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When free language sites turn to profit | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4420 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 9 of 27 12 June 2013 at 10:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't really use that many language sites, apart from this one, but I fully agree with Arekkusu and Solfrid Cristine. If you spend a lot of time and effort offering a service, then you are entitled to charge for it, and as a user, you are free to take it or leave it.
I have noticed that some people on the forum take an issue with the fact that non-paying members do not get access to all the features that pro members have. Personally I don't mind at all. The Administrator did a great job creating this site, and if he gets some financial gain out of it, then good for him. I have not signed up as a pro member so far. Not because I would mind paying, but rather because I am not sure to what extent the additional features would give a lot of added value to my participating here. Now if someone can convince me that it is really worth it, I might get out my credit card... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4609 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 10 of 27 12 June 2013 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, after I converted my membership here from free to Pro, and started using the full power of the search facilities (v. useful by the way), I happened to find the thread where FX was talking about introducing charges for the first time (this was before my time here). One of the reasons he introduced charges was to allow the further development of the site (e.g. by software purchase/development or whatever). There was a certain amount of negative reaction from some members (I don't know what proportion), but anyway, as we know the change went ahead, and some members signed up for it, but as far as I can tell, it's quite a small proportion of total membership. Now, not so long after that time, FX began to spend less and less, and eventually no, time posting on the site (although he may have still been reading it / checking it). And as we know, in recent years, functionality has not been added, and bugs have not been fixed (although the damage caused by the hacking incident was put right, at some expense, I gather). So one could argue that the premise on which the charging was introduced has not resulted in the kind of positive development that people may have hoped for. I am not saying FX introduced the charges under false pretences. It seems likely that circumstances changed for him at around that time, and he simple wasn't able to give it the attention needed whether he wanted to or not. Had he been here and responding to feedback, he may have been prepared to try different approaches to charging, e.g. a lower entry-level charge, or lower for students or something. But clearly that isn't on the cards the way things are. I have wondered if the reason the site hasn't been developed was that the takeup of Pro membership was so disappointingly small, and the resulting income wouldn't support any more development. That could be the case, but if so, I'm surprised FX didn't come back with a slightly more "in your face" marketing campaign (which could have included special offers), but I could find no evidence of that, looking back at his posts. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6378 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 11 of 27 12 June 2013 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | ||
But this site would be nothing without us. I think it's very rude to say "you've been a member for 2414 days and made 5096 posts, time to upgrade?" Time to acknowledge that without me there would be slightly less useful info, and without the top 10 posters this forum wouldn't be itself anymore. 12 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5043 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 12 of 27 12 June 2013 at 11:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I support the forum. I would also like to see our administrator tell us his plans for updating the forum and solving the many technical issues. At this point, without any word from FX, we are left hanging, not knowing when the next glitch, hack attack or technical problem will send this forum to the realm of former great sites and a 404 error.
One would have thought, after the last great outage, that FX would have addressed the community. Ideally, he would have acknowledged our concerns and put forward a plan to fix them, but he didn't. As broke as most HTLALer's are, I think a lot of members would contribute if they knew that their contribution would go towards maintaining and improving the forum. I'd be happy if he just came on and said, "Hey, I'm still here! I'm working on things but I need your support.", or something to that effect. I don't know how old FX is but at some point, he may wish to divest himself of his interest in the forum. What happens then? What do we do if our administrator becomes incapacitated and physically unable to pay the bills? Is there a transition procedure in place? Do we go to the back-up site and build again from scratch? Do we lose all the database? Do we run the forum as a community? We'll have to pay for hosting, technical support and web design. Obviously, costs will be involved. The benefit that most of us get from being members is huge and I don't think it would be impolitic to ask for money, but people have to know that it will be put towards improving and maintaining the forum. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful to FX for creating this site. I am also grateful to people like Serpent, who, though not pro-members, are the lifeblood of this forum. Without their content contributions the forum would not be much use. Edited by iguanamon on 12 June 2013 at 11:49pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 13 of 27 13 June 2013 at 12:20am | IP Logged | ||
I admit that I voted for you post because of the avatar. I don't understand why he doesn't sell it. I would if I was in his shoes. Speaking of profit, the site/free product that I think would most benefit from becoming pay only is Anki. Thoughts? Edited by leosmith on 13 June 2013 at 1:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4911 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 14 of 27 13 June 2013 at 1:35am | IP Logged | ||
FX could fetch anywhere from $14,000 to $38,000 if some of these online website value calculators are any indication. That's quite a spread, but at least one site I visited gave some interesting social data, such as how many times HTLAL is mentioned on FB (a couple hundred times), tweeted (none), LinkedIn (none), etc. I don't know how it's calculated (ads, I suppose, since membership probably isn't taken into consideration), but the highest estimate of monthly income from this site is $3510 a month. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4790 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 15 of 27 13 June 2013 at 11:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I totally understand why people want to turn a time consuming hobby into a cash cow.
