# Cycle Chat finances - advertising?



## dellzeqq (28 Jun 2009)

I'm starting this off the top of my head, and it may well be that Shaun takes the view that death is preferable to carrying advertising on the forum, but it does strike me, given the weight of money that gets spent by people posting on this forum, that advertising might be a go-er. And I, for one, wouldn't object. It wouldn't lower the forum in my esteem, or change my view of those posting. 

Of course, if Shaun were to take advertising from a bicycle supplier, and fifty people got it in to their heads to write that the bicycle supplier was pants, then there would be some embarrassment, but that would hardly be terminal. The advertiser might stick it out, or withdraw, but the forum would be no worse off. As a believer in the LBS, I'd be one of those who would not be charmed by an ad from Wiggle, or the like, but it wouldn't put me off using the forum.


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## Gerry Attrick (28 Jun 2009)

I wouldn't want advertising on the whole site, but another forum I use (nowt to do with bikes) has advertising for non-signed in viewing, but once a member has signed in, the adverts disappear. Could be worth consideration.


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## dellzeqq (28 Jun 2009)

Gerry Attrick said:


> I wouldn't want advertising on the whole site, but another forum I use (nowt to do with bikes) has advertising for non-signed in viewing, but once a member has signed in, the adverts disappear. Could be worth consideration.


when you say that you wouldn't want it, do you mean that you would prefer the forum without, or that you would be put off using the forum? The reason I ask is that I would prefer the forum without, and I doubt many people would want advertising for it's own sake, but if it paid the bills, and offered an assurance of continuity, or even made Shaun some money for his efforts I'd see it as a good thing overall...


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## Gerry Attrick (28 Jun 2009)

No, it wouldn't put me off the forum, but the half-way-house I have suggested seems to be the best of both worlds.


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## Shaun (30 Jun 2009)

I'm not keen on advertising simply because it doesn't make any money.

Over 10 years at Qango.com I displayed in excess of 40 million advertisement - yes, you read that right, 40 million - now ask me how much I netted from those same adverts? Less that $500.

People are simply immune to them and because of this advertisers either only pay a commission when they make a sale (something like 0.1% - 0.5% of people click the ads, and of those only 0.02% actually result in a sale) - or they pay pennys for displaying thousands and thousands of their ads. The result is that you give them massive brand exposure, and they pay little or nothing for it. That may sound harsh, but it's a simple truth that I learned after spending 10 years giving up top-of-the-fold web page space to advertisers!

I have been considering plans to make CycleChat financially independent, and allow us to take it further and do more with the forums and the brand / community, but I don't want to get into it just yet - maybe in a few months time when I've had time to sit and explore the various options.

I also want to investigate what's available in terms of add-ons for the forum software and what it will take to expand the site and pull together some of the ideas into a cohesive package.

I'll open up discussion on it later on.

Cheers,
Shaun


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## simon_brooke (30 Jun 2009)

I would have thought that a cyclechat shop selling nice cycling kit and other things that people might buy would be a better thing. Something like this. You could also ask for a voluntary subscription - some of us could afford to pay and some of us probably would. It would have not to be compulsory and probably the only thing it would get you would be a little badge under your avatar saying 'subscriber' - but it's clear that cyclechat is an important resource for quite a few people, and we're not all broke.


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## dellzeqq (3 Jul 2009)

Admin said:


> I'm not keen on advertising simply because it doesn't make any money.
> 
> Over 10 years at Qango.com I displayed in excess of 40 million advertisement - yes, you read that right, 40 million - now ask me how much I netted from those same adverts? Less that $500.


Criminy! That's a real eye-opener!


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## HJ (9 Jul 2009)

Put a change on posting, for those with over 5500 posts


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## thomas (26 Jul 2009)

Sign up to affiliate window, there are a few cycle schemes on there...Then, add a page for cycle shops using the affiliate links. Then when members want to buy something they can click through on the affiliate links, which should give the forum around a 10% commission on whatever they buy.

I'm sure people would be willing to do that as a form of donation to the site.


Qango just sounds lousy. Adsense can be a good one, but banners at the top and bottom of forums do generally get ignored....it's good for in content though (so any long articles)...for instance, from a little over 300,000 advert impressions I've made around £70 on just one website....if you worked that out for your 40m it would be just under £10,000....now a lot does depend on advert positions, etc, but it does show that advertising can make money.


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## Shaun (27 Jul 2009)

thomas said:


> Sign up to affiliate window, there are a few cycle schemes on there...Then, add a page for cycle shops using the affiliate links. Then when members want to buy something they can click through on the affiliate links, which should give the forum around a 10% commission on whatever they buy.
> 
> I'm sure people would be willing to do that as a form of donation to the site.
> 
> Qango just sounds lousy. Adsense can be a good one, but banners at the top and bottom of forums do generally get ignored....it's good for in content though (so any long articles)...for instance, from a little over 300,000 advert impressions I've made around £70 on just one website....if you worked that out for your 40m it would be just under £10,000....now a lot does depend on advert positions, etc, but it does show that advertising can make money.




