Forget avatars, GIFs, and attracting the kids. Just get corporate sponsorship from Geritol and Depends. They would love to reach a bunch of old fogies like us directly. 
A couple things.
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Suppose someone runs across this board and likes what they see. How exactly do they become a member? Where is the big red button, either on the Straight Dope Home Page or anywhere on the SDMB, that says “Be One of Us! Click here” ? (As a matter of fact, didn’t there used to be a sign up link on the home page? What happened?) Honestly, if I weren’t already a member, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to join. Let’s try to be a little more user friendly to someone who happens to run across this place in a Google search.
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TPTB have to acknowledge that the Straight Dope Home Page is no longer an effective way to get new eyes. We need to design a portal that gives at least equal weight to guide people into the Board while still acting as the repository for the old columns.
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If we’re going to rely on advertising for a substantial potion of revenue, then let’s by golly give advertisers a worthwhile medium. No sneaky popups that don’t show up until after we leave, no sudden interruptions of content. Hell, if CNN can have entire sections of their home page labeled “Paid Partner Content” and “E Commerce Guide” and if the Chicago Sun-Times can put a banner ad ABOVE their own masthead, we can design something that’s at least a little more advertiser-friendly.
I don’t know about Reddit but I’m on Quora and one thing the Dope has that Quora does not is a sense of community.
How can we have thoughts without any information of any kind?
I’m pretty sure we won’t be losing anyone over avatars or pictures in thread. I know some people have said they would leave, but my gut tells me they won’t actually be going anywhere.
Well, you wouldn’t lose me but I’d probably spend an order of magnitude less time here. I’d guess on a normal week 80-90% of my time spent here is at work and that would go away.
Sorry, typo there. I still don’t see it happening.
Have a look at Kim Kardashian’s Twitter feed.
Unless you opt out of avatars. You only need to do that once, not every time someone adds a new avatar. So the board will stay the same you and not change one bit. Unless it will still bother you that someone out there has an avatar, even if you don’t see it.
Not to mention this is a board that has posted threads about pan-fried semen and polls asking women for detailed descriptions of their nipples. If that hasn’t cheapened the board, avatars and a forum for posting photos (a specific one), then I think we’ll manage.
…new logo. New branding! New fonts! New colours! Replace the garish yellow/blue/red!
That’s my point exactly - I don’t see how you can change things in any profit seeking way and maintain the sense of community. You can’t have your internet cake and eat it too. I don’t think you could even have the internet cake any more; that ship has sailed, any significant changes would make this board a very small much more lamer version of Reddit etc.
And to be serious, think of things from the users perspective, this board would not be welcoming place to the vast majority of the population.
You could log on one evening and turn off the avatars in your view. Then you’d never see them again, and the board would look exactly as professional as it does today.
At least, that’s how my other board works.
I avoid coming here from work because some of the ads are unprofessional, and i don’t have an ad blocker on my employer’s computer. But I have to admit they’ve been better recently.
Requesting a voluntary donation is one thing, harping on it is, well, just nagging, basically. Nobody likes a nag. Is it voluntary or isn’t it?
In order for me to perceive value I would like to get something only members get. A couple of ideas include searching for members only, with no delay, unlimited. Ad-free for members (I guess that’s in play already). Avatars, some people want that. I’m on several sites where they have avatars, and I have them turned off because I think they’re childish, so I never see them and never think about them, but they seem to add value for some people. Forums where pictures could be posted. Some kind of members-only thread rating system, for instance “Like” buttons or other ways to single out worthy threads. Or maybe signal general displeasure with a thread. Visible to everyone but you can’t vote unless you’re a paid up member.
But there are two things here. Improving the site, and generating income from the site. They may not work well together.
Why aren’t you working at work?
I was not aware that the board was having such a hard time. I was busy with life, and such didn’t post for a while. I’m a much-dreaded Millenial. Which is to say, a person between 20 and 35. Probably the type of person you want to attract. Maybe you would like some insight to us younger folk, in that case. This post will be long.
I got here by searching google with questions I had. The SMDB popped up fairly often, but one month, every question I typed in google google pointed me towards the Straight Dope Message Boards. So I hung around, thinking, “hey, these people have answers”. I imagine the majority of new people get there by that reason. You certainly have no other web presence. The column is not even a blip on my radar.
There is a combination of factors at play, I assume: I am not an “old timer”, I do not friend or interact with other posters on Facebook, I do not post extremely frequently, and I do not make a name for myself in Great Debates (since I don’t go there, since as a millenial I’m fed up to here with politics and being shat on for being “one of those kids” - and you can bet 95% of any new sub-35yo posters will react similarly - Great Debates will never be a young person’s stomping grounds here), but I definitely feel ignored. This is in general, fine. I am a nobody in this world and recognize that. But the old time board members frequently point out that they are old, that they have met other posters personally, that they specifically care about so-and-so, that they know so-and-so’s real name, that they chatted with so-and-so on facebook the other day, that they noticed so-and-so stopped posting – this absolutely causes an ingroup, and an outgroup feeling. And I know I am part of that outgroup, and I know it means literally nothing to these people if I stay. So why stay? This is not a matter to be fixed with moderation, but with board culture. The board culture is probably hard to see by those on the ingroup, but it reads as one really snarky clique. The board is actually not at all welcoming and almost actively tries to snark new people away. I have barely any reason to stay - certainly nobody wishes to be friends with me, but they’ll put up a lot of hullaballoo about who they are friends with. Politics has nothing to do with the large scale picture as many other posters bemoan, though on the ingroup you probably have a rift due to politics.
