Grandfathered in life membership ended

[Justin Baker]

https://adblockplus.org/en/

[Dave T]

If BPL hadn't already extracted a bunch of cash from members whilst committing fraud, all these arguments would hold a bit more water.

[Nick Gatel]

"Then how does every other forum pull it off?
I understand needing revenue but charging people just to post is the worst possible way.
I have no problem paying $5 to support the forum but I know that if I was surfing the web and came across an interesting forum site and they were charging $5 to post I would probably leave and never come back.

$5 for a site with inadequate support for it's members."

---

In a sense, every forum has a different business model. Backpacker Magazine vs BPL would be an example. I have seen forums in the past that require a fee to READ posts — wonder how that works out? At least on BPL you can read the posts and then make a decision if you want to join the community. Whether or not $5 or $109.95 is worth it is up to each individual.

What Ryan J needs to figure out is how much more traffic is driven by free memberships and how does he turn that traffic, which costs money to host, into revenue.

Some sites sell advertising, which Ryan has said he does not want to do as it can bias or infer bias on editorial content. Looks like BPL is using Google AdSense, which probably doesn't generate a lot of money here — as it would on a site that gets 10's of thousands of hits a day.

So how do other forums pull it off? I guess there is an assumption they are viable businesses. Perhaps the answer is, check your premise.

[Marko Botsaris]

@Nick – thumbs up.

@TheShrillOnes You have some reasonable points overall about customer service, or the lack thereof. Perhaps BPL/Ryan could use some of the money and hire someone to answer the emails, especially anything related to membership fees and accounts, at least once a week. Still, no one will (or should) take you too seriously if you start talking about "Fraud", etc. So far I think occasional incompetence is the only thing I see.

You may have to work at it, maybe even much harder than you should, but I'm sure you can get the matter cleared up eventually. But if instead of being constructive you jump straight into the hyperbolic invective, well then you are just making yourself into an internet cliche.

[Nick Gatel]

A couple of interesting links. I am not an Internet expert, so I cannot say the information is close to accurate.

From
Worthofweb.com

BPL is worth $94K

BPL has to potential to generate $74K per year in sales (this is revenue, not profit)

BPL generates 411,240 visitors per month (includes multiple visits by individuals)

Another site for traffic
Traffic Estimate

My gardener generates more profit than the revenue potential for BPL.

[Greg Mihalik]

"My gardener generates more profit than the revenue potential for BPL."

… made my day.

Thanks.

[and depressing that few will ponder the difference between "profit" and "revenue potential"]

[David Ure]

"BPL is worth $94K"

Canadian? It is $90K USD now.

LOL!

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

FWIW, those website valuation tools are wildly inaccurate. They use the traffic estimate from Alexa.com (which is based on the 0.001% of web users that have installed their software) and then pretty much just guess from there.

Using that service, the total worth of a website I have is actually very close to the monthly income.

[Nick Gatel]

Yes, I mentioned that. However, there is a difference between income, earnings and profit.

So use this formula…

Calculate Net Profit after all expenses, including your wages (time).

Now add back your taxes, amortization expenses, and interest expenses (EBITDA).

This is your earnings.

Now multiply it by a factor for your industry. PR, Advertising, and Media industry is 3 to 6.5

[Brock Graves]

Just an update if anyone's interested…. Ryan emailed me back and we got it all worked out. Thanks Ryan!

[Stuart .]

Brock, I'm glad you got it sorted out in a week. Thing is, this should be transparent to members and you should never have had to raise it here. And it's contingent on one person – Ryan – who won't delegate it to anyone and isnt always at the helm.

I'm pissed that I haven't received an official response to my ticket from six months ago. It's not the measly $20 or so. It's the fact that Ryan doesn't have a process in place to fulfill a promise he made to his paying members when the Forum membership was introduced, unless he is physically running the site day to day.

And we know that he isn't doing that because he'd rather be out there in the wilderness, yet he refuses to put in a support mechanism in his absence.

I don't know how much of a stink you had to raise to get this resolved, Brock. My point here is that consistency is key in customer service, and from what I can see, BPL's ownership doesn't understand that yet.

[JP]

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