the Dope into a big money-maker (as opposed to just keeping the site running debt-free), they’re going to fail no matter what business model they try to use.

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OK, but what does Creative Loafing get from that? Someone (several someones) has to put in the time and the energy to make the site work, just to get to break-even?

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Of course this thread was not about “I’m leaving …” so maybe you got a little lost on the way to one of those?

Raising money is a side issue. The PBS model is not being suggested as the only way to make money but part of the answer. In fact, mainly it was about a past way they could have raised money.

You should probably not speak for Ed though if you think this through. Suggesting he does not want to maintain the board culture goes against stuff he and some of the mods have posted. If he does wish to keep the community together you are damaging his asset.