I’ll admit it. I use an ad blocker. Your ads have been malicious and I will never put up with ads like that. Your ads are absolutely keeping people away. Get better ads or figure out how to remove them. Webcomics as a whole figured out how to have good ads that I can unblock, so you can too.
Your out of date board software that is not mobile-friendly is also definitely keeping people away. I see no reason to allow image posting or avatars except through highly regulated means, as they can and will cause more moderation overhead. If those means are money subscriptions, so be it.
I would never buy merchandise. That said, it’s a no-brainer as others have mentioned. Use a site that prints and fulfills for you, and you will get some kind of income for little effort. In this situation, do not purchase merch up front and hope people will buy. Only stick to print on demand services (the quality is much better these days than when they started). You don’t have the funds to risk.
Patreon with subscription tiers sounds like your best bet. You have people here clamoring to give you money and yet somehow you have not made this possible. With Patreon, you have a platform to collect money for minimal fees, people can donate what they want, you can set up (or not set up) any reward tiers you want (even if it’s just titles and avatars on the board), and it makes it easy to keep track of who is where and who has paid. It has its own troubles, but it’s a one-of-a-kind service at the moment that will fulfill what you need. I would consider subscribing to Patreon. I would never consider subscribing to some weird site’s subscription format when it looks so out of date, serves such bad ads, and overall appears to be a gigantic security risk for my bank information. That being said, subscribing is difficult to push. If you get even 1% conversion, you’re doing good. People as a whole are used to vast swaths of the internet being served to them “for free”. After all, you can use Reddit for free, so you need to have an extremely good reason to convince people to pay to use a place like this over Reddit. You have not given me any reason thus far to want to subscribe.
EDIT: Actually, I don’t even freakin’ know where to go to subscribe to this place even if I wanted to. Why is it not in every header and footer if you think it will help save the site? You will not convert people if you don’t make it extremely obvious how to do so.
Facebook is dead. People here are clamoring for a good Facebook group but literally the only thing keeping Facebook alive at all is groups. It’s teetering on the edge of disaster. People under 35 are leaving it in droves. I know, because I can watch my list dwindle. The only reason I’m still there? I really don’t know. I would never interact with a Facebook group.
A presence on Twitter is now too late. If Cecil would have posted on twitter the same way say, Neil DeGrasse Tyson does, you would’ve had brand new people signing up left and right. But now Cecil’s retired, and I can’t be sure any other ideas would be anything more than a waste of man hours. All the best accounts that people follow and spread the word about are personality or (rarely) corporate accounts that say relatable, true, outrageous, or meme-able things.
The ideas about a Youtube/Twitch/Streaming channel where people offer up their expert advice or projects sounds great in theory but in practice is near impossible. I would watch it, if it was quality enough. However, I doubt users here even have streaming hardware (a decent mic, a webcam, etc), the knowledge of how to stream, and on top of that, the knowledge of how to stream well. People think streaming requires little skill but it actually requires quite a lot of knowledge and skill to be entertaining at it. I imagine such a channel in actuality being cringe-worthy to watch.
A new board forum for posting about your pet projects or general expertise? Making a dedicated AMA forum? (The general public freakin’ LOVES AMAs) A moderated front page to pick out an interesting new topic in one of these two new boards? People might not be able to stream, but you know they can type. I might actually stick around for content like that.
In sum, you need to make the board engaging and friendly if you want new users, and then you want to make it easy for them to give you money for perks.
Indeed, that is totally wrong. Either you put your money where your mouth is, or you’re just a drain.
I lurk on a few subreddits for things we don’t cover here. One thing you’ll notice - the user name - which is usually long because of infinite throwaway logins - is tiny, unlike ours which clear;y shows who is posting. People do respond to others in a thread, but there seems to be no history across threads. Maybe there are subreddits where this happens, but the volume of posts probably makes it impossible for anyone to have an impact,
That is an advantage for us.
Has anyone done demographics on Dopers? I’m pretty positive we are better educated, on average, than your normal message board and I’d suspect we have higher average income also. Has this been used to attract better advertisers? Or sponsors?
This might also suggest where to recruit new members. Given that so many comments sections are high volume cesspools, I bet there are lots of people out there who would love a relatively more intellectual forum.
You might consider it elitist, but the elites have money. In any case, our elitism is posting skill and logical argument, not cash.