New ad free sailing forum

Guys, really. This thread is lame. A few ads are not going to ruin your experience. They're going to consume an unnoticeable amount of data, and it's not exactly unfair to get this service for free in exchange for a few harmless advertisements that you may actually find interesting.

IPC are a business. This forum is a huge cost. It's entirely reasonable that they wish to reduce that cost with some advertising revenue.

Stop being unreasonable and nimby like. You use the service, so pay the price. Else, leave.
 
nathanlee said:
Guys, really. This thread is lame. A few ads are not going to ruin your experience. They're going to consume an unnoticeable amount of data, and it's not exactly unfair to get this service for free in exchange for a few harmless advertisements that you may actually find interesting.

IPC are a business. This forum is a huge cost. It's entirely reasonable that they wish to reduce that cost with some advertising revenue.

Stop being unreasonable and nimby like. You use the service, so pay the price. Else, leave.
Click to expand...

I have already said I would pay to not have ads! Anyway, ad blockers will probably prevent hem showing, but are harder to implement on tablets and phones.

You say this forum costs a lot. That interests me. Do you have any figures? Have you made allowance for the fact that IPC take the content and use it for free in their magazines?

If it is so expensive to run it would be interesting to ask IPC how much they would pay someone to take it off their hands. I suspect they wouldn't.

My original premise was based on a thought I had. If you offered a competitive publisher the chance to take the entire membership database and content over so long as they provided an ad free non subscription forum, as many are, I suspect there would be a small, but elegant queue of takers.
 
nathanlee said:
Guys, really. This thread is lame. A few ads are not going to ruin your experience. They're going to consume an unnoticeable amount of data, and it's not exactly unfair to get this service for free in exchange for a few harmless advertisements that you may actually find interesting.

IPC are a business. This forum is a huge cost. It's entirely reasonable that they wish to reduce that cost with some advertising revenue.

Stop being unreasonable and nimby like. You use the service, so pay the price. Else, leave.
Click to expand...
I always find it amusing the number of people who think this forum is a democracy...:D
 
.
Bunch of whinging old women.

There have been and are plenty of other yachting forums, but you would all rather hang about here and moan.

It's the people that make a forum what it is, not the software or advertising.

- W
 
the reality is that any 'free' forum would have to start charging or using advertising to pay for the bandwidth and hosting charges once the usage reached the levels this forum does. Try hosting this on Amazon S2, or on a LAMP server environment with multiple servers, backup, admin, load balancing, etc. They don't, they have constrained costs from the legacy Time Warner/AOL hosting.
 
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Ex-SolentBoy said:
You say this forum costs a lot. That interests me. Do you have any figures? Have you made allowance for the fact that IPC take the content and use it for free in their magazines?
Click to expand...

IPC have a team of people that look after all their web infrastructure. There's a technology director, a head of web infrastructure, project managers, all the way down to the developers themselves. In salary alone you're going to be on tens of thousands per month - perhaps considerably more - and I know for a fact that this forum on YBW has by far the most traffic (visitors & support demands) out of any of the sites on their network. Add in hosting costs, bandwidth, etc... it's no small change. I'd hazard a wild guess that running this site costs between £30,000 and £150,000 per month.
 
nathanlee said:
Guys, really. This thread is lame. A few ads are not going to ruin your experience. They're going to consume an unnoticeable amount of data, and it's not exactly unfair to get this service for free in exchange for a few harmless advertisements that you may actually find interesting.

IPC are a business. This forum is a huge cost. It's entirely reasonable that they wish to reduce that cost with some advertising revenue.

Stop being unreasonable and nimby like. You use the service, so pay the price. Else, leave.
Click to expand...

Nathan, generally I like what you have to say and will take it a face value. When someone in the industry tells me something is trivial without backup information though, I'm inclined to go and check. So I've run a short experiment; opened a private browsing Firefox session and try some refreshes of YBW pages whilst logged in and not logged in. I measure network data with Networx which is bit crude but I'm happy that the data being measured came solely from the network traffic generated by the YBW refreshes. The data traffic generated, over several iterations, looked pretty much like this:
[TABLE="width: 500"]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Logged in[/TD]
[TD]Not logged in[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]PBO Threads list[/TD]
[TD]90k[/TD]
[TD]150k[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]All Forums 'latest' list[/TD]
[TD]80k[/TD]
[TD]140k[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

That seems to demonstrate that the advertising today on YBW forums creates a 60k or, if my sums are right, a 60-70% (on those pages) overhead. Assuming a user has a fixed data allowance and solely looks at YBW forums (unlikely I know) thats around 30% less pages the user can read - I dont consider that unnoticeable.
 
nathanlee said:
IPC have a team of people that look after all their web infrastructure. There's a technology director, a head of web infrastructure, project managers, all the way down to the developers themselves. In salary alone you're going to be on tens of thousands per month - perhaps considerably more - and I know for a fact that this forum on YBW has by far the most traffic (visitors & support demands) out of any of the sites on their network. Add in hosting costs, bandwidth, etc... it's no small change. I'd hazard a wild guess that running this site costs between £30,000 and £150,000 per month.
Click to expand...

Nathan,

I like what what you write as well, but trying to allocate IPC's entire IT structure to this forum is the sort of dumb ass accounting that collapses companies and governments. They do other things besides this forum you know.

The forum software is developed by someone else.
It's probably hosted somewhere else.
The bandwidth is minimal and cheap.

The only real incremental cost is moderation. Small price to pay for access to the database and free use of content.

You are just guessing, as I supposed. You are way, way, out.
 
What is the value of this forum to IPC - an interesting question?

Lets just say that an Audi forum (started in 2000) sold last year to new owners for a mere £250,000.

There are more active users on this forum so double that??

(and I should add the total number of users count as well which is why inactive accounts are never deleted)
 
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