Quote:
Originally Posted by JDigital
I don't see why the responsibility of paying the bills of the website should fall on the Vender Sponsors alone. We all use this site for our benefit/knowledge.
If keeping Canreef around means introducing a membership fee so be it.
Make it tiered and depending which tier you fall grants you permissions for the forum.
As an example. Prices are just pulled out of my arse. Same with the per month thing.. just an example.
$5/month Tier 1 - General browsing
$10/month Tier 2 - General browsing/Post a Build Thread/Browsing Marketplace
$15/month Tier 3 - Full Access. Post/Make Threads in Marketplace, etc.
If the site owner doesn't want to incorporate a Membership Fee that's fine, but maybe consider a Paypal/Fundit Donation link somewhere that is clearly visible. Some people may not donate at all and that's fine but I bet some people would donate monthly, even if it was only $5-10. It would be extra income to help offset costs and take some of the responsibility off the Vendors who choose to be on here and help keep their costs down.
We have that sort of system on my Gaming Clans forum and it works well.
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Bringing on a monthly user fee for general browsing would likely result in a 80-90% drop in users immediately.
I agree that it should not be the sole responsibility of the vendor sponsors to keep the site running. I understand that CanReef is a business, however costs on running a forum of this size (relatively small) is quite inexpensive.
For 6 years I ran a forum with over 50k members and it cost me $50 per month for basic site hosting and bandwidth. Although I did not run the site to make profit, there was an obvious need to raise funds to sustain the site.
I used a simple formula to financially support the site
General Users: free
Browsing Marketplace: free
Posting threads on marketplace: $10/year
VIP membership (gave access to post in market, and site image hosting, acces to VIP forums) :$20/yr
This was more than enough to cover the costs and saw little to no user decline. Excess monies were used to upgrade site features and do other things like have giveaways.
Should CanReef want to bring on more sponsors or bring back sponsors, then couple this method with lower sponsor fees.
You'd be surprised how much money you can bring in with such an simple system.