I presume we are speaking about generating revenue for whatever owns the SD.
How much money are we talking about?
Open custom titles up to where anyone can buy a custom title for anyone. Yep, if someone buys one for you that you don’t like, you gotta pony up to change it. For a little extra, you can choose your own custom title that can’t be modified by others. With this contentious crowd, it would be an epic way to raise funds.
I cant see any significant expenses, and I am sure that advertising and member fees cover those. However, I suspect the board is more bother than it’s profits bring in.
That might violate the “don’t be a jerk” rule. 
I first discovered the Straight Dope in the now-defunct Baltimore City Paper probably around 1985 - 6. I searched for in on the Internet and found the Dope again probably in the 2002 - 3…I was a long time lurker before finally joining as a guest…I will echo what so many have said:
*MERCH the hell out of the SD, tee shirts, golf shirt, calendars (wall and desk), posters, coffee cups, you name it, I’ve love to have a couple of shirts…I’ve got numerous band shirts, tons of Seinfeld and Dilbert swag, my wife gets me a desk calendar every year, in the past, it’s been Dilbert, Seinfeld or Family Guy, love to have a SD desk calendar…I’d be the first one to buy a “Fighting Ignorance Since 1979” tee shirt…
*Re-do the website, it’s archaic, find a better way to deliver ads - many websites do this successfully, this shouldn’t be a mystery…people WANT to be here, make it user-friendly…
*Love the idea of more member-related submissions, give people a reason to join other than feeling like they’re paying blackmail to not watch ads…
Get Weber, Coleman, and Char-Broil to compete over sponsoring the pit.
A thought, maybe a more highly moderated forum or two that is only postable by members. Still readable by guests, and the rest of the board is accessible by guests. It may raise the quality in those forums enough to make people happy.
Another thought, with the purchase of a membership, a 1/2 price discount on buying a gift membership for another poster.
This. Always and forever this. The Straight Dope has been leaving thousands of dollars on the table every year by not mechandising like crazy. Between Zazzle and Cafe Press, this is a no-brainer.
This is an interesting idea, but I think it could have a serious us/them dynamic within the board, where there is already some elitism at play. I also doubt that it would result in enough additional revenue to make it worth the bad feelings.
I’ll join the throng that is urging better merchandise and more of it. Perhaps raise the membership fee by a little and throw in a mug (for all current members as well). I don’t honestly know how much of it I would buy myself (I seem to be drowning in “stuff” wherever I look) but there seems to be a lot of eagerness around.
I think merch is great, but it ain’t gonna bring in new people. Yes, us old timers are clamoring for it, but that can’t possibly be enough to make this place profitable. Maybe the money it brings in could help fund some new ideas for the site, but I can’t imagine it’s the final answer. And for me, what made the Straight Dope something I wanted to buy merch for was Cecil and his column. Not the SDMB, which I love, but I don’t want to wear an SDMB t-shirt. And without new stuff from Cecil, what’s the Straight Dope that we’re trying to promote with shirts, mugs, etc?
There needs to be a reason for new people to come here and come back. There needs to be something new and awesome that people WANT to promote with merch. The message board isn’t gonna cut it. It’s a nice component, but new content, IMO, is the only way to move the Straight Dope forward.
The Straight Dope web magazine. Quirky articles, essays, poetry, short stories, web comics, blogs, videos, etc.
Bring back The Teeming Millions, in other words.
That’s just crazy enough to work!
Another vote for the Patreon presence, with a heavy vote for a YouTube presence. My detailed idea? The Straight Dope had a television show back in the 90s on A&E, which was pretty entertaining. Mike Lukas was basically doing three or four segments a show, with a VH1 “Pop-up Video” style to it. Bring back the show on YouTube channels, and set up a FaceBook/Patreon presence to expand the advertising web. Maybe have those that did the Staff Reports do their own columns on the YouTube channel. Perhaps subject-matter-expert members (subject to Mod approval) can upload their own videos for Q&A. Mental Floss has been doing this for awhile, and they’re kinda dweebs compared to us; but they must be generating a ton of cash.
