Donations Versus Subscription.

albatross

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
I know that this is intended to a 'free to access' site. However. Would it be a reasonable idea to make it a small fee site. I mean for example £5.00 a year. After all that is about the price of a pint of beer in the U.K. Lets face it. No one likes to ask for money to keep afloat and the information and help available on this site is a goldmine.
 

dvd8n

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
I know that this is intended to a 'free to access' site. However. Would it be a reasonable idea to make it a small fee site. I mean for example £5.00 a year. After all that is about the price of a pint of beer in the U.K. Lets face it. No one likes to ask for money to keep afloat and the information and help available on this site is a goldmine.
I dunno.

If you need to pay to access the site I think that it might just drive people to one of the other forums.
 

albatross

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
I dunno.

If you need to pay to access the site I think that it might just drive people to one of the other forums.
That is a possibility. But a fiver for a year when you consider the benefits of being a member is really not much of an ask.
 

4d4m

Active member
That is a possibility. But a fiver for a year when you consider the benefits of being a member is really not much of an ask.
That's true but the majority will see the subscription and not bother signing up in the first place. I never bothered donating, but the recent mega outage made me realise how much I missed it, so I will do so.
 

Mark2

Active member
AIUK Saviour
I honestly think people assume forums, like archeryinterchange, and clubs for that matter, just magically happen with no effort from anyone. This is an excellent forum for the sport and the recent outage (I don't know why) left a hole in the UK archery scene. Damm I had to go to the Merlin web site for an 11pm archery fix. And that usually costs a lot more than a donation to an archery forum.
 

Mark2

Active member
AIUK Saviour
PS Not sure how many regular users on AI but a £5 donation from each I would like to think would help the site.
 

Sinbad

Member
For £5 a year I have had my moneys worth of reading, help and good information that I would be happy to pay.
 

dvd8n

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
I'm not connected to AIUK and Dave in any way, but my understanding is that Dave has 3 revenue streams from AIUK:
  1. Yearly subscriptions; about £20 IIRC. For that you get advertisements blocked and a supporter badge.
  2. Occasional donations; £ what you can afford; you get a saviour badge.
  3. Advertisement income.
Presumably Dave has thought about this and set subscriptions at £20; £20 is a lot but that subscriber isn't going to contribute to ad viewer numbers so that's lost ad revenue.

People are talking about a fiver; there is a bit of a gap between £5 and £20. I'm kind of getting the impression from this thread that people are willing to pay about £5 but not the £20. So should Dave lower the subs to £5?

If Dave did and picked up new subscribers then what would that mean?

Well he'd get £5 from all those new subscribers but he'd also lose £15 from all the current ones. So he'd need to quadruple the subscriber base before he even broke even. Plus he'd need to add a few more for the lost advertisement revenue. Would he work out ahead? I don't know; possibly he would. Would he come out significantly ahead? I doubt it.

If I were Dave I'd do nothing, hope to pick up a few more subscribers at £20 each after the last outage and hope those not able to afford the £20 would give their £5 as a donation.
 

Rhys

Active member
AIUK Saviour
Saw the same done on a rugby forum and it failed. Most didn't sign up and they ended up with the income stream not being much more than donations.

I run a forum at a similar scale to AIUK (probably with many more Xenforo add-ons) and I just ask for the odd donations. I don't run ads because I have competitors who don't. Keep running costs (before licensing fees) down to about 20 a month. Offloading the attachment stores to S3 rather than locally attached storage actually helped a chunk.

I would suspect asking everyone to pay £5 for access would be the death of the site.
 

Mark2

Active member
AIUK Saviour
I only think the £5 came from Dave's comment that for less than the cost of a fancy coffee. etc etc, but it is always difficult to know where to pitch.
Looking at the top 10 donations list I now have a Scrooge complex, so I may have to up my donation.
 

albatross

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
I only think the £5 came from Dave's comment that for less than the cost of a fancy coffee. etc etc, but it is always difficult to know where to pitch.
Looking at the top 10 donations list I now have a Scrooge complex, so I may have to up my donation.
So will I.
 

tabashir

Supporter
Supporter
Although current users know what a wealth of experience and information is here, that's because we've been able to access it. If you put it behind a paywall then it is very unlikely that you'll get new subscribers because even at the price of a cup of coffee, potential customers would want to know what they are purchasing.
It is possible for them to see what they'll get if you gave new members a short trial period, but even then, forcing people to sign up even to access a trial can drop readership considerably which at the very least drops ad revenue.
Maybe those are members you can do without, only those that have that data can answer that question. History shows very few sites that are 100% paywall survive long term.
 

oceanjaws

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
I agree. Sites have to be free, or people just won't come to them, but it is worth regularly encouraging people to contribute. I only give £2/month, but if everyone did that it'd probably be fine.
 

dvd8n

Supporter
Supporter
AIUK Saviour
I must admit I've wondered if an occasional donation drive or subscriber drive (sort of like Wikipedia does) wouldn't be more effective than a constant banner on the front page that becomes easy to ignore.

But then that would presumably take more effort to program and administer.
 
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