An idea that I’ve been working on (in the back of my head for several years) is a sister site completely separate from FR where we can have an all of the above approach. I signed up a year ago on two different “cloud” providers and have even built a prototype “conservative social networking system” using some AJAX programming techniques and some user defined page set up techniques of my own design. Each user can sign up at the membership level he or she desires and can control his/her own page(s) or forums and control who may or may not post to them or even access them, ie, each paying member is his own site owner/administrator/moderator and can even recruit others to assist. And it could be a for profit site where we could sell merchandise or advertising or whatever. The only basic restrictions are they would have to be pro-life, pro-family conservative pages.
And FR would just continue along as it is.
That being the case the only way to increase revenues is to increase membership. I would guess that you can count on x% of members to donate y amount of money even though the donors are a very small percentage of users. So you have to increase the users.
How? Go back to the old free wheeling FR where true believers from every nook and cranny of the right, center and occasional liberal got to tee off on each others views without fear of getting shown the door or harpies calling moderators because some poster isn't toeing some line.
Keep it clean but move it back to the free wheeling FR where the wars between libertarians, socons, Econs, believers and non believers were epic, so to speak.
That is where the donation money is, among those who are true believers in whatever it is they believe and are guaranteed an ad free site where their views can be aired without fear of "zotting" if they play by the rules.
Jim, you never disappoint. I can't say that I'm surprised that you've been working on something like that in your 'spare' time. Good show, my man.
It would be interesting to see how the model you mentioned works. It sounds very much like the Delphi Forums network. At their Premium membership level, one can create their own forum with all of the bells and whistles. Even Basic members can create a forum, but they're limited in functionality and glitz.
Do keep us posted!
And if that doesn’t work raffle off some AR’s every quarter. That’ll get the viewership up! ;-}
An idea that I’ve been working on (in the back of my head for several years) is a sister site completely separate from FR where we can have an all of the above approach. I signed up a year ago on two different “cloud” providers and have even built a prototype “conservative social networking system” using some AJAX programming techniques and some user defined page set up techniques of my own design. Each user can sign up at the membership level he or she desires and can control his/her own page(s) or forums and control who may or may not post to them or even access them, ie, each paying member is his own site owner/administrator/moderator and can even recruit others to assist. And it could be a for profit site where we could sell merchandise or advertising or whatever. The only basic restrictions are they would have to be pro-life, pro-family conservative pages.
I THINK THAT’S A FANTASTIC IDEA.
CONGRATS. I hope you can and will make it happen.