Any decisions he makes regarding the administration of this board are made to advance the business interests of The Chicago Reader and the parent company, Creative Loafing.
So, for all intents and purposes, yeah, Ed is a business.
If they ever do switch to free posting w/ ads, I suspect they’ll see their revenue drop like a rock as people discover the glory of the hosts file. If I were them and knew for sure that free posting would happen, I would want to build up goodwill with my customer base. But what do I know.
Nice attitude. I explained what changed: next time I’m deciding to renew, the lack of ads becomes the only benefit to paying, so you’d better get it right.
Let’s put it this way: I would be embarrassed to admit to someone that I willingly paid a subscription fee “to get rid of ads” on a board that showed me ads anyway. That is a subscription model that deserves to be laughed off the internet, and I suspect that the only reason more people haven’t said this is that few people realize that’s the plan.
This change would actually manage to convert me from a guy who basically thinks of his yearly subscription as a donation he willingly gives, into someone who feels taken advantage of. So yes, I guess that does make it a deal breaker. If you choose to ignore and/or belittle the reason rather than try to make your customers feel like they’re getting a good deal, then that’s your prerogative.
I’d just like to point out (since you didn’t notice) that this place has no problem losing money. The entire reason that this thread (and others like it) exist is because the Reader is changing their behavior because they have continually failed to take my money and do something intelligent with it. Even when they are “making” money, they are providing a shitty service that people continuously complain about. Poor quality of service in and of itself is pretty rare for a messageboard. It’s just so easy to get right. Making money off of tens of thousands of eyeballs and gigabytes of interesting content is even easier.
Unlike yourself, apparently, I would like to see something intelligent done with this place. And that’s why I’m here voicing my opinion about the topic rather than telling paying members to keep their opinions to themselves, take their cash and stick it.
Ever since this board has existed seperate from AOL, people have felt the need to voice their complaints about the business model. None of the changes to the model have changed that, not surprisingly.
Now here is a tip for you, and others: people don’t listen to complaints. When you start out a piece of advice for someone with “this is detestable,” you are not going to get any sympathy for your position. :smack: I’ve been in business, indeed, in retail, and I assure you that people who complained were not gaining sympathy for themselves.
Which takes us back to what I said. A business only responds to lack of business. If it isn’t sufficiently upsetting to you to cause you to stop giving it your business, then the problem you complain about certainly isn’t “detestable.” And complaining about it isn’t going to get you anywhere, nor is it going to get the people in charge to do something about it.
Unlike you, I DID cease to give the business my money. When they went to a paying board, I stopped being a member, for almost two years. I didn’t like the decision to make us pay to post. After a while, I decided that I missed being here and could afford the $15 a year to indulge my enjoyment of the place. So I came back. Since I have been back, I rarely complain about the way the Board is run, because I accept that I have the option of not being here, if it really is that annoying to me how they do things.
If you have suggestions about how to run the place, email Ed. Be detailed. I doubt that Ed will totally ignore anything that is offered with an appropriate attitude. But whinging about it in the ATMB, using terms like “detestable” isn’t doing anyone any good.
Which was the point to my prior post.
Wow. I don’t see ads regardless, because I have Firefox and Adblock and whatnot, but I assumed that by paying to not see ads, people were, y’know, not seeing ads.
Yes, I think that if you are going to continue to run ads for paying subscribers, you need to be very clear about this up front, as in, “By paying for a subscription, you will be removing the ads that show up in threads and banners, but you will still see Google Ads.” Because saying that people won’t see ads isn’t just misleading, it’s a total lie. I mean, come on; this is a board dedicated to fighting ignorance and we have the administrator saying, “Oh, what, THOSE ads? Oh, I didn’t mean THOSE ads when I said you wouldn’t see any ads.” Give us a break, okay?
I’ll be frank. Till now it never occurred to me that there was some major resentment of text ads, which have been appearing for quite a while. My impression has been that most people didn’t notice them and a few found them amusing. The controversy last fall, as I say, was strictly over display ads. If it becomes apparent that people really, really don’t want to see text ads either, I guess we can make them go away. However, please keep a few things in mind:
(1) We derive some revenue from text ads. If we forego that revenue, we have to make it up somewhere else. The idea is that the subscription rate is supposed to equal the revenue we lose by not showing subscribers ads. If we don’t show text ads, we’ll probably have to bump up the subscription rate.
(2) We haven’t switched to free posting yet, and won’t do so till this summer. For now all remains as before, meaning among other things that subscribers see text ads.
(3) We’re not trying to persuade you to subscribe, either now or later. If we do this right, we’ll make the same money on subscribers vs. nonsubscribers. We’ll be switching to free posting fairly soon. If you don’t care about ads, want to save money, and don’t mind not being able to post for a while, let your subscription lapse and we’ll see you later.
