User Survey

[Luke]

******Update 04/05/2005**********

The survey is now completed. Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate. We received 141 responses. The results will be made available in the near future.

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As most of you are aware we recently upgraded to a new ISP. We had to do this because we had outgrown our smaller ISP. As you can tell the website is now MUCH, MUCH faster. However, when we moved to our new ISP, the costs associated with this site went up exponentially.

We have looked into various options for fund raising for the site and have decided we would really like to avoid “selling out” to many of the more obnoxious money makers available to websites. As spring approaches we are trying to find ways to promote our website and gain advertisers. To continue to maintain this site at its current level and keep it free for all of our users, we need a little assistance.

If you would please take a couple of minutes and answer the following survey it would help us tremendously as we try to build demographics for the website so we can entice additional advertisers.

The survey is anonymous and will not be tied to you or your user account in any way.
Planet Nautique Survey

Thanks!

[Grant_West]

Just wondering how much $ are we talking I will donate to help keep the site, I know you guys spend loots of time keeping things running ,mabey if everyone threw in some extra $ it could work out

[Luke]

Thanks for the offer Grant. We’ll never turn down user contributions! In fact we’ve had numerous users contribute money to the site. We really appreciate those contributions! It would be great if we could fund the entire site based on user contributions, unfortunately that just isn’t a realistic goal.

We’d like to keep the site free to all users and we don’t want users to feel pressured to contribute as we’d lose entirely too many valuable opinions and input. That’s not the direction I want to see this site moving in.

We’ve looked at various website applications like Google Adsense, but feel programs like that would add clutter and annoyances to the website. So ultimately we just need to find additional advertisers who can provide some dependable income. So we’re starting by gathering some demographics with the survey above.

[Mikeski]

Hi Luke,

I have tried to go through your paypal checkout a couple times and for some reason it doesn't work for me. Can you give me a paypal ID so I can send you guys some money?

Mikeski

[Luke]

Our ID is: PlanetNautique.com

[gotwake]

The improvement on speed is very noticable! Keep up the great job. If you can post it, what is the monthly cost? Perhaps you can have monthly sponsors? "This month brought to you by, "Gotwake" or such and such dealership. Just a thought-

[gotwake]

By the way, tried to make a donation (by credit card) and the board came up with this message: Your payment session has expired. To complete this transaction, you will need to enter your information again.

I typed it the 2nd and 3rd time as fast as I could. Still came up with the error...

[NautiqueJeff]

Yeah, we've been hearing that the donations system isn't working so well right now. We're currently looking into the problem. Thanks for trying!

EDIT: I have found the problem with the donations system. The PayPal site doesn't work well when it opens within another website, like we had it doing. I have changed the link so that it opens properly now, and I was able to make a test donation. Thanks for pointing out the problem!

[Mikeski]

Yep, It's fixed, works like a charm.

[redelf75]

Luke & Jeff,

Is there any reason not to tell us how much money you need to keep Planet afloat? Luke says that membership fees are not going to be even close but I find that hard to believe. But, if that's the case, you guys must be far in the red already.

You have a decent amount of dedicated members and I don't think they want to see their favorite forum go under or see either of you in the poor house.

I personally would like to avoid ads if possible and would like to explore all other possibilities first.

Perhaps you will consider another poll. Why don't you ask the members if they would pay a memebrship fee to gain access to certain features. For example, you must be at least a Bronze memeber if you want to post a poll. Or if you login more than once a week you have to be a Silver member.

Afterall, it's only the price of one tank of gas...

[AirNautique211]

Guys there may be other longterm goals of the sight by Jeff and Luke that require some descretionary measures be taken. If we want to contribute, we should and let the guys keep plugging away. This is a great sight and they have done a great job keeping our interests in mind. Let's keep that way, fill out the survey and help them without getting into their business.

Just my opinion.

[Luke]

We won’t be charging members to access the site or any areas of the site. I don’t feel that business model works for message boards. Just to put it in perspective, we have 1277 registered users. Out of all of those users, only 84 people have taken the user survey. That’s roughly 15%. And that’s just to help us out by answering a few questions.

There will hopefully be more advertisements in the not too distant future. This is something that really can’t be avoided. We will try to add them tactfully so they aren’t obnoxious. We’ve looked at other options, and advertisements that we control are typically the least intrusive. If you’re interested in what it costs to run this site, feel free to search around online; you’ll quickly find that with dedicated hosting solutions you get what you pay for. And that is just the cost of bandwidth. On our old ISP we could fund the site for an entire year compared to what it now costs for 2 months. We’ve simply outgrown the smaller options. Which is a good thing.

We really appreciate user contributions, and while they help to defray the cost, they certainly don’t provide enough to fund this site on a permanent basis.

[AbunDiga909]

How about asking CC to fund for at least some of it. I don't think it would be any sweat off their backs. CC has been known for paying for booths at shows, where MC makes the dealer pay for the booth. I don't think CC is the company that would want their site like this to have to resort to adds and donations to stay a live.

Also about the number of users on the site, I was taking a look through the memberlist, and I found that only about 150 members have contributed more than 10 posts, and only about 450 members have posted any posts. There are a lot of people that find the site, regisiter, and rarely check back.

Is there a way to find out how many active users are on the site...

[skinautique]

Abundiga,
I think the problem you run into with CC donating to the site is the possibility that they will want to have more control over the site. MBO.com had a similar dilemma and decided to stay away from it.

[redelf75]

Luke, thanks for sharing that with us. We certainly appreciate the faster bandwith, it make all the difference.

Let us know if we can help with the sponsors.