SpaceDog says that the Amazon affiliate program pays more for directly linked books–maybe if the SD Powers That Be sign up for that, they can set up something like the Threadspotting and Weird Earl links and let members nominate books to be linked that get changed on the same schedule.
Thanks folks for, IMHO, some really excellent suggestions !
Thanks also for you input, Ed Zotti. Four observations on your informative post:
One
Charitable donations to the presently constituted entity:
Ed – would you take a look at this thread where poster Humble Servant (a Chicago Lawyer, I believe) says he/she doesn’t believe The Reader can’t accept charitable donations (as per the New Server drive).
In the light of that, are you able to say quite clearly that you sought professional legal advice and you were advised The Reader cannot (in its presently constituted form) accept donations ?
If so: Are you able to share the legal reasoning ?
Two
The SDMB Trust:
From the same thread it appears the adoption of charitable status itself is little more than a formality. Yes, there are issues and costs associated with setting it up but it can revert to The Reader’s ownership in the future for a nominal fee. And we have lawyers here who may be willing to do some work, we can also sponsor the legal work if necessary. I do think we need to think creatively and to be motivated to solve this issue.
Further, I don’t necessarily agree with “unreliable”, “unpredictable” maybe but once charitable status is obtained strange things can happen – damn! we get billions donated to cat charities every year in this country because old ladies have no one else to give it to.
In the absence of head locking some old trout on her death bed, charitable status is itself is an excellent conduit and motivation (having a legal endorsement, an implied ‘feel good giving’ factor) for attracting money. For a start, several options already listed here would fit well with charitable status. I believe it is an option worth looking at further and there are enough lawyers around these parts to get a pretty good perspective on the deal.
Three
Annual charity drive resulting in a lump sum in return for a token banner ad:
Sorry, but that just reads so negatively to me. I’m not sure what numbers you’re projecting on PTP take-up or the fee for annual subscription but you’ve dismissing (at $7,000 as per the Server drive) the equivalent of 350 people paying $20.00 each for PTP – if PTP is the solution, I’m not sure how much more you expect to raise…$10,000…$20,000… because I really don’t think that’s possible and it likely means the board withering.
You’ve got potentially 7 grand sitting there in a lump sum waiting for collection, all for the price of a token banner ad …
Four
Lifetime Membership:
Ed – you didn’t address this. Say – on the understanding it’s for “The lifetime of the board only, non-refundable and subject to the usual terms (jerkism)” – 25 people cough up a $300 fee to support the board – not a lot of people given the mean income of members. That equals $7,500 as a one-off lump with the option of others doing the same if they want to later on. But you offer no comment.
Would it be so difficult to collect (maybe) 25 cheques totalling (maybe) $7,500 ? - perhaps more if they could write it off to charity.
The general feeling amongst those who participate on the board is that PTP will signal the death knell. Could we please take a good hard look at some very meritorious suggestions as listed in this thread or should we just accept PTP as the already chosen easy option ?
Very Quick and Dirty Answer:
The Reader can’t accept charitable donations b/c it is not a charity. It can accept “donations” but it would have to book them as income and pay tax on them. Of course, there may be offsetting expenses, but this is a complex tax question. For example, paying Ed is probably a deductable expense. However, buying a server would probably have to be depreciated over a few years. Donations/income, however, would have to be booked in the year it was received. So it’s not necessarily a wash.
In any case, as the Reader isn’t a certified non-profit, the “donations” wouldn’t be tax deductable by the donor.
MrVisible, that’s a very interesting idea. Individuals contribute funds to the Reader by buying a commercial classified ad. $23 minimum, text “Buy Cecil Adams’s Straight Dope Books! This ad courtesy of an SDMB poster in City, Country.”
Further comments in this thread.
