Another idea I saw somewhere recently, possibly at ArsTechnica, I cannot recall exactly, is where people that want to use the Flame Forum pay a $5.00 monthly fee.
Due to the fairly recent death of the on-line advertising business coupled with the astronomical costs of bandwidth, many on-line "content providers" (news sites, etc) that used to make their keep via ad banners have been faced with one of two choices: 1) cease to exist 2) seek out "alternative" revenue streams.
In the case of arstechnica.com, rather than go under due to mounting financial pressures, they switched to a "subscriber" model of generating revenue. Ars is a PC enthusiast/technology news site. At the time of the ad market's demise, Ars was serving up more page hits than ever, but not making enough back on banner ads to even cover bandwith costs. The sites ower claimed that the situation was so dire that he had been using money from his personal savings just to keep the site afloat. Things got so bad that he initially asked for DONATIONS, but that alone didn't solve the bandwidth cost problems presented by the astronomical bandwidth fees that Ars' main page and forum racked up each month. So, in order to remedy this problem, the site's owner decided to set up a "membership/subscriber" service. Under this plan, the main page and most of the forum are still available for free, public access, however, the most popular part of Ars' massive forum, called "The Lounge" (a general bullshitting area) was made so that only those who paid the $50 per year subscriber fee could post there. In addition to "Lounge" access, subscribers also get access to a tech. PDF repository, discounts from thechipmerchant.com and a few other perks.
Ars is an on-line "content" site that aims to profit off of its news articles and the information that it offers. From what I can gather, this site isn't exactly the same thing. It's a hobbyist venture that probably makes up any operating costs via the "Neo-Store". That's just what I'm assuming, but I could be talking out my ass here. Ars' bandwidth costs are in the thousands per month, so they really NEED a subscriber model to survive. In fact, I subscribed to Ars. I'm usually opposed to paying for information, and believe in the original egalatarian views of the net, but we've gotta face reality sometimes. A lot of the free services we enjoyed in the past are dying due to the failings of on-line advertisting, and even more are set to die off in the near future. I guess the general thrust of this post is to state that I wouldn't object to Shawn implementing a few perks to forum members who paid a reasonable membership fee, but I really don't think that it's necessary in this case.
Added Material: I just checked out somethingawful.com's donation policy, and I think that it's kinda shitty. Donating money to help out an ailing site is good, but paying money to HARASS other forum members in the form of changing their title is BS. Maybe such a corrupt system would work on a forum with a clientele like that of SA's, but I don't want to see that implemented at neo-geo.com.
[ July 22, 2001: Message edited by: DolphinLord ]
