Agree with everything you've said, and have a few things to add.
Somewhere at sibob.com, I've got a graph showing posting activity for a few years. I quit maintaining the data several months ago when I quit caring about it.
But the graph points out a fallacy in a lot of peoples' thinking about the correlation between a bull market and posting activity.
If you compare the graph to a graph of the Naz, it looks very similar UNTIL you note that it's about a year off.
The posting peak here had zip to do with the Naz. It was the popularity of (and arguments about) OTCBB stocks. At one time, OTCBB was the majority of volume here. I accept that my own actions (my refusal to boot people for, for example, "lying about our wonderful company" -- nevermind most of those went into the crapper) had a lot to do with not only our sudden decline in posting volume, but Raging Bull's success. When it was obvious SI wasn't tout-friendly, they left for freer lands, as did many who followed them, and as did their counterparts (ie. Janice Shell, etal).
I wouldn't change it though. There are inviolable lines. Right vs. wrong is more important than traffic. It's a price I was willing to pay as were (most of) my handlers.
Nowadays, the OTCBB arena isn't quite as full of the bad juju it used to have. On both sides. Enough people got wiped out in the scams that they've wised up and don't confuse "hope" with "smart investing".
The rabid touts, vitriolic cheerleaders, hateful bashers, and pre-sheering sheep still exist, but in far fewer numbers. They're non-existent on SI. Their numbers are still great (but far fewer than in the past) on RB, and who really cares about the Yahoo demographic. <g>
The OTCBB market is still sizable in terms of posting interest, and of the sites that contain such discussion, only iHub has it under control. RB and Yahoo still have a "no rules" feel to them, which begets traffic, but iHub has more of the same attitude toward rules that SI has. It's at the right place at the right time for OTCBB discussion because much more of the OTCBB community can handle rules and engage in semi-civil discourse than they could in SI's heyday.
I say the Naz has "zip" to do with posting volume, but that's an exaggeration. OTCBB was responsible for the vast majority of the plummet in posting volume. Crappy overall markets had their effect too (as shown in the graph), but to nowhere near as great an extent.
Some of the other dropoffs in volume have to do with certain "events" at SI. Remember when login names were being displayed instead of aliases? Small exodus on that one. Or this version of the software being forced on everyone and being done in such a way that it blatantly showed disregard for the group of people the company organized to help in the migration while keeping some aspects of "Classic"? Or the many software and database screwups? Each shows up as a plummet on the graph. I haven't tracked it in a long time, so have no idea what impact my being laid off had.
Regarding buying SI, this was one of many options in a business plan I was putting in front of VC's a while back, but I had to concede that really the only value here is the die-hard membership and the data itself. The software is worthless. I consider it a rewrite because it's too difficult to modify or maintain. And there are important things that are just plain "wrong" with it.
I'd like to do something message-board related for the next several years, but my utter failure at getting funding has encouraged me to abandon that plan. I've been unable to get money people to understand the beast. I could write my own and have it rolling inside of 3 months, but that's not a route I like. Starting with zero members and zero messages? Yikes! But still.......
The money people I talk to always want to focus on SI, RB, and Yahoo. I'll drag them over to sites where people are discussing lots of things having nothing to do with the market, and tell them "the software doesn't care what's being talked about", but they always come right back to SI. <groan>
Getting to the "how do you make money with a message board?" question, there are many answers. And you know them, TLC. You're one of the few I've talked to who really "gets it", IMO.
Memberships and advertising are the two main ways. Licensing the software and hosting discussions are two more. And merchandising.
Selling t-shirts and mugs? Yep. Every little bit into the coffers helps.
And no "lifetime" memberships once you've reached critical mass. As others have pointed out, the very people who are devoted enough to pay monthly or yearly if they had to, don't have to. I don't like non-recurring revenue streams. You do that when you're strapped for cash and only then.
Personally, I don't even like the "pay to post" model. Well, only when you need it as a twit filter, like SI definitely needed. It's what separated it from the herd in a positive way.
I prefer the idea of charging for enhanced features. Kind of a "shareware" or "annoy-ware" mentality.
I do expect SI to go the way of the dodo someday. This isn't spiteful wishful thinking. It's what I see as an inescapable conclusion. It's spiralling down the same toilet into which every dollar spent on it is being flushed. It COULD be salvaged and turned around. But it won't be.
I became a very proud GNETter, but still believe that the first nail in SI's coffin was pounded in when Brad and Jeff sold the company to GNET. It thrived (as will any message board), when there were very few hands on it and decisions regarding it weren't being made by committees or managers who didn't understand the beast. Jeff and Brad were passionate about what they'd wrought and the community that populated it. The same was true of precious few people who came after them. I number myself (passionate but powerless in the big picture), Scott Lux, and Shannon Callies <sp?> among them. Most of you probably never heard of Shannon. She was hired as my boss about a month before we were both laid off. Too bad. IMO, INSP really missed the boat on that one. That woman understood message boards, was very passionate about them, and was an effective manager, quickly identifying strengths of her people and how she could make the company benefit from those strengths. Whether she'd have been empowered to really accomplish anything was never determined. She was let go way too quickly.
Anyway, I do get frequent encouragement to start my own site and I still occasionally think about it. The inability to get funding to acquire a (very good and nicely-priced) existing site discouraged the hell out of me, though.
On the other hand, "Talkzilla" is way too cool a name to just abandon. <g> Gotta do *something* with it.
Hmmmm.... I just now realized that the non-compete that would've prevented my doing anything message-board related just expired today. Purely coincidental that I'm writing this diatribe on the same day.
I've stashed a bit of money that was earmarked as my personal financial participation in the deal I was trying to sell to VC's, but it's looking for a good use now. Perhaps a good way to deploy it would be to buy a machine, connection, and rackspace, and play around and see what I come up with. |