Unfortunately I must disagree with the way my words have been recycled here. I know it is done without malice, but the higlighted language is not what I said. Truth Seeker is right on the tax issues, which I also discussed in the other thread. I said that I did not think that it was illegal for the Reader to accept “donations,” but that they would be treated as taxable income to the Reader and would not earn a tax deduction for the donor–i.e., they cannot be classified as “charitable” donations in the hands of the Reader. Further, as I again discussed in the other thread, getting tax-exampt status is a big deal (forming a not-for-profit corporation is not so big a deal, but putting into place its relationships with the Reader might be). I also posted something very like what Ed wrote about some of the practical impediments and the “not inexpensive” nature of the complex legal relationships entailed.
Sorry, LC.
Ed How many unique visitors does the SDMB have per month? The reason I ask is that 3 million plus page views per month is extremely respectable traffic. This doesn’t, of course, translate into 3 million visitors, though.
Excellent, no sense in relying on only one revenue stream.
You are absolutely correct. There is wide agreement that there must be a method of getting new posters hooked. Straight PTP will eliminate new posters and will kill off the board as it has killed others. A workable solution must allow the Reader to make money and encourage newbies and lurkers to post.
Suggested Solution #1 Make People Pay For an Identity
Keep the current system requiring registration and allowing free posting. However, make people pay for a unique and verfiable identity. In other words, people can post questions and responses on the boards but the questions and responses will appear anonymously until they pay a subscription fee. This should be be technically easy to implement. It won’t deter newbies and I’d bet that it would actually generate more revenue than a straight subscription fee because more people will get involved in the SDMB. Once people get involved in the board, lots of them will want to pay for a unique identity as one of the main attractions of this board is the relationships you create with other posters and the reputation you develop. It’s true that people can spoof other anonymous posters by pretending to be someone else. This, however, is exactly the point and one of the key reasons why people will want to buy an idenity. (This idea has also been discussed in another thread.) In any case, something like this is worth a try as an intermediate step before implementing a fee that everyone agrees will drastically reduce participation in the board.
Suggested Solution #2 Sell Naming Rights
This doesn’t mean selling a banner ad, it means finding another corporation to co-sponsor the board. In the greater scheme of the universe, $45,000 is not an enormous amount of money. Given the uniqueness of the SDMB and the traffic it gets, I have no doubt whatsoever that the Reader could find another corporation to co-sponsor the site in return for naming rights. Barnes & Noble or Amazon seem likely choices as does Ballantine. No doubt there are any number of other organizations that’d be interested in exploring a relationship with the SDMB. In fact, I bet, there are Dopers reading this board right now who are in positions of responsibility with large corporations which would allow them push an SDMB sponsorship. The big advantage of this approach is that you wouldn’t have to change the way the board operates.
I’d just like to say thatnks to Ed for indentifying the costs associated with the board - nice to see that L_C, KellyM & co. had hit the target.
Publicising that figure may be one of the best things that you can do - now people realise that the cost is up to $45K per year, they’re probably going to be somewhat more sympathetic towards any solutions you implement.
Not so sure about corporate sponsorship, Truth S - the Reader is, after all, another for-profit entity. It’s hard to envisage a corporation sponsoring another corporation.
Interested to know what you thought, Ed, about my estimates for the number of likely subscribers. Namely that your potential population is of the order of 1800, with 300 of those being on the fringe of take-up (0.75-1 posts per day). If you charge $25, you’d need almost a 90% take-up of that 1800 to make $40K per year. Waddya think - feasible?
I think we need to consider attempting perfect price discrimination. This is the ideal pricing structure where everybody is charged exactly what they are willing to pay. In the real world it is virtually always impossible to implement, since the customer is not going to tell you the maximum they are willing to pay and it is normally very hard to charge different amounts to different people. Railways attempt primitive price discrimination, for example, by charging different rates on- and off-peak.
There’s a good case, however, for considering perfect price discrimination (ppd) here because we all want to pay according to our means to keep this place afloat. Although we would strictly speaking be “customers”, there is extreme brand loyalty and a desire to make this place work. As such, I would expect that asking people to pay as much as they think the subscription is worth would lead to positive results.
Now this has been suggested a few times (did I see TurboDog do so?), but it hasn’t been fleshed out. So I have.
