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SI - Site Forums : Silicon Investor - Welcome New SI Members! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d:oug who wrote (21895)	12/12/2004 1:30:31 PM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32968

Thats good news Bob, and signals to us that the image of SI old is alive and well as the first investing message board to be consider for the serious minded towards markets. Yes, it's definitely good news. I'd worried that time had eroded the value of the brand, but am worrying less about that these days. And that free members are posting almost exclusively to market-related threads without being forced or even encouraged to do so is extremely good news. It's why I bumped their daily limit to 5 posts the other day, and will implement a way for the more prolific ones to dramatically increase that limit. All of us who have been around a long time are the body, heart, and soul of SI. The free members are an extremely welcome transfusion. One that's been needed yet denied for a long time. Well, that answers lots of folks wondering about the future, "Will SI and IH eventually remain seperated, or combined?" At some point, SI, as a company, will be folded into iHub, but as it currently stands, I see no reason to ever combine them into one site. It's likely, though, that we'll eventually provide a sort of gateway into both sites using the stocksite.com domain name. With shared content (commentary, for example) being on that gateway page. I'm completely clueless on any worthly insight into what another member once said about SI & IH... "SI is for DOW trading, and IH for Nasdaq and Pinksheets." It's a too-broad brush and has the flaws such brushes always have. But it's correct in spirit. A better but a still too-broad brush would be that the average market cap of companies discussed on SI is far larger than the average of those discussed on iHub. iHub got a lot of its marketshare from SI (I doubt that's happening anymore) but the vast majority of its new members come from Raging Bull and Yahoo. They typically come for the active administration (administration is bad enough to be effectively non-existent on RB and Yahoo), speed, reliability, and far deeper featureset. I think SI is gaining more new members per day than iHub is, but iHub often gets huge influxes of new members when a thread on RB collectively decides they've had enough and are moving to iHub. And who's on RB? Mostly the small-cap folks. How'd they get there? Well, many of them used to be on SI, but fled for RB because RB wasn't as tightly administered (profanity and personal attacks wouldn't get the swift boot they always have here). Many are finding that they do want active administration and are moving to iHub. I'm sure most of us can remember the DGIV, MTEI, RMIL, etal groups. They left here for the greener pastures of RB, where their more raucous nature (I'm being kind) wasn't the issue it was here. And those groups were pretty large. Well, a look at any of those tickers leads one to the assumption that a lot of those folks are no longer active in the market. Those who're left are a different kind of investor, many with severe battle scars. They appreciate active administration and that's iHub's gain. If true, then ad space on SI should cost more then on IH adserv.stocksite.com It does. And SI's remnant (not sold directly by us) inventory fetches nearly double the rate iHub's does. Among advertisers, SI is still considered the premium brand. There's also the supply/demand effect. SI's supply of ad inventory is far less than iHub's partly due to iHub having 3-4 times as much traffic. And more of SI's gets directly sold than iHub's, reducing its supply even further. And because of SI's brand and lower supply, it gets better, more relevant ads. To such an extent, that I plan to make a page available where people who don't see ads can see the ads if they want to. There's some pretty cool stuff being advertised here that the majority of the site's users never get to see. And partly because of better ad relevance here and partly for reasons I have yet to figure out, SI gets substantially higher click-through rates on its ads than iHub does. And that translates into us being able to charge higher CPM rates for ad space we sell directly and in the agencies giving us the higher-paying ads on our remnant inventory. Ad revenue for SI shot up when this version got rolled out. It used to make a fraction of what iHub makes from ads. SI now has higher ad revenue than iHub. On 1/4th to 1/3rd the inventory. The only hard & not nice question to then ask about SI v. IH is to know which site is better equipped to handle a market downturn if another USA 9/11 terror attack happens. Interesting question. I think they'd both be able to handle it. SI has good revs and iHub has good reserves. They both should be able to weather quite a storm or drought. Edit: I just checked. SI's ad inventory is currently about half the size of iHub's. Very substantial increase.