I'd better reply to this one publicly since I'm sure you're not alone in wondering that.
Not all elements of the new business model are set in stone yet, though most of the major elements are.
First, the new version of the site is largely unaware right now of what a person's membership status is. Well, as of this morning, completely unaware. I've temporarily made everyone a "Premium" member there.
Second, the promise that Brad Dryer made was that premium and grandfathered members would not see banner ads on the message boards, and I will be honoring that promise.
I don't know yet what kinds of advertising will be shown (specifically, whether or not text-link ads will be displayed with messages for premium members), but on message boards, there won't be banners or skyscrapers. For Grandfathered or any kind of paid account.
There will definitely be ads on other pages, though, such as the quotes pages. Those pages cost us too much to not try to offset part of the cost with advertising.
The new business model will move away from the current "use for free but pay to post" to "use and post (limited) for free, but pay to use advanced features". Just like it is on InvestorsHub.
The features the production version on the site currently contains for Premium (Grandfathered and Paying) accounts will be carried over to the new site and will still be available to those accounts. As will some features the new site has that the old site doesn't.
However, there will be many new features (some of them already in existence on Dev) that will only be available to anyone who has purchased a subscription since our acquisition of the site. They'll be made available to Grandfathered members and Lifetime members who purchased their subscriptions before the acquisition for a nominal annual fee.
I haven't made a complete list of which features will be available to which account types, but an example of a feature that won't be available to Grandfathered or old Lifetime accounts without the nominal annual fee is the ability to read a batch of a specific author's posts regardless of which thread they're in. And some of the more advanced parts of Search, such as the ability to search through one's Private Messages.
The goal here is to give the Grandfathered and old Lifetime accounts the same value-added features they have here and then some. And to make extra features, nice-to-have but not necessary ones, available as part of the regular subscription package or for a small extra cost to the Grandfathered and old Lifetime accounts.
I know there are those who've weighed in saying they believe that anyone who has any kind of Lifetime account, whether Grandfathered or otherwise, should get free access to every feature the site ever has and ever will have, but we can't do that. We need to run the site as a viable business, which means money going into the coffers to offset the high costs of keeping the lights on.
That's why we quit selling lifetime subscriptions shortly after we acquired the site. As a business, the site needs recurring revenues.
The short version is that Grandfathered and Lifetime memberships will continue to be honored and will not lose any of the paid-for features and will actually gain some features. But they won't gain *all* of the new features. The new features those accounts won't gain will purposely not be "necessary" ones but hopefully "cool enough to pay for" ones. |
