HJ's idea sounds like a good one. I have started this thread for 2 reasons
1) Someone was going to have to anyway
2) A question
How many Back Room Members are there out of interest? HJ suggested 60 quid from 1000 members. Are there 1000?
Thanks
Adam
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"Ah...beer - my only weakness - my achilles heel if you will"
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I moderate on another board. We have 726 registered members, but only about 20-30 are what I would call "regulars". However we designed and printed a club t shirt for this year's event and sold around 200, at cost price.
It's hard to tell how many members would pay £60 just for membership though. To be honest, despite the pleasure I get from the BackRoom, I'm not sure I would...maybe a tenner, maybe.
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I would pay as I consider myself a 'regular' but my problem is that not only have finished uni until September, I've left my job as well! Bad timing I know....
People may consider the ads to be not much of a nuisance to warrent paying £60 but the idea is certainly well worth considering.
Adam
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"Ah...beer - my only weakness - my achilles heel if you will"
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Above is a good example of what happens when you rush a post.
Obviously the first line should read "...not only have I finished uni" but also "warrent" to "warrant".
It's being picky I know but I can do that to my own posts!
Thanks
Adam
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"Ah...beer - my only weakness - my achilles heel if you will"
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£60,000 a year to run this site? Pull the other one... or get a different hosting company!
HJ I think you're onto a loser with this one. Not only are there not 1000 people who contribute/read regularly enough to warrant paying £60 to do so, but I don't think anyone would cough up that much money in one hit...maybe £5 a month, but not all in one go. It's also way above the market rate for other sites that offer paid for ad-free content.
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I'm OK with the ads (I click on quite a few with genuine interest) apart from the poorly designed pop-ups but I see that as being primarily a design issue that can be controlled before they are put onto the site - to the benefit of both user and advertiser, rather than a question of whether pop-ups should be here or not - they are and that's that.
So in conclusion I won't be stumping up £60+VAT, nor will I be bleating about ads.
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I agree with you Nsar. I too click on some of the ads but the pop-up and some of the flash ones make me scream. I won't click on them as a point of principle.
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I agree with Nsar - keep the ads, I don't mind them.
Another point is that once you charge £60, or indeed anything, for membership, you limit the available pool of knowledge or otherwise interesting contributions to the members. One of the things I like about this forum is that anybody can come here, by chance or by personal recomendation, and get expert answers to a specific question. That person may or may not stay as a more or less regular browser or contributor, but the forum has been enriched by his/her presence.
I think a little bit of fine tuning on some of the pop-ups is all that is needed. If the ads pay for the forum, keep it that way.
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i agree totally with nsar,no dosh and cliff pope.
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I also agree with the above, especially cliff pope's comments. I wouldn't pay £60 for the sake of getting rid of the ad's.
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I was quite horrified to see HJ's claim of what this site is costing him (not the 60k bit).
I have often contrasted this site with www.karlsforums.com/forums which has been run by an individual for some years and has only very recently started taking ads.
The site was started by Karl (forget his surname) when Tiscali committed some slur against him and were subsequently forced to apologise on all their forums, where he had been a regular poster in the PC Help section.
The point is, I don't think he is wealthy and, although he has always tried to be very helpful to others, I doubt he is in a position to spend a fortune purely for the benefit of others.
I am not connected with him - in fact I stopped posting on his site when he deleted my link to this site (in his 'useful links' section) "because it is a commercial site" and I went all huffy.
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For 60 quid i will suffer the adds
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However I would buy a nicely designed 20 quid HJ backroomers t shirt every year!
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yes i think i could manage one of those.
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I don't think anyone, and certainly not me, is bothered by the normal adverts. In fact, I quite often click on them - especially the ones offering deals of one sort or another.
The pop-ups are a different matter. You can get deluged by them, they're intrusive, and frequently cause technical issues. Hell will freeze over before I click on one of those.
But £60 ?? Not from me. And I don't think you would find 1,000 people to give you that, either.
However, can I assume that since you need £60k to remove the ads, then that is how much revenue you are currently getting from them ? If so, that was a pretty impressive deal.
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I agree with everyone above. The adverts are...ok - the only problems I've had is I.E. crashing but that's my own fault for using it! I've only ever really clicked on the Volvo I.Q. Test Ad (due to the publicity it got on some posts) and the Autotrader ads but that's about it. For £60 I could live with them.
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"Ah...beer - my only weakness - my achilles heel if you will"
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Agreed.
The pop-ups are annoying (were annoying until I downloaded the Google toolbar) but for sixty quid I'll put up with the ones that get through.
I won't even pay £5 a year to friends re-united.
Don drbe
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Agreed. The pop-ups are annoying (were annoying until I downloaded the Google toolbar) but for sixty quid I'll put up with the ones that get through. I won't even pay £5 a year to friends re-united. Don drbe
If you won't pay £5.00. a year to friends re-united you must be some kind of sad person. (Person), was not the word that I wanted to use.
