Reply To: Some Insights on How We’re Doing

[Peter DeLegge]

On pseudopop said

So… When does the public registration open?

TL:DR Version
I am planning to do that this week.

The Full Version 
I realize that I’ve revised the date of opening to the public a few times and I’m still not completely comfortable with public registration, as I’m trying to reduce the amount of time required for me to manage the site. I’m also thinking about the costs involved as the site is on track to hit half the bandwidth transfer in my contract at the current volume. If it goes .1-5TB the data transfer over it’s an additional $50 US per month. Plus there are costs for SMTP provider and an email service provider which vary based on volume (of course, costs are relative to traffic / use levels). All of this is a lot of work to manage as a hobby.  I have a business to run and this greatly cuts into that. Getting this started, managing and improving the site, taking requests, and helping people with issues was requiring more than 70+ hours a week, but last week I was able to reduce that to around 40+ hours. I want to get it to around 15 at most, which means, I need more volunteers, especially moderators. And of course, opening the site to public registration will mean I need to put in a lot more time into moderating and troubleshooting the site and email.

Once the site is opens to public registration, we will be seeing spammers, puppet accounts by unscrupulous developers and shills posting affiliate links and codes, and worse. That means there’s going to be A LOT MORE moderation required. Whereas right now, with this little group of 100 beta testers and maybe a couple thousand posts since we’ve launched, there has been several posts that violated policies and none of them were really bad.

Consider this. Cakewalk Forums is the outlet of a mid-size software brand owned by a billionaire. It’s based on around that business. VI-Control is itself profitable from developer advertisers and subscribers as well as an outlet for its owner to promote his business, which, from his public statements, brings in around half a million dollars a year (as of a couple of years ago, it could be more or less today). KVR likely brings in a lot more money than VI-Control due to the size of its community and e-commerce capabilities. Additionally, all three of those sites — while all revenue producers for for-profit companies — use unpaid volunteers to moderate their sites while making profits (yes, I do consider that exploitive, but it has been a very profitable model for these forum owners). LinkedMusicians is my passion (hobby) project. It doesn’t have any advertising, and with its current and likely first year community size, I don’t think it’s even worth the energy to set up advertising (even though I might attempt it, just to get the ball rolling). Realistically, I seriously doubt this site will be able to fund itself within the next two years. Maybe — maybe — by the third year, it can generate enough revenue from contributions, affiliate links, and advertising to pay for itself, but that is hopeful, at best. I don’t have any plans for this to become a profitable business. I’m expecting that not looking at more than 2,500 hours I have put into this site, the first year costs will end up at around $2,000 US (hosting, email, theme, various plugins and subscriptions, security services, etc.).

I am planning to put up a contribution page so that community members who believe in LinkedMusicians can contribute. I have had a few people offer contributions of $100 US or more, but I have yet to give them a way to contribute. But again, beyond costs, my greatest concern is the time investment and finding volunteers who can moderate. If anyone wants to help in that area, please send me a private message.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

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