One possibility is to have five price options, with a “suggested” of about $30. Another is to really bite the bullet and have a blank field for people to make their own ppd.
Incidentally - whilst classifieds are indeed a great idea, I think that their effectiveness will be severely curtailed if run in conjunction with PTP. This is because whilst I would feel a sense of duty to place a classified ad if I was not contributing anything else, if I pony up $25 subscription I am less likely to feel that I owe anything else. Just a thought.
pan
I don’t think one individual thing is going to make the SDMB profitable. It’s going to take a collection of things.
The Reader has a very valuable resource here, if it can figure out how to profit from it. You have thousands of highly active participants, most of whom I’m guessing have above-average educations and incomes. Lots of commercial websites would kill to have the developed user base that you guys have. Some sites have literally spent millions to develop their ‘eyeball share’ and didn’t wind up with what you guys have. So be very careful about talking about ‘thinning’ it, or getting rid of ‘casual’ posters.
I think the best way to look at the board as a revenue model is like a sports stadium. Sure, when demand is high enough the arena makes plenty of money from gate receipts, but that alone won’t cut it. So it sells programs, merchanise, and food to the spectators, and ad revenue on the inside of the building. Then it might even sell its name to a corporation, and rent itself out for rock concerts and such.
You need to think out of the box. What works for this board is going to different than what works for others, because the user base is quite unique. For example, I think you could do reasonably well with an online store of wacky, or hard-to-find merchandise that gets talked about in the boards. Stuff with conversational value.
Become an Amazon affiliate, and set up a way for people to put links to Amazon books in their messages in such a way that you get credited for it. Then when we’re discussing the latest novel or having a debate about a new political tome, you can be almost guaranteed that one of us will put up the obligatory click-through link for you guys.
Do the classifieds, too.
Do some vanity selling. Announce that we can post a GIF of our choice for one full day for some price, with the idea being that we’ll make up goofy banners to make each other laugh, or to announce a kid’s birthday, or whatever. Hey, for a couple of bucks I’d do it regularly just for yucks and see if I can generate some fun comments. In fact, people could set up threads for contests for who comes up wih the best banner, and you guys collect the dough.
Look into the donation system. You can’t take tax-free donations, but I don’t see why you can’t have a voluntary-pay system and call it the ‘premier club’ or something like that and give people recognition for contributing. But I’m not a lawyer, and could be wrong.
Create a Premier, for-pay club which gets the member a special flag announcing his status, or even allows him to post a thumbnail picture of himself with his message (I don’t know if vbulletin supports this).
Put us to work. You’re already doing this by posting some thread snippets in Cecil’s books, but maybe there is a way to work some of the better material here into some published material. Maybe a new type of book you can sell.
Get slug to do some original artwork, and sell it to us. Slug gets even richer than he is now, and we get some cool artwork. I’d pay some decent money for an 8 x 10 signed print of a Slug SDMB original. If he won’t do it, get someone else in your art department to do art to represent recurring themes on the sdmb. Put 'em on T-shirts, and we’ll buy truckloads. There’s a lovely goat-felching shirt I’ve got my eye on…
Some of these ideas may not work - I’m just firing ideas out. The main point is that I think you have to be creative to make money from the Internet. I agree with the others that if you just charge for posting this place will be a ghost town in short order (and I used to run a place like this for a living - for 8 years).
And I’m sorry to, ** Humble Servant** – to both you and Ed. I haven’t grasped this fully and was absent from the board when the question of donations to an existing for-profit entity was more fully discussed.
Oh heck…you don’t make no omelette without…
Leave it to the experts !
I don’t know about that, it happens all the time in co-branding, joint ventures, etc. In this case, its a species of advertising. They’re doing something similar whenever McDonalds or Burger King has a movie promotion. In fact, in the film world, studios generate big bucks by agreeing to have a particular character drink a Coke in a scene or receive a package by Federal Express.
