If SDMB is to make more money, it should not stay away from things where people can get emotionally involved because this is exactly where they are likely to spend their money.
Now, I am not an expert in economics but I have never heard of an Internet forum that has become a successful business model. If SDMB wants solid financial support, it should clearly identify and promote a cause, for which donations can be raised regularly from people and organizations pursuing the same goal.
First off, it’s been an incredibly refreshing change having you at the helm of this ship. Your openness to new ideas is fantastic and long, long overdue.
Secondly, it would be a lot easier to brainstorm if we had an idea of the scale of the problem. Can you give us a rough estimate of (a) the operational costs of this place and (b) a minimum amount of profit that you suspect would be deemed acceptable by the owners? Are we talking $100/month, $1000/month, $10k/month?
Lots of good suggestions.
I’d get behind a Facebook page but even more a Twitter feed, consisting of interesting snippets from posts. We’d need volunteers to do it.
The reason for that is to get something around here to go viral. I’m sure some people found the Dope from the columns, some from Google, but we are not very visible. The PTB will not get rich selling merch to current posters, we need more and to get more posters we need more visibility.
Could we ally ourselves with other websites and organizations that fight ignorance? Political ones would not be candidates. Lots of them probably have problem with trolls and comments that make the Pit look like Sunday School. We have great moderation and more civil posts than most places. Maybe we could get some of those sites to outsource their comment sections to us?
I don’t know how advertising revenue works, but it must be somewhat proportional to page views. Lots more people mean lots more advertising revenue or lots more memberships.
Comments like,
“Figures, look at the join date.”
are great at chasing away potential new paying members.
So if we all toned that down it might help.
Maybe start a SDMB forum on Reddit or do a clever advertise post on Imgur. Imgur loves clever advertise posts.
People on Imgur also love their Fake Internt Points.
So we could do something like that here but only positive upvotes. We don’t need the negative downvotes. If someone has a problem with someone else make them take it to the Pit and create another thread. No anonymous negativity.
And this right here is a prime example:
Attitudes like this drive posters away. It puts people on the spot and makes them feel like you’re giving them a guilt trip for not ponying up. THAT’S why people got “huffy”.
(For the record, it’s none of your business why people choose to pay or not)
It’s $15 already – how much more do you think it should be? :dubious:
By all means, merchandising, but first more people need to know we’re here. And let’s not make this site like Reddit. There’s already a Reddit. II signed up a year ago because the SDMB has a lot of highly intelligent people, so I knew if I asked a GQ, I was going to get great and relevant answers. What’s more, Reddit and Quora and the like don’t have the standards the SDMB has: post in GD here, and people demand cites. Integrity is important.
About the name…I love it, but I was already familiar with the Straight Dope column in the Chicago Reader. When I was teaching high school, I’d occasionally read aloud from one of Cecil’s books, ie, regarding Hitler’s possible Jewish ancestry, but I had to preface it with a definition of “straight dope.” I highly recommend against changing it, though, because once that happens, it becomes indistinguishable from other sites. The meaning could, though, be incorporated into the ads. It’s a quirky and eye-catching name.
Who’s the target audience? Maybe that’s a good place to start.
I’d like to see a live stream, probably on Twitch with videos shared on YouTube afterward, that included content from the Teeming Millions. I’d like to see the music performed live, or book readings, art exhibits, and so on. I’d love to see some of the forum games played live, especially the D&D type stuff. I’d love to see some of the gamers streaming their games on our channel. We could also have how-tos and lessons. We could a have our own cooking & brewing shows, I’m sure. It would be a mixed content arts & leisure stream. It would have a sort of local cable feel, with different people streaming at different times.
The only thing is, it would need to have a real broadcast team scheduling and sourcing the content. It’s too big a task to rely on volunteers beyond the initial set up. In order to attract enough content, there would need to be a revenue sharing of some sort for the content creators and a professional director of operations. We would also need a professional advertising system, here and at the stream. I couldn’t begin to estimate the cost - I’m just lousy at that end of planning things. But I think with enough buy in from all parties, it would pay off.
Is it possible for gift descriptions to return? I know the plug in for gift subscriptions “broke” a few years ago when the boards’ software was upgraded and the tech administrator cited a lack of time available to fix it. Could whoever is running things under the hood find time to make gift subscriptions available again?
I want to echo this sentiment.
Since your (Tubadiva) post to me that you hope I stick around, I have stuck around. I was recently reminded that I’ve posted here more in the last month than I have in a long time, if ever.
