Future of World Affairs Board - Feedback Wanted

[Chris]

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: -

• 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

[Ziska]

Whatever it takes. Boards like this are rare enough to put up with the minor irritant of ads.

And a big thank you for running this thing as well.

[Jay]

Go for it Chris. I know its awfully expensive to host a site that gets 3 million hits a day. Google ads are mostly non flashy. So I think we can very well live with that.

And yeah, I would like to thank the mods, admins and Rochen staff for giving us some breathing space in www.

[Chris]

Yes, that is the number one priority here to not create an intrusion for our members. You will never see any nonsense like big flashy banners, pop-ups or anything like that. We basically want to continue running World Affairs Board as it is at the moment, while improving the website and protecting it financially for the future.

Anyway, I plan to leave this topic open for a good while longer, so everyone gets a chance to discuss this plan before we go ahead and make any changes to the community.

Thank you for your feedback and support Ziska and Jay

- Chris

[Officer of Engineers]

My other forum, the China-Defence.com is based upon donations and google. Google has been our bread and butter, however, donations have allowed us to move up to a more powerful server and more hosting capabilities.

[Chris]

World Affairs Board does have a slight advantage in that Rochen is a pretty well established web hosting provider, so up until now the hosting charges have been absorbed by Rochen and myself.

However, World Affairs Board is going to need to be moved to its own server pretty soon, instead of being hosted from a shared Rochen server. This step involves significant hardware and staff costs.

While Rochen will continue to fund a very large portion of World Affairs Board, as a corporate entity I can't really ask Rochen to fund everything. Hopefully the Google Adsense can help to provide part of the funding when we need to take the next step.

As I pointed out above, any revenue generated will be put back into improving the community.

Officer of Engineers, it is certainly encouraging that Adsense has worked for you and your discussion forum. That is some good news at least. Also, if you need any help with the web hosting side of things for your community, then please don't hesitate to shoot me a message, as I would be more than glad to assist you in anyway I can.

Thanks for all the great feedback so far!

- Chris

[Officer of Engineers]

Originally Posted by Chris

Officer of Engineers, it is certainly encouraging that Adsense has worked for you and your discussion forum. That is some good news at least. Also, if you need any help with the web hosting side of things for your community, then please don't hesitate to shoot me a message, as I would be more than glad to assist you in anyway I can.

- Chris

Will do. And if you want, PM me if you need a small donation.

[Chris]

Originally Posted by Officer of Engineers

Will do. And if you want, PM me if you need a small donation.

No worries...

No donations needed at this stage. Just keep posting and that will be support enough

Thanks again,

- Chris

[ChrisF202]

I agree with Ziska, do what it takes to keep this forum alive, its one of the few good ones.

[Confed999]

Originally Posted by Ziska

Whatever it takes. Boards like this are rare enough to put up with the minor irritant of ads.

And a big thank you for running this thing as well.

Well put...

Thanks Chris.

[Officer of Engineers]

Might as well give you all the tricks we at CDF learned.

We also get commissions from Amazon for helping sell through them. Several members do write books that we try to advertise and sell though our site. We get a commission on those obviously. However, what's not obvious is that we still get a commission if the person just hotlink from our site and buy something else that we did not advertise.

I and several members of CDF usually buy $1000s of books a year (occupational hazzard). By hotlinking through CDF, CDF gets a commission.

Even if members just posted a link (Black Hawk Down - both the movie and the book) to Amazon, we still get a commission.

[Officer of Engineers]

Just to let people know, click on the ads to help generate revenue. You don't have to buy anything. Just click on them. The more times. The more money.

[Chris]

The advertisements should now be live across all the skins, although we still need to tweak them a bit.

Thank you for your support everyone!

[Fonnicker]

I am very glad to have found this site. I'll support anything you feel will keep it running.

Thanks for providing this for us.


Fon

[Julie]

There's not another one like WAB, so whatever it takes.