Seriously, why are we limited to just a message board and a few books/coffee cups? Get the word out, and paid subscribers will start to come on in. YouTube views would generate some more ad revenue, etc. etc. etc. Broaden the presence.
Send me a t-shirt–I’ll wear it in front of Congress next month.
Tripler
My lapel button: “I like Mike.”
I agree with Little Nemo. The PTB tried to turn the board into pay to post years ago, and we lost a ***LOT ***of posters. Those of us who paid to keep posting and who keep paying became “Charter Members”.
I don’t think this is a good idea, at all, although I don’t have any objection to paying a higher membership fee than I do now. I certainly get my money’s worth.
I agree - but merch would be a great place to start and would kick in some quick cash, IMHO…advertising merch on FB, Twitter, Amazon, etc…
Cecil to me is analogous to the Grateful Dead (OK, I know, I mention them a lot, but hear me out), he’s got a voluminous body of work, we don’t need new content immediately if we can get people in here as one can spend years digging through the old columns and threads…
My brother and I trade GD subscriptions every year for Christmas, can I go online to the Online Music Archive and stream multiple versions of every concert they ever performed? Yes, but we like buying the STUFF, we buy Dead tee shirts still…and Jerry’s been dead for 13 years now…Dead and Company don’t count for me, it’s just a really expensive cover band…
I love the idea of the quirky articles, essays, poetry, the Teeming Millions are a creative group, tie posting those to membership, anyone can read, but only members can post…
Good discussion here, we may have our disagreements across the spectrum in other areas, but we all want to see the SDMB survive…
I think it all depends on the type of troll. The asshole trolls are allowed to stick around, the crazies are banned at once. We used to have fun poking them with a stick. Maybe have a loony bin forum? I’d rather see a bunch of nutjobs like Beryl Mooncalf or JDT rather than sickos like Cesario that the powers to be took forever to ban. (I know it wouldn’t draw people here, but we lost a few old-timers when the latter was allowed to stay)
And maybe that’s not a lot to you. BUT, let’s face it. Message boards aren’t the draw they used to be, at least not with younger people. Social media IS. And kids aren’t going to want to pay a dollar a day just to pal around with, to put it bluntly, a bunch of old farts.
Pay to post did a lot of harm to this place before – if they insisted on it again, I’d be outta here. The whole “member vs guest” thing is really snotty and creates the wrong atmosphere. It shouldn’t matter who pays and who doesn’t.
Unless you had a trial period (we did before), nobody’d want to stay around. I see a place that requires payment, I’m like, fuck it, why should I pay when there are plenty of places on the web for free.
Awesome…all of it, merch like hell, youtube, FB/Patreon presence…do it all…JHMO…
And you have 12 years on me and literally 153.6 times more posts than I do, so I will defer to you on these questions:
Would you stick around if guests could post and comment, but not post original content (quirky articles, stories, poems, etc.)?
Would you buy merch?
I’ll ask this again: whom are we trying to attract? It’s hard to develop a marketing strategy without deciding what the SDMB market is. A presence on Facebook? Great. The average Facebook user is about 40, and about 65% are over 35. Is that who the potential joiners are, people over 35? Everyone over 35?
What’s the average user profile of the SDMB now?
“Everyone who’ll come” is a good strategy for a bake sale. Is that the level of funding that’s needed? A bake sale?
Who are we?
What do we offer?
Whom do we want to attract?
I spent 10 years as one of two people managing the network for a school district. When we wanted to set up a blog server for the teachers to use it cost the district literally nothing. The bandwidth was already in place. We already owned a domain, and adding a subdomain cost nothing. WordPress multiuser is free, and we installed it on a machine we already had. Of course, vBulletin isn’t free, but there are free alternatives, such as phpBB. We already had plenty of public IPs available.
We were both on salary, and all the work was done during downtime when we would have been doing nothing but being available anyway, so no extra labor costs.
A board the size of SDMD wouldn’t be able to run on a shared machine, but even if we’d had to buy a machine to run our server it would have been a one time cost of 2 grand tops.
Nitpicking is another thing this board loves to do that annoys people. It adds nothing to the discussion and is a distraction.
And whining. We excel at whining.