The Future of World Affairs Board...
I personally along with the Administrators and Moderators of World Affairs Board greatly appreciate the loyalty of our members and it is our aim to always interact with our members and gain your feedback and support for any idea before we go ahead and make changes to your community. It is after all you, our members, who make World Affairs Board such a great discussion forum and without the loyalty that everyone has shown we wouldn't have managed to build the site to where it is today.
As I am sure you have noticed, World Affairs Board has started to grow extremely rapidly over the past few months. In the month of September 2004 alone we received over 3,000,000 (yes, 3 million!) hits to the site and nearly 50,000 unique visitors. The post count and membership of the forum is also increasing at an extraordinary rate. While this growth is absolutely fantastic it does come with some financial burdens, which I am personally financing at the moment. In order to support the future growth of World Affairs Board we really need to get some kind of revenue stream going.
Iron Duke and I have had several lengthy discussions about the best way to generate revenue to support the website over the past few weeks. There were a number of options available: -
After eliminating all of these possible options, we finally decided that introducing Adsense from Google would be the best possible option to help support the future funding of World Affairs Board. There are several advantages to using Google Adsense: -
World Affairs Board will continue to be run as a non-profit venture and any funds that are generated will be used to improve the site - such as possibly introducing a new skin and live real-time chat for our members. I will continue to provide significant financial backing to World Affairs Board, as I love this website dearly, in addition to any revenue we generate from Google.
We wont be proceeding with this idea until we have given our membership enough time to consider this plan and give us some feedback on the idea.
Thank you for reading :)
- Chris
I personally along with the Administrators and Moderators of World Affairs Board greatly appreciate the loyalty of our members and it is our aim to always interact with our members and gain your feedback and support for any idea before we go ahead and make changes to your community. It is after all you, our members, who make World Affairs Board such a great discussion forum and without the loyalty that everyone has shown we wouldn't have managed to build the site to where it is today.
As I am sure you have noticed, World Affairs Board has started to grow extremely rapidly over the past few months. In the month of September 2004 alone we received over 3,000,000 (yes, 3 million!) hits to the site and nearly 50,000 unique visitors. The post count and membership of the forum is also increasing at an extraordinary rate. While this growth is absolutely fantastic it does come with some financial burdens, which I am personally financing at the moment. In order to support the future growth of World Affairs Board we really need to get some kind of revenue stream going.
Iron Duke and I have had several lengthy discussions about the best way to generate revenue to support the website over the past few weeks. There were a number of options available: -
- 1) We could introduce a subscription charge, where members would pay a set fee to join and participate at World Affairs Board. This option wasn't really even considered. World Affairs Board is and will always remain a free, open and fair community where anyone can come and participate. We don't want to change this under any circumstances.
2) We could introduce banner advertisements. We put this option under some consideration, but we felt it would create too great a distraction and inconvenience for our members.
3) We could accept donations from our members. While this idea would probably work, due to the number of loyal members we have, we would prefer not to accept funding directly from our member base. As I highlighted above, we want World Affairs Board to remain a free community for everyone to enjoy.
After eliminating all of these possible options, we finally decided that introducing Adsense from Google would be the best possible option to help support the future funding of World Affairs Board. There are several advantages to using Google Adsense: -
- 1) Google Adsense will display text based advertisements as you often see on the right hand side of the page when searching using Google.com. We feel this will work perfectly, as they will not be intrusive to our members as regular banner advertisements often are.
2) We can specifically tailor the Google Adsense text advertisements to fit in with the site design - color, text size, text color etc. This allows us to reduce the intrusion for our members even more.
3) Google will specifically target the advertisements based on the content of the page you are viewing, so the advertisements you will see should be relevant to the topic you are browsing and may hopefully even be helpful to you.
4) We will have Google's content control team working for us to ensure that any text advertisements our members may find offensive wont get displayed on World Affairs Board.
World Affairs Board will continue to be run as a non-profit venture and any funds that are generated will be used to improve the site - such as possibly introducing a new skin and live real-time chat for our members. I will continue to provide significant financial backing to World Affairs Board, as I love this website dearly, in addition to any revenue we generate from Google.
We wont be proceeding with this idea until we have given our membership enough time to consider this plan and give us some feedback on the idea.
Thank you for reading :)
- Chris
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