But there are a few points where most of them fail, make a stupid mistake, unnecessarily alienate people and earn much less than they could have earned had they avoided the stupid mistakes. 1.The appropriate price. Sorry, I am not paiyng 40 dollars for one year membership on a forum. But as I already said, I would gladly pay five dollars to keep the forum running and perhaps many more than 8 times more people could afford to pay 5 dollars a year than 40. Another such example is Scritter. I have a crazy plan to start learning Chinese if I finish my exams but I am not sure I can afford 14 dollars a month (=over 150 dollars a year) as a student. Since I found it a few months ago, they even removed the option to prepay for longer time for a reduced fee. So now, instead of knowing "It is a great thing worth all the money", I'll be forced to consider whether there are really no cheaper (even though worse) alternatives or how often to unsubscribe and resubscibe to reduce the cost while not damaging my progress much. And I really wanted to gather and give the 95 or so dollars for a year. 2.Another huge mistake is taking away something that was already free instead of developing new and better paid content/tools. I think that is one of the thoughts behing total destruction of Memrise. The old system, while nearly perfect for learning, was worse chunkable for sell than the new one. And anytime people, even free users, are being taken something they liked away from them, a lot of bad feelings arise. And behaviour like "You didn't pay so don't you dare to open your filthy cheap mouth" isn't going to help the business. This is where Anki succeeds. A totally free basic system, you can try the srs, all the tools for adding cards etc. You can even try the synchronisation as you can study through the online interface. So I was happy to pay 24 euro for ipad app because I knew I would use it. And I don't doubt there are many happy and paying users. 3.The main reason why I am not going to pay for LingQ and others with similar strategy: There is not enough free content for me to really try it out. There are like 100 lingqs for free. That tells me nothing, I have no trouble learning 100 words without any tool. I need at least 500 or rather 1000 to start seeing a difference. Lingq would do better to give people much more for free so they would get addicted and couldn't imagine their further learning without lingq. 4.Too agressive "PAY US" marketing strategy. I foolishly gave my main email adress to the Germanpod101. I hate that "pay us or you'll never really learn" blackmailing. I wanted to get the basic paid membership for summer, when I have time to fully use it. Now I am reconsidering as I don't want the company to think this is he way to go. 5.False promises. Any kind of paid service that was not worth the money makes the target public and market less willing to experiment with their money next time. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4609 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 16 of 27 13 June 2013 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I happened to visit FI3M recently, and found an article by Benny that explained
his approach. He said he'd actually removed the front-page advertising from his site in response to feedback from site users/members. He still sells or advertises products via his site, but you have to go and look for them. I must say that I respect this approach. He also said that because of the very high traffic, maintaining the web-hosting at the appropriate level was expensive, and he needed to make money just to keep it going. (I'm not sure if he also makes a living out of it, on top of that). I think this is just the situation that FX was in when he began charging, and one can sympathise. But for whatever reason, he became less active on the site, and (as far as development of the site was concerned) there became a bit of a downward spiral. If people were seeing no improvements being made, they'd be less inclined to pay, therefore less money coming in for development, etc. Now at the moment, and maybe for the forseeable future, languages and "language- hacking" are Benny's passion, what he seems to live for, but one can imagine that that might change if he wants to "settle down" one day. And he might then not be able to be so active on his site, and he also might either need to be a bit more agressively commercial (to pay the bills), or give it far less attention in order to make his living elsewhere (what seems to have happened with FX). 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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