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SI - Site Forums : Silicon Investor - Legacy Interface Discussion (2004-2011) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: grusum who wrote (2655)	11/24/2004 2:22:25 PM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6035

it could be that more features and usability attract more people to use SI. the more people, the more revenue... too restrictive and not enough people use it. too free and the owners get nothing. it just needs to be thought out well. would the new search feature for everyone attract more people to SI and thus more revenue, or would making it a pay feature bring in more money even with less people? Those are the basic questions that are at the core of nearly every decision I have to make regarding the site. Experience (on iHub and previously on my BBSes) has shown me that the current business model is the best. In a good advertising environment (it's pretty decent right now), subscriptions are actually a losing proposition. The ads a subscriber doesn't see are worth quite a bit more than the subscription price. But subscriptions are important not only as a sort of vetting process, but also because though they're typically a far smaller revenue stream than advertising, they're much more reliable. Whatever we make this month in subscriptions, we're probably going to make as much or more next month. It rarely goes down. And never by much. With advertising, though it's a far larger revenue stream, it can change as much as 50% one direction or the other in just one month. We've got one comparatively large but unpredictable revenue stream and one comparatively small but very predictable one. Works out nicely for now. I have a strong preference for using extra features to drive subscriptions rather than the old model of basically zero access unless money changes hands. And in the case of features like Advanced Search, it's a very expensive feature in terms of computing horsepower required to service it. Anytime a feature is "expensive" in terms of computing power, it's always going to be subscription-only, not only to help pay for the costs of more horsepower when required, but to limit how often it's getting used. Right now, the cost of Advanced Search isn't too high, but it's noticeable. When I'm watching the CPU utilization graph, I can tell anytime an Advanced Search has been run because there's always a blip in utilization up to about 10% rather than the 4% the db server usually runs at. As for whether such features attract more people, they definitely do, but not to a huge extent. iHub became what it is basically because it was an alternative to SI and RB with better features and performance. Now that we've got a pretty good handle on the features (they're not done, but it's definitely a far more feature-rich environment than the old site and it performs far better), the emphasis does swing to attracting more traffic to the site, and we're working on that. One of the things that helps is that free users are allowed to post. The average free user who posts is doing so twice a day, so 3 posts is probably a workable limit. And free users' posts go about 90% to stock-related threads. It's a thing of content begetting content; users begetting users, both of which beget page views, which increases ad impressions, which means ad revenue. So, performance, features, and the ability to post for free are increasing traffic, which is becoming our new main focus. But it's a slow climb. I'm just glad it's a climb. Oh, and I don't mind disclosing publicly that though none of us is getting rich (yet), the sites have been reliably profitable for a long time. Enough so that we're finally getting close to rolling out new, non-finance sites based on the same technology. Users of our existing sites would help populate the new sites, and they'd attract other users to those sites, some of whom will find their way to SI/iHub. And in spaces where there are already well-established sites, many of them can be acquired rather inexpensively because so many of them (dbforums.com comes to mind) were hobbies that grew into expensive albatrosses. Occasional side work has already been put into a program we call "BigBang" (named after the program used to create universes for the popular BBS game TradeWars) that will do all the work of creating a new site and underlying database based on this system and eventually will be able to import data from existing sites running on UltimateBBS and vBulletin. Gotta wear shades. :)

To: grusum who wrote (2655)	11/24/2004 4:25:37 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6035

don't really need contests. prizes cost money and time too (1) Offering prizes need not cost anything. I mentioned, for example, offering free premium membership for a year. Advertisers are also usually quite happy to offer free prizes. (2) The contests serve like a suggestion box with a prize awarded if the suggestion is deemed good enough to be implemented. It should reduce rather than expand Bob's workload. And if the idea is implemented but turns out badly, management gets to blame someone else -- like a management consulting engagement. Sam