I’ve had a great time, learning new things that I’ve incorporated into my life. A couple people have mentioned they learned of new resources in threads I’ve posted. That’s nice to see.
Behind the scenes, people have been welcoming and supportive. (Thank you again to those people.)
At its best, the SDMB has a wonderfully supportive community. At it’s worst, the community can become insular with people holding grudges for decades. If the supportive part of the community can be fostered more, hopefully more people will want to join in.
I’m encouraged by your efforts so far that the supportive part might become the norm. You’ve brought a new positive energy here that I’m enjoying. I’m hoping to see new positive things being created here.
Another great strength of this community is that people like to analyze things and solve problems. People here are great at that. When this is focused in a positive direction, it’s great to see.
My suggestion would be to highlight these two positive aspects of the community. Perhaps there could be a welcome sticky in ATMB which would ask people to say hi but then to also introduce themselves in MPSIMS by starting a new thread. That gives new people two ways to be seen and start off in a welcoming way.
I really like Voyager’s idea of starting a twitter feed with threads/posts that are especially helpful or entertaining. It might be nice to have a thread where people can nominate those posts. I was just toying with the idea of starting a thread where people could point out funny posts. I think this already exists in some form with the weird urls, but I haven’t noticed it, only heard of it in other threads.
I like the idea other people have expressed about creating a place where people can donate anonymously. I’ve been amazed at how much random people on Reddit give money to each other and for good causes. I’m sure the people here are no different in that regard.
My other suggestion is to keep doing what you’re doing, continue communicating with the posters here and soliciting their input. If people are given clear instructions on what you want to see more of here, it’s easier to follow the directions. You asked me to stick around, post more and invite people. I’ve stuck around, posted more and am considering inviting a couple people from Reddit that I think might fit in well here. I’m just waiting until I find out more instructions on how they would get started and become accepted into the community.
Transparency.
We’ve been hearing for years that The Powers That Be Want to Make The Board Profitable, but what does that mean? What are the hard costs and what does “profitable” mean to the owners? Costs plus ten percent? Twenty? A hundred?
This board is never going to be a cash cow for the Sun-Times, so how much does the board need to bring in over its costs to exist in a state of benevolent neglect?
I’m not sure why the Sun Times would care about running a board that puts nothing back into the company. It would need to be a genuine source of income for them to want to continue investing the time of their staff. Either that or the board somehow works as a way to generate customers/subscribers to other parts of its business in sufficient numbers.
And to be honest I cannot see how a board like this could ever possibly achieve either of those things.
If we wanted to make the SDMB more popular however I do think a well crafted Facebook could really help. And a welcome to the boards style forum, where newbies can post their hellos and feel welcome on the boards, might be a nice idea.
How a board like this could ever be a revenue stream for a serious business though? That feels like an impossibility to me.
One thought though is to publish a series of Straight Dope books. That might be profitable. But they would need an author with no guarantee of a decent return!
I also would support a Patreon approach. Instead of memberships being less than $10 a year each, it could be $3 a month, which is essentially a tiny amount, but quickly adds up. It’s still a voluntary contribution, but there are some out there who make a good living via such donations, so even if it only covers hosting costs, it’s a load of pressure off somebody’s shoulders.
Anyway. This is a minor suggestion, but this entire site needs a modern design spruce up. It looks the same as it did in 1998, and feels it. It doesn’t have to be radical, that brings its own problems, it only has to be introducing basic design principles that are contemporary and will re-energise.
I know we had that hassle a few months back of the board UI changing, but that was poorly implemented by people who didn’t know diddly about what they were doing. We have extremely talented people on this very board who could have done a better job in their sleep, but their expertise was not sought beforehand, and instead had to be implemented via an imperfect kludge.
Or a weekly column that answers quirky questions.
The Sun Times Media Group is down to one asset: a city tabloid. How much longer is that going to last? Look at what’s happening to the New York Daily News. The only way this board has any long term future is to step off the sinking ship.
Seriously speaking, that depends on how large the sinking boat is.
Folks on my Death Pool list live forever. Send me …no, we can’t list board members.
dammit.
Encourage posting by awarding prizes for things we post. And make them fit the tone of the post or ironic. A snarky post would get a snarky prize.
And, the first person to use the word of the day gets spaghetti falling on their head, or whatever the message board equivalent of spaghetti falling on your head would be.