Hi Thomas,

I agree, and I'm not saying you can't make money at it, I know quite a few people who've made a success of generating revenue from ads on their sites, but to do it properly you need time to create a focused campaign that ties-in your ads/affiliate links to your site content.

Unfortunately I didn't have that luxury with Qango, and don't really have it with CycleChat. I get a few hours per week, most of which is currently spent on maintenance.

With Qango, I think its single biggest problem is its diversity. With over 15000 categories covering all sort of topics it is almost impossible to focus the ads without having someone full-time configuring the ad-feed at the back-end. With advertisers starting / stopping campaigns all the time you need to monitor the feeds and keep your affiliate links current, or you just end up giving away clicks for free.

Cheers,
Shaun


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## Dan B (27 Jul 2009)

I was also going to suggest affiliates as a possibility. I imagine it would not even be especially hard for the software to detect links to online shops and rewrite them to include cyclechat's affiliate link, so that all referrals from these pages raise money for the site


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## Shaun (27 Jul 2009)

Again, whilst not very focused, my experience was that even when sending tens of thousands of visitors through an affiliate link, very few actually purchased - and you only get commission when someone buys.

I can see how CC is more focused - it's cycling and, well, cycling, and erm cycling - and can't get much more focused on your site than that, but to maintain an effective affiliate program the majority of the work is done by hand and this is something I simply don't have the time for at the moment.

If CC made enough for me to take a wage and quit my day-job, then I could probably afford the time to create some focused campaigns and generate some revenue (as well as doing many more things), but for the time being it's simply not practical. 

I'm not trying to be deliberately negative, it's just that I have to balance what is _possible_, against what is currently _practical_.

Cheers,
Shaun


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## blazed (1 Aug 2009)

What you say about advertising couldnt be further from the truth you seem to have been going about it wrong. I wouldnt run PPC on a site like this for a start, forums are notoriously bad for click through ratios and ad blindness. 

Ive made a living from websites since i was 17 and have been working at home self employed that whole time. A site like this could make some good money. I recently sold two sites receiving a combined 100,000 uniques a day for nearly 6 figures (adult sites) but the adult online industry is in the toilet at the moment.


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## MacB (1 Aug 2009)

blazed said:


> What you say about advertising couldnt be further from the truth you seem to have been going about it wrong. I wouldnt run PPC on a site like this for a start, forums are notoriously bad for click through ratios and ad blindness.
> 
> Ive made a living from websites since i was 17 and have been working at home self employed that whole time. A site like this could make some good money. I recently sold two sites receiving a combined 100,000 uniques a day for nearly 6 figures (adult sites) but the adult online industry is in the toilet at the moment.



priceless, are you actually holding the online adult industry up as an example of how to do it?


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## blazed (1 Aug 2009)

MacBludgeon said:


> priceless, are you actually holding the online adult industry up as an example of how to do it?



Ya what?


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## TheDoctor (1 Aug 2009)

blazed said:


> What you say about advertising couldnt be further from the truth you seem to have been going about it wrong. I wouldnt run PPC on a site like this for a start, forums are notoriously bad for click through ratios and ad blindness.
> 
> Ive made a living from websites since i was 17 and have been working at home self employed that whole time. A site like this could make some good money. I* recently sold two sites receiving a combined 100,000 uniques a day for nearly 6 figures* (adult sites) but the adult online industry is in the toilet at the moment.



And you still don't know better than to buy a bike at Halfords???


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## Will1985 (1 Aug 2009)

Slight problem in your calculations there blazed - CC averages about 700 member visits a day, added to all of the guests who come in from searches makes maybe 1500 unique daily visitors. That is vastly different from your filthy smut empire which clearly has a much broader audience than cycling. Scale your figures down, and CC might go for £1500-2000.

The beauty of this forum as repeated many times is the distinct lack of advertising, no matter how obtrusive.


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## thomas (2 Aug 2009)

Will1985 said:


> Scale your figures down, and CC might go for £1500-2000.
> 
> The beauty of this forum as repeated many times is the distinct lack of advertising, no matter how obtrusive.



CycleChat would go for a lot more than £1500-2000. I'd usually aim to sell my websites for 12 months revenue, but usually end up with at least 18-24 months. As this site doesn't have any real revenue you can't really work on that, but I bet it could make some money and for the user base and loyalty of members it would be worth more.

I was offered somewhere in your price estimate for here for my Guess My Age site (in my signature), which gets a lot less visitors than here and has a lot less too. Though the site makes some money, it doesn't make that much.

There would be other ways to monetise the site, such as premium subscriptions, selling the tops and things all the time for a reasonable profit....