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I wont pay 5 quid to be in touch with people I was happy to see the back of 32 years ago either.
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I wont pay 5 quid to be in touch with people I was happy to see the back of 32 years ago either.
Dear Renault family,
Did you dislike ALL of the people you were at school with??
Regards.
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It was a joke! I have fond memories (specially the girls), but still wont shell out 5 quid, we have 32 years of nothing in common.
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In my limited experience there seem to be 2 main groups of people drawn to such 'reunion' sites Those who've done well and want to tell everyone and those whose life has come up well short for one reason or another and who are trying to rekindle their youth. Amongst former friends of mine there are several whose marriages have fallen apart as a result of doing just this with quite a few who seem to be heading the same way.
I'll stick with HJ and my virtual chums in the BackRoom thanks :)
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"But to answer Mark, and out of respect for Mark,"
Oh dear, this sounds like "the manager has the full confidence of the chariman and board"
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£60,000 a year to run this site? Pull the other one... or get a different hosting company!
Quite aside from the debt already mentioned, I suspect it would become harder to expect the mods to do their job for practically no reward on a subscription-based service...
One thing I do wonder though is how much the ads bring in per regular used over the space of a year - i.e., how much we would have to pay to be better off without them. If HJ gets say a tenner a user a year then offering the option to pay £15 without ads (while still having the 'free' site with ads) would still surely make him better off?
Of course, the other thing to consider is that a subscription might just end in the majority going elsewhere. (As happened with L@L and other sites that tried to introduce charges)
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Quite aside from the debt already mentioned, I suspect it would become harder to expect the mods to do their job for practically no reward on a subscription-based service...
Practically? There's no practically about it!
No Dosh
Backroom Moderator
mailto:moderators@honestjohn.co.uk
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hj's "£60 a year commitmment (= £5 per month)" thread or challenge
www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?f=2&t=22...7
is designed to prove all the moaners and groaners wrong.
hj will easily prove that most backroomers are not going to pay a penny, let alone a £5 per month equivalent.
however, as with most others on this thread, i agree that it is the pop-ups and flash which are a nuisance. i can easily tolerate the banner ads, especially as i have disabled the animation on this site via my firewall settings.
the real issue is that hj seems to be paying for a uk based cost for a service which he could get hosted from anywhere in the world. afterall, it is the internet. how about getting your support and internet services from indonesia-bali or growler's paradise island?
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I agree with nsar.no dosh and cliff pope.keep the adds they dont bother me anyway.I have actualy used a few for friends that come around.so I dont think a waste.and have had comments on what a good site it is.Thats why I use it
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I cannot believe the Backroom alone costs £60k a year to run.
You can get a vBulletin licence (far superior forum software to whats used here) and a dedicated server with 1500Gb transfer allowance for about £150 a month from US providers.
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Where did anyone say that the back room costs £60k a year to run ?.
It doesn't cost much at all to have the forum software & hosting (I pay $40 a year for my hosting), but 60k might be what the adverts bring in, perhaps the adverts would have to be taken off the whole site not just the back room.
Honest John puts a lot of work into this site, think of the all the equipment (computer etc), internet connection, electricity bills and most importantly time spent.
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subscription site? If the backroom wants to self destruct then this is the way to do it. Keep the site and ads as they are. I wish people would stop whingeing about them, it's getting boring.
no it's the silly signatures on posts that get up my nose. ban them i say.
:oh women, my only weak spot my big toe if you wont:
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no it's the silly signatures on posts that get up my nose. ban them i say. :oh women, my only weak spot my big toe if you wont:
Er.... that was tongue in cheek, right?
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Er.... that was tongue in cheek, right?
of course..tongue firmly in cheek.. a bit of levity.
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That looks strikingly similar to my signatur....oh wait - that was the point.
As the great Homer Simpson said:
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"Ah...beer - my only weakness - my achilles heel if you will"
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The BR is very important to me so far away, and in particular my partner who pores over almost every post -- she says she learns so much about Britain -- and I would chip in in any reasonable way if requested or required to ensure its survival. It's always a slight source of astomishment to me that one can have access to such a vast information base, not to mention wit and wisdom, for free, without the flames and stupid nonsense so prevalent on other Boards.
As for the ads they don't bother me at all. There's a price for everything.
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Well I've been around here a couple of years now I guess and I couldn't care less about the ads. I don't suffer any technical problems due to pop-ups 'cos I don't get any. I do however sympathise with those contributors who have such problems. As others who've been around longer than me will know, this site has changed over time and mostly for the better. It's true that as it has become more popular the 'small family' feel it once had has inevitably been lost and many former regular contributors have faded away. Whilst a little sad, this is IMO (as Growler implied) a price worth paying. If I were HJ I'd want to get any technical problems sorted (as I'm sure he does) but I'd also get pretty hacked off having to justify the running of the site to those who whinge but won't put their money where their mouth is. Constructive input direct to HJ is welcome I'm sure, however we are all guests here and if we don't like it we can always do the other thing.
