Fair enough, but he’s right that it’s disingenuous of the Reader to complain about the costs of this place without showing any evidence - when the numbers simply don’t appear to add up according to the smart folks who understand these things. The staff costs that are discussed, for instance, are miniscule: TubaDiva’s “small stipend”, the tiny amount of time Ed Zotti spends here, and Jerry the tech guy’s time running this place - I’m not certain how much time that is, but it must be a small part of his employment with the Reader. It’s not like the message board has a tech staff on constantly working just to keep the SDMB running smoothly.
It doesn’t work both ways. Wal-Mart doesn’t send out ads telling me that their executives are eating cat food when they try to get me into their stores. But we get told constantly that the Reader is losing enormous amounts of money on us, and frankly, the analyses I’m seeing don’t seem to support that idea.
For many it’s less than 8.00 a year, for others it's less than 15.00 per year. It’s absurdly cheap. It’s stoopid cheap. This is the chumpiest of chump change for the entertainment and education value this board provides for people interested in participating as posters or readers. Personally I think it’s too cheap, and the price should be a minimum of 9.95 a year for students and 19.95 for everyone else.
Having this board be part of a larger organization like the Chicago Reader generates some cost savings (shared tech expenses to some degree etc) but it also incurs a number of associated costs that are part of it’s being part of the larger organization. As a result part of the expense is that a number of fairly well compensated people have to (in some form or fashion) pay* attention * to it. The bottom line is that it’s a distraction to some degree, an amusing distraction, potentially a profitable distraction someday, but a distraction nevertheless. I would suspect that this “distraction” aspect is more meaningful to the Chicago Readers ownership in than the relatively piddling sums the subscriptions generate, or the moderate hardware and maintenance expenses.
In this context, although the Reader and Ed Zotti have the best and purest capitalist intentions, to be realistic I really don’t think this board is ever going to justify itself from a corporate profitability and “worth the bother” perspective. We’re like a bright, but wayward child who is never going to get a regular job and make a decent living. We’re going to hang around coffee houses and expect you to pay our room and board while we entertain you with all manner of fascinating discussions. Either you love us enough to support us in this lifestyle or you don’t. You need to decide.
Hell, Green Tree Financial didn’t let their institutional investors dig through their books when the investors started smelling trouble. And they were publically held and the investors had ownership - in some cases millions of dollars worth of ownership. And when they went under, the they were cleared of all charges of fraud.
Are you communicating with Wal-Mart? Because their annual report goes into this sort of thing. They do talk about how they keep costs down to provide low prices, and yet sometimes prices must go up do to increases in energy costs or health care benefits or insurance or whatever the increased expense of the moment is. We are asking the Reader, they are telling us. If you asked Wal-Mart (or read their annual report) you’d get the same information.
A lot of this, shall we say, “animated” discussion strikes me as odd.
If you think it’s horrible having to look at ads, block them. There have been at least two ways mentioned. I never got to see the ads in the first place because I have a well-stocked Adblock list as a result of being presented with ads elsewhere. I don’t scream bloody murder when I see ads - I just make them go away if I’m feeling cantankerous that particular moment.
One respondent said that “almost everyone on this board” blocks ads. I have strong doubts that almost everyone on the board blocks ads - I like to think that we are a reasonble cross-section of the computer-using community; if that is the case then then that implies that almost everyone in the computer-using community does so. Think about it - would the ads still be produced if no one looked at them?
Others have said that the income from the ads will be miniscule because people won’t click on them. Maybe yes, maybe no. I don’t get the impression that many of the respondents actually use Google ads on their own boards or have seen hard statistics on them. Without that knowledge you can’t claim that just because you won’t click them no one else will. The Administrators will know without being told in a few months whether the income is miniscule. So, wait until then and see whether or not they agree that the results are not worth the bother. If at that point there is insignificant revenue from them but they won’t get rid of them, then you can reasonably complain.
There are many paid entertainments these days that have ads - most movie theatres, many extra-cost TV channels (at least up here; I assume down there), almost all magazines, and so on.
SDMB may be a sideline for Chicago Reader. Why should they be prohibited from making a few (very few) bucks off their sideline?