I’m not suggesting a corporation sponsor The Reader. I’m suggesting another corporation co-sponser the SDMB. After all, The Reader doesn’t compete with Ballantine (Cecil’s publisher) or Barnes & Noble or Qualcomm, for that matter.
True enough.
Though I’d still consider that more as “advertising” than “sponsorship”. And getting advertising has, apparently, proved tricky.
pan
I like the Amazon.com idea, personally (as one part of a multi-tiered approach). I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon (well, not as much as the person discussed earlier but for me a lot) and the SD would definitely make more off me from an affiliate program than they would for charging yearly access. Unfortunately not many dopers here like Amazon, and how much longer can Amazon be in the red before it shuts down?
I hope never, because I love 'em.
I’ve been at a number of websites that used Barnes & Noble as an “associate” link. You get some cut of anything people buy who came via your website.
It could be turned on at once, as I understand it, and they do everything else.
It would be something the board could do while it was waiting to decide what to do.
Under the fee system, what about a way to reward excellent posting ? PTP in reverse, as it were. A fee refund, or some kind of value-credit to be spent online at a Reader corporate sponsor or advertiser, to be given at the moderators’ discretion given the quality of given posts ? Thereby making the expense of the 20$ [or whatever] fee provide the hope/promise of a return. (Sorta like the incentive of the stock scheme mentioned in Anthracite’s other thread, or the business model of Amazon-style affiliation, in a way…)
The Amazon Suggestion is a very good idea.
I’m contemplating buying one of everything at the shop. I figure it should knock me back about $100 dollars. Would more people be interested in doing this? 100 people doing this would be $10,000 dollars. not a lot, but not to be sneezed at. Perhaps a Teeming Millions Bundle offer (mug, 2 books, t-shirt) at a set rate?
I know these arent long term, but its a start.
I’ve been away for a bit, so I may well have missed some of these discussions. At the risk of annoying folks, I’d like to set forth my understanding of the issues. This will probably be a respeat for most of you, so I won’t blame anyone for skimming or rolling their eyes.
[ul]
[li]The Chicago Reader is losing too much money on its website, of which the SDMB is a significant part.[/li][li]The Reader requires either significant cost reductions, a steady income source, or both in order to continue sponsoring this site. They are investigating a registration fee as a mechanism for obtaining “both”.[/li][li]Many of us who find great value in this site are fearful that such a change will have disastrous consequences for the online community that gathers here. Some folks have made the effort to analyze the problem and propose alternative solutions.[/li][li]Others have expressed ethical/financial/philosophical concerns with the proposed fees.[/li][li]The Reader, obviously, is under non obligation to listen to, investigate, experiment with, or care about alternative solutions. However, they have asked for opinions in a slightly different form (through the survey) and they have been open enough to supply the financial parameters of the problem.[/li][/ul]
Okay–that seems pretty clear. My personal reactions:
[ul]
[li]The fee is neither a financial nor an ethical burden to me. I can understand how it might be to some people, but I do not share their circumstances and/or evaluation of the issues.[/li][li]I value this community and I am quite willing to spend money to contribute toward its maintenance.[/li][li]BUT, significant, perhaps even vital, elements of this community are the open quality of debates, the diversity of opinion and expertise, and the abundance of esoteric knowledge and experience that are represented by the TM[sup]tm[/sup]. I am very concerned that restricting posting priveleges to those who pay a fee wil compromise these elements.[/li][li]I will pay to support this community. I am not certain that I will pay to support what this community will become should participation be “pared down” and future membership growth be financially discouraged. I am not trying to be melodramitic. I am not saying that “doom will come”. I do not know. I think it is a safe projection that active participation will decline and that new memberships will slow.[/li][li]I will pay the initial fee, should that become reality. Whether I continue to pay is not something I can predict right now. I would not be interested in a “lifetime membership” offer of any kind. I would much rather make one (or more) financial donations designed to defray costs and allow membership to remain open.