| ioi said: I'd wait until the 3.0 is launched before making any judgements. For some reason, people seem to think that paid data membership will overflow to the forums - it will be totally seperate. You won't know if anyone has paid for a standard or premium membership, it will just be them who will see more or less features on the charts section of the site. It won't affect anything else. Well I am here for the community more than the numbers TBH, so this subscription fee debate not an issue to me.
it is more for the industry investors not for us normal people with little interest in numbers (i think). That's exactly the point - these memberships are aimed at either those who have a really keen interest in the numbers who are willing to pay a small amount to get more access to extra features or those in the industry who need full data and advanced tools to improve their business. It isn't aimed at the general VGChartz community or general readership - from your points of view nothing will really change. If you're not someone who spends 5 hrs per week scrutinising the charts (and we have reader stats so we know exactly how many people read past the top 50 or use filters etc) and is just interested in the top sellers each week and how your favourite games are getting on, then everything will be exactly the same after these changes... We made this site what it is now, and now you wan't us to pay..
I'm a little confused by this. The community on VGChartz is the best on any website around but the community doesn't produce the sales charts each week. Again, nobody is asking you to pay to use the site or to be a part of the community - we are devising a new costing model to bring in enough revenue from the charts activity to make it profitable - at the moment it is being done at a loss and subsidised by other areas of the site such as news. So the people who are missing out here are the writers, site admins etc who are having to take less money so that we can support the chart activity rather than it standing on its own two feet. A business model which involves collecting loads of specialised data and publishing it for free is never going to be that viable - at the end of the day you are dealing with information (especially when you go past the top level data - top 20 games and hardware) that only a tiny number of people will ever look at. How many people are seriously going to look at games 1750 - 1800 each week? Maybe 10-20 people compared to maybe 50,000 who look at the top 10. Therefore, the people who want (and need) to go down to this level of detail and the people who should contribute more directly to the work involved to track all 5000 games each week should be those in the industry or those who are interested enough to help support the operation. For those who are just looking at the top 20 each week, there are enough of you to support the activity via ads and general site revenue. It's a case of finding the best way to support the work that is being done with the array of different users we have. Someone from an analyst firm will find the data far more valuable than someone just looking for fun and we need to find ways to reflect that in how we present the data and bring in revenue from it. |
it's cool bossman. by the looks of the poll, about 5% would pay willingly so far.
i do think that a subscription model would be a good idea. i mean, if you get busted up financially by keeping this site open at a loss, no one can see any numbers. and i think we should all appreciate that you, the owner of the site, are taking the time to keep us in the loop on things before they happen.