My prediction - ads in SDMB will end up the same as same-sex marriage in Canada. People will complain that it will lead to the downfall of SDMB (or Canada) and will threaten to leave SDMB (or Canada). In a year’s time people will mutter occasionally about ads and same-sex marriage, and SDMB and Canada will carry on as usual.
Disingenuous how? The Reader tells the staff that the boards need to make X dollars to be worth it for them to run, and the staff passes this message on to you an an explaination for why certain actions are taken. Whether or not you believe the Reader could in fact run the board with less than X dollars is immaterial. They’re running a business, and part of that is deciding what is worth doing and what isn’t. Once they decide X, that’s the reality for the boards. Demanding that the Reader prove to you that X is a reasonable number is, well, stupid.
Believe it or not, the mods and admins don’t want to make you unhappy. Quite the opposite, in fact – it’s the staff who go to bat for this place. The strongly negative reaction of members to the ads has been noticed and options are being discussed. Your voices are being heard. Changing things takes time, when it’s even possible at all. Bear with us.
It’s great to hear that y’all are listening, but I think that there’s a lot of members who really don’t care–and a lot of people who can’t help but sound outraged about everything, and who won’t give a shit once a week has passed. And once the ads are customized for the boards, I’m guessing a lot of the furor will die out as well.
Some ideas like premium membership to avoid ads sound good to me, but I’d much rather deal with Google ads and keep membership prices low than have membership be raised across the board and lose the ads.
SO why isn’t the GMMB (GorillaMan Message Board) up, and running, and drawing all the paying customers away from the SDMB with your lower prices and better quality?
Let’s go. Demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about. Put out the superior product for the lesser price. I’ll go check it out. If I like what I see enough, I’ll switch.
I never said it was cheap. I did say there’s no way I’ll ever believe it costs more than $41,000 a year.
Then put a number to X. What’s the magic number? Are you all just not going to say what it is because the truth is, X is way less than $41,000 a year?
Doesn’t take you long to make changes that negatively affect the customers, nor to whine to us about how we’re such a burden. It also doesn’t take any of you too long to tell us to shut up, quit complaining, kiss your asses and thank our lucky stars that you stoop to provide us peons a place to post.
You wanna prove you listen to the customers and care about their happiness? Dump the fucking ads and quit telling us that it takes more than $41,000 a year to run a message board. There ain’t no way that’s true.
Show us, please, where they said that it takes more than $41,000 a year to run a messageboard. Someone’s being disingenuous here, but it ain’t the mods.
You’ve shown me how much income they have, and I agree with that part. The question is, where have they said that this isn’t enough to run a messageboard?
What I’ve read is that this amount isn’t enough for the Reader to continue running the messageboard from their perspective as a for-profit business. That’s very different.
I like to think that most Dopers have more common sense, skepticism and deductive reasoning abilities than the average person. This means that even Dopers who are nearly computer illiterate will not attempt to hit the monkey for $20.
How many people look at spam now? How much is produced? How much junk mail do you receive? How much of that results in you buying something?
This is not another board. How many clicks Google gets from members on other boards is of no relevance in predicting what the click rate will be here. Many things about the behavior of Dopers can be predicted, based on past actions. If I ask how far an object can fly, somebody will respond with “African or European?”. The majority of Dopers either use adblocking software, or mental filtering. They do not click on ads.
Assuming for a second that you’re right and only the Admins will know how much revenue is being generated by the ads, they could tell us anything they want. By that reasoning, we would never have grounds to complain.
I adressed this earlier. It is clear that magazines, etc will have ads before I make payment.
The SDMB did NOT have Google ads when we paid for membership. The ads showed up only after we had paid.
The Reader is also not prohibited from liquidating all assets and using the cash to buy oceans of rat urine. This would also be a bad business decision.
I actually have no idea how much money this board costs, how much it brings in now, or how much the Reader would like it to bring in. (I don’t know much of anything, actually.) My point is that X is in fact, immaterial. The owners of this place have decided that it needs to bring in more money to make it worthwhile for them to keeping running it. The staff are trying to find the least unpleasant way to make that happen.