Have a nice day everyone.
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To be serious abuot this for a moment....
There are a number of different costs associated with a website such as this; These range from the technical costs such as servers and bandwidth to people costs such as HJ, Stephen and ourselves.
Somehow this has to be paid for. If HJ every makes a billion out of this website, then I shall be clamouring for my share, but I think we can safely assume that there is very little chance of that happening. However, what would clearly not be acceptable is for HJ to subsidise this website out of his own pocket - and that has happened in the past.
And that's just cash, there is also the matter of time; Not so much for me, because this isn't my job. If you wanted your company managed, then I wuold expect to be paid, because that's what I do professionally - however moderatin a chat room is mostly a hobby (bit more complex than that, but that is pretty much the case). However, writing articles, reports, road tests, etc. etc. is actualy HJ's job and it is as a writer that he keeps the wolf from the door. I don't know what you would have to pay HJ per word if you wanted him to contribute to your website, but I am sure it would be a lot more than he gets on this site after you've taken out all the other costs from the advertising revenue.
My point being that it is not unreasonable that he should expect a profit, albeit small, from this website and he should be absolutely sure that it isn't actually going to cost him money.
I think we're all agreed that the website in general, and the Backroom certainly, are well worth having.
It is also free insofar as none of the contributors have to make a cash contribution. I tend to agree with the feeling that the reality is people would not pay, or if they did, they either wouldn't pay much or not enough of them would pay.
Therefore we're stuck with the adverts. And to be fair a lot of them are quite useful - especially the ones showing deals that are being offered.
I would doubt that anybody has an issue with the adverts existing or the amount of adverts we have.
What people object to, I think, are pop up adverts which either appear every 10 seconds, or the ones that when they do appear screw something up.
I presume that if every time you visited the site you saw each of the pop-ups once, and then they didn't appear until your next visit, then that would be acceptable. I also assume that if they didn't cause any technical difficulties then again there wouldn't be any serious objection to them.
If that is the case, then if we simply try and resolve the technical difficulties, then there really is no issue. Or am I wrong ??
I would pay to stop the pop-ups causing me trouble. The rest of the advertising environment is a matter of complete irrelevance to me. However, I wouldn't pay £60, and perhaps not even a tenner, to solve a problm that small.
"If you don't like it, then find somewhere else to be" is a phrase I have been known to use. However, when it is a matter as fundemental as the usage/usability of the site and it affects so many people, I think it would be rather more productive to get to the route of the issue and see if that can be resolved.
Mark.
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hj and mark
you have my vote.
carry on as normal, just do the best to avoid technical probs with po-ups.
as i suspected, and as hj confirmed, his £60 per year post was a psychological ploy to show that no one here will sign up to pay a penny when asked for it.
hj has not said that it cost him 6o grand nor that the current income from the ads amounts to 60 grand.
the hidden message i see there is that he is saying that is the gross amount he needs to make a year to keep this site viable - for him to pay of the legacy of debts, to pay for the current running costs, and pay for the mods beer & sndwich now and again. after all that, it may leave him a few pennies "operating-profit" although i doubt you could call it that if he charged for his time to the company "honestjohn.co.uk".
apart from the whingers and free loaders, who can object to you resolving the root of the issue.
even google are going to intorduce banner-ads soon.
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May I suggest that here two ways of looking at this issue?
The first approach is the one which HJ proposed: set a fee based on what he reckons he'd like to earn from the backroom. The problem is that it's clearly much more than folks are preapred to pay.
However, the alternative approach to the problem is to look at how much money the ads bring in, and whether subscriptions might bring in more. That might not be as much as HJ would like, but if it's enough to replace the ad revenue plus the cost of the establishing and running subscription system, he'd come out ahead.
Remember, the proposal was not to eliminate the ads entirely,merely to turn them off for the folks who pay the subs. So the relevant advertising income here is not the site's total ad revenue, but the ad revenue from 1,000 backroomers.
If the advertisers are prepared to pay anything near £60 per user per year for the privelige of pushing ads into the backroom, then I reckon he's onto a very good thing and should hang on to the money while it lasts. I don't claim to have much of a grasp of the economics of advertising, but I'd be very surprised if that was a wise use of an advertising budget ... so even if there is that much coming in, I really wonder if it would last.
It's HJ's site, and it's his call how he wants to run it. But it seems to me that a much lower-priced subscription model would probably still bring in more money than advertising
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I am intrigued by the 'legacy of debt' mentioned. Come to that I would be interested to see the history of this site.
Or is that impertinent?
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