You said that affiliate links can have a low click through rate with lower rate of success. It can be true, it depends how targeted they were. My idea involved members making an active effort to click on them before making a purchase, rather than hoping people A click on them and B buy something within 30 days.


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## Crackle (2 Aug 2009)

Attach an online shop to it, selling bike parts - There's a few sites do exactly that.


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## TheDoctor (2 Aug 2009)

Trouble is, if it became a paysite, or even if some changes happened that members didn't like, they'd soon be off somewhere else.
C+ became BikeRadar, and a whole load of us decamped over here. ACF imploded - CC could do the same. Admin seems highly reluctant to commercialise the site, and I think he's got the right idea.


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## joolsybools (2 Aug 2009)

£10 a year to use the site. Is that do-able?


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## ianrauk (2 Aug 2009)

nope, bye bye if CC turns into a paysite. What attracted me to this site (and I can imagine a lot of others) was that it is free and had no advertisements and/or popups. Being a paysite would put a lot of people off, especially newbies. However when Shaun has a funds drive as has had recently then I am more then happy to contribute something.



joolsybools said:


> £10 a year to use the site. Is that do-able?


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## MacB (2 Aug 2009)

ianrauk said:


> nope, bye bye if CC turns into a paysite. What attracted me to this site (and I can imagine a lot of others) was that it is free and had no advertisements and/or popups. Being a paysite would put a lot of people off, especially newbies. However when Shaun has a funds drive as has had recently then I am more then happy to contribute something.



agreed, and I think there is a tendency for people to see £ signs and assume that the rest of us see the same as well.


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## Shaun (3 Aug 2009)

Crackle said:


> Attach an online shop to it, selling bike parts - There's a few sites do exactly that.



I would like to do that someday (and many other things too), but unfortunately that's not something I can do at the moment.

I work full-time, then work on my revenue generating business site in my spare time, then manage CC in the remainder of my spare time.

I would love to make CC my living one day, but the transition needs to be one that's slow, steady, and managable.

CC could be much bigger than just the forums - there are many things we could do with it - but it needs to be done in a way that everyone feels comfortable with, and with a reasonably sustainable revenue stream.

Cheers,
Shaun


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## blazed (4 Aug 2009)

TheDoctor said:


> And you still don't know better than to buy a bike at Halfords???



They are the only place which sell Boardman bikes unless you buy second hand but i have bought so much stuff from there and never had many problems. 



Will1985 said:


> Slight problem in your calculations there blazed - CC averages about 700 member visits a day, added to all of the guests who come in from searches makes maybe 1500 unique daily visitors. That is vastly different from your filthy smut empire which clearly has a much broader audience than cycling. Scale your figures down, and CC might go for £1500-2000.
> 
> The beauty of this forum as repeated many times is the distinct lack of advertising, no matter how obtrusive.



No it would go for more than that, a site i sold a few years ago healthadel.com, was nothing special received maybe 100 uniques a day tops for nearly a grand. The reason it had a lot of unique content, just like this site. If the buyer wanted there was a good base to work from. I used to see apparent small forums going all the time for good sums of money, right now isnt the best time to sell but i would buy for £1500/£2000 in a heartbeat.

With porn you are selling a membership to a site/dating/webcams for say $30/month and taking a percentage of the sale, when you sell a bike you are selling something a lot more valuable the potential for bigger commissions are there but im sure a lot of manufactures would be happy to sponsor promotions on this forum on a flat rate basis. The advertising doesnt have to be obtrusive at all and could be beneficial to everyone. Also comparing to adult again, this sites users will all be prepared to get their wallets out and buy, whether a bike or accessory, the average porn site is full of free surfers and not prepared to do so.


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## Dan B (4 Aug 2009)

blazed said:


> the adult online industry is in the toilet at the moment.


That would be what they call "scat", then.


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## mangaman (4 Aug 2009)

simon_brooke said:


> I would have thought that a cyclechat shop selling nice cycling kit and other things that people might buy would be a better thing. Something like this. You could also ask for a voluntary subscription - some of us could afford to pay and some of us probably would. It would have not to be compulsory and probably the only thing it would get you would be a little badge under your avatar saying 'subscriber' - but it's clear that cyclechat is an important resource for quite a few people, and we're not all broke.



This is what we did - seemed to work : the Blue Peter style Totaliser filled up.

I don't like the idea of a badge saying subscriber though - it should all be anonymous as a lot of people can't afford to give, and it might end with people perceiving "subscribers" getting preferential treatment from Mods.


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## TheDoctor (4 Aug 2009)

mangaman said:


> This is what we did - seemed to work : the Blue Peter style Totaliser filled up.
> 
> I don't like the idea of a badge saying subscriber though - it should all be anonymous as a lot of people can't afford to give, and it might end with people* perceiving "subscribers" getting preferential treatment from Mods.[/*QUOTE]
> 
> ...


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