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My resentment isn’t over the text ads in general; it’s over purchasing a service described as “no ads” and still seeing ads. It’s about getting what one paid for, and getting a proper description of the service one is purchasing.
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Why are the other ads being called “display” ads? The Google ads on the bottom of the thread are displaying on my display, so the word fails to distinguish between the two types of ads. Maybe it would be better to call them graphical ads or in-thread ads?
You misunderstand.
Ed never said “no ads.” Ed said NO DISPLAY ADS. [caps for emphasis]
Ed said display ads because they are prominently displayed all over the board, because they are big ads. They are not like Google ads at all.
You have not seen display ads because you are a subscriber and have thus not been exposed to them, it’s been one of the benefits of subscribing.
To see exactly what we’re talking about, please sign out of the board and return to the board without logging in again. Look at some pages.
You will see DISPLAY ads.
You will see more ads than you can shake a stick at.
THOSE are the ads you do not see if you are a subscriber.
Google ads were with us before all this; Google ads were with us before display ads. Everyone, including moderators and administrators see Google ads. They are mostly inobtrusive and not overly objectionable. You had them for ages and didn’t mind them before.
Please try the little experiment outlined above. I promise it will be most illuminating.
Whislt you’re technically correct in what you are saying, to the average person looking at a website that says if you pay a subscription then you won’t see display ads, they are going to assume there will be no advertising on the page.
Surely just a minor change to the wording is required to clarify?
“If you’d rather let your subscription lapse and wait for free posting, that’s up to you. I remind you that free posting means you’ll see display ads, whereas subscribing means you won’t (although you will continue to see the google ads at the bottom of each page).”
Yeah, we probably should make that distinction. Ed has said as much.
The term goes back to the ancient days of newspapers. Display ads in print are the ones (usually) with pictures and are mixed in with editorial content, as opposed to classified ads, which were text-only and relegated to the back of the paper.
With Google’s ads, it’s much the same - the “classified” ads are the easily-ignored text-only ads at the bottom of the page, and the display ads are the huge banners and mid-page monstrosities.
Ya know, I didn’t think of it like that until just this second – you are absolutely correct.
Ed, being an old newspaper guy, thinks like that too. 
Perhaps “display ad” is not a concept easily understood by the average poster who thinks an ad is an ad is an ad. But there is a difference.
Thanks for posting, I really appreciate that!
What do you mean he never said “no ads”? That’s exactly what his sticky referenced in post #3 said. It STILL says that, but now is at least thankfully clarified.
Yes, it’s very clear now what you guys meant, there’s no need to keep explaining. The problem isn’t that I don’t understand which ads you mean, but it was incorrectly explained before I had to resubscribe to continue posting.
Your doubts are wrong. Use the search engine.
Ok, and here’s my point. Now that you’ve realized this fundamental disconnect, you need to retrace your steps and find out how many people that you’ve run this idea by and thought it sounded great were similarly confused. I suspect you’ll find the idea a lot less well-received if they’re better informed.
I’d like to clarify that I don’t think there has been major resentment of text ads. Certainly not on my part. But up until now, I have paid to post, not to suppress the ads. The ads weren’t even part of the equation. You make my payment all about the ads, and that changes things.
I definitely recall finding them amusing at times, but more in a “laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation” sort of way. Your interpretation of this type of amusement is wishful thinking: all else equal, I doubt there’s anyone who actually wants them there for amusement purposes. There are probably plenty of people like myself who think, “if that’s what they need to keep the site afloat, ok, whatever…at least they’re so absurdly wrong it’s funny sometimes.” But again, if I’m paying for the sole purposes of making ads go away, those are included in what I want to go away.
Correct, I was reading most of the threads a while ago about the ads, and then the ones about free posting. Nowhere except in these few, very recent, threads has it been mentioned that it’s only the new “display” ads that will be gone. Admittedly there was also no mention that the google ad’s would go but anyone looking at something that said no ads, without qualifications, would assume it meant no ads whatsoever. I do, at the moment, despite all the things i’ve read on here over the past few years, give Ed and whoever else the benefit of the doubt that it was a misunderstanding, but you cannot claim that that is what he said in the beginning.
I, too, thought “no ads” meant “no ads at all,” but now that it’s been pointed out, the distinction between display ads and google ads is pretty clear. I think as long as the SDMB’s description of the pay benefits is equally clear, subscribers will have no problem with the continued google ads.
(Of course, I do not presume to speak for the teeming millions, who will no doubt tear me apart maenad-style for the above opinion.)
Sorry to resurrect an old thread just to say this, but I never saw this discussed anywhere and thought you guys deserved a “thanks” for making this happen. Thanks.