[/li][li]I dearly hope that the Chicago Reader will try (not just debate) alternative means of raising revenue before deciding upon a restrictive membership mechanism. Several alternatives have been mentioned in this thread. I might add a simple idea:[list]encourage those of us who wish to keep access free to “put our money where our pixels are”. If you do not want to allow simple donations (I have no need of a tax deduction for this.) then point us to teh merchandise.[/li][li]on the header section of each page display a simple measure of how much merchandizing sales have served to defray operating expenses.[/li][li]Allow people the option of spending money directly for “operating expenses”. Frankly, I would rather all my money went to the maintenance of this site than stock my dresser with more t-shirts. It costs me less and gives you more “profit”.[/ul][/li][li]The Reader may be correct that none of these alternatives, individually or in aggregate, will provide a long-term solution. And I certainly don’t blame anyone for declining to get into the “pledge drive” business. I hate the things myself, no matter which side of the phone I’m on. I think the frankness of this discussion is very much to the credit of Cecil and the Chicago Reader. I think we can all understand the scope of the problem. I also think that the scope is not so vast that we cannot meet it without restricting access to the boards. I may be wrong, but I hope that we will be given that chance.[/li][li]I have great sympathy for the work that the moderators and administrators do to maintain these boards. I applaud them. I value their efforts. I try not to make their task any more burdensome. I do not, however, agree that access to the boards should be discouraged in order to make their jobs easier. If keeping tabs on the trolls is taking up too much of teh mods time, then please seek more volunteers to help distribute the load. I sympathize with your frustration, but I think the cure you propose might be worse than the disease.[/li][/list]
Okay – that’s it. I’m off to add oodles of Straight Dope stuff to people’s Christmas lists.
Spiritus, I think you’ve got a pretty clear grasp of the situation. However, I disagree that even agressive merchandizing efforts will contribute sufficiently to the cost of maintaining the boards. Only so many Teeming Millions coffee cups I can own.
I am really, really interested in the Barnes and Nobles/Amazon/et al idea as something that would generally appeal to our dopers (especially GD and GQ where book references are so often used in the first place!). I was always wondering what sort of revenue a board like this could expect with so many readers of the kind that we have here; that is, with so many readers who aggressively read!
I strongly request of Ed Zotti and others who are a major part of this decision process to try this for a time. When I signed up (back in the day when I had a web page) for an Amazon Associates account it was totally free, and once you signed up you put the links where you wanted to and forgot about it. It is a very low-effort, low-cost solution to raising some possible revenue without noticibly changing to boards at all. If the goal is to make money off a website, or at least fend off excessive costs, putting deterrents to membership is the very last thing that should be attempted. Unlike others I am a "doom and gloom"er when it comes to that. I do believe it will kill the boards.
I couldn’t decide where to put this post, but this thread seems as good a place as any.
Of course, it’s not strictly necessary for this board to have to do the work. As far as I can see the pay-to-post thing is because the SDMB doesn’t get any advertisers.
If one of the regulars (a trustworthy one) were to set up a web site with the Amazon/Expedia/Barnes&Noble links and collect the money, then they could use this money to buy advertising on the board. That way the board gets money in an normal fashion - which is generated by the members.
The problem with this would be making sure the incoming revenue covered the cost of advertising, I suspect some sort of special contract with the CR. And, also, whether people would trust in the fact that the money was all going to the right places.
I’m sure people more clued up than me can solve these problems. You could also accept donations on this web page since the donations are being used to buy a service.
On the off chance that there is extra money then it can be donated to a charity, as voted for by the members of this board.
Whatcha a’ think ?
SpaceDog
Just one quick observation / opinion. I believe that the Amazon.com click thru idea is a fantastic one, that can generate real revenue for the board. I’m sure that many SDMB members will be buying from Amazon.com this holiday season, and would be more than happy to support the SDMB in the process by using the SDMB link. However, time is running out, in order to take advantage of this opportunity, action must be taken ASAP.
Long term solution? Maybe not, but why give up the opportunity to get a few grand in your pocket?
This is the answer to the question **So, what’s it cost to run this board? **
But I won’t try to get this quote over to that question.