RMweb Gold - a new premium membership

[Regularity]

I followed the link (labelled as CLICK HERE) in your first post, Andy, and it took me to “World of Railways”. No mention on there of RMWeb Gold, or if there is, it was not obvious. 

Apologies if a more correct link has been posted in the thread, but I am loathe to wade through 23 pages of 25 posts each to find it.

 

[SForrest10]

On 29/04/2021 at 21:09, Regularity said:

I followed the link (labelled as CLICK HERE) in your first post, Andy, and it took me to “World of Railways”. No mention on there of RMWeb Gold, or if there is, it was not obvious. 

Apologies if a more correct link has been posted in the thread, but I am loathe to wade through 23 pages of 25 posts each to find it.

 

Exactly the same problem here. I had a look through the site and no mention of RMWeb gold.

It was there previously but has disappeared.

Steven

[fiftyfour fiftyfour]

Hmmm. "Pay us £60 a year or you won't be able to read the forum at all because the top 30% of your screen will be taken up by an advert and now the right hand 40% of the remaining screen has a bandwidth sucking video advert everytime you click to a new page". It is a business model I suppose, seriously reduces my visits to the site and I hope the advertisers notice that....

 

[08221]

A fiver a month is a small price to pay for access to a site which is not only full of useful modelling advice, but has also been a lifeline socially for some of us throughout the pandemic.

[AY Mod]

On 02/05/2021 at 22:29, SForrest10 said:

Exactly the same problem here. I had a look through the site and no mention of RMWeb gold.

It was there previously but has disappeared.

Steven

 

The link was an old one as a new sign-up process is in place following the addition of more benefits. The link has been amended and you should end up here https://www.world-of-railways.co.uk/membership

[AY Mod]

21 minutes ago, fiftyfour fiftyfour said:

Hmmm. "Pay us £60 a year or you won't be able to read the forum at all because the top 30% of your screen will be taken up by an advert and now the right hand 40% of the remaining screen has a bandwidth sucking video advert everytime you click to a new page". It is a business model I suppose, seriously reduces my visits to the site and I hope the advertisers notice that....

 

OK; how much would you feel comfortable paying to have ad-free access?

[polybear]

So about the same price as a print subscription to BRM every year.  I know which is the most informative......

[fiftyfour fiftyfour]

3 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

 

OK; how much would you feel comfortable paying to have ad-free access?

I'd pay £10 a year. How much would everyone have to pay to have the site ad free? The new addition is VERY intrusive!!

[uax6]

3 minutes ago, fiftyfour fiftyfour said:

I'd pay £10 a year. How much would everyone have to pay to have the site ad free? The new addition is VERY intrusive!!

My guess is much, much more than a tenner a year! 

The internet is a very expensive place to be, and that's not just monetary, its also environmentally too.

 

Andy G

[Regularity]

Ah bless.

We have come a long way since irregular appeals for donations had to be made to pay for the hosting of RMWeb.

 

I for one don’t want to go back to then.

[AY Mod]

20 minutes ago, uax6 said:

The internet is a very expensive place to be ... its also environmentally too.

 

I'm pleased someone else is mindful of this too. Beyond the 'internet is free' mindset there is a widespread ignorance of the resources it uses; Facebook with server farms in the Arctic Circle; an abundance of power requirements to stream movies onto the telly, electrically charged clouds, satellites that will one day be placed over every body on the planet (they get up there with fairy dust of course) and so on. It's a hidden polluter and it'll become a priority problem at some point.

[t-b-g]

1 hour ago, AY Mod said:

 

OK; how much would you feel comfortable paying to have ad-free access?

 

An interesting question Andy. Of course most of us have no notion at all of the costs involved in running the forum, or how many would fall by the wayside if any payment was involved. We also don't know how much per member the advertising revenue raises.

 

Going by how much I pay to be a member of some railway organisations, such as the EMGS and the GOG, I would have thought that something around £12-£15 per year would be a reasonable amount for a stand alone forum subscription.

 

It is a difficult job, finding a figure that will give what is needed to fund the forum but not put too many people off and I think anything higher than that might become a deterrent to many. I suppose that if a number of people who are not contributing to the running costs of the forum fall by the wayside then it may not be seen as a major problem. Having a smaller membership but on a better financial footing might be a good thing. 

 

It would be interesting to hear the number worked from your side of things, along the lines of how much it would need to be to replace the advertising revenue.

 

That might tell us whether it can be done for a realistic amount or not. 

[AY Mod]

7 minutes ago, t-b-g said:

I would have thought that something around £12-£15 per year would be a reasonable amount for a stand alone forum subscription.

 

It is a difficult job, finding a figure that will give what is needed to fund the forum but not put too many people off and I think anything higher than that might become a deterrent to many. I suppose that if a number of people who are not contributing to the running costs of the forum fall by the wayside then it may not be seen as a major problem. Having a smaller membership but on a better financial footing might be a good thing. 

 

It would be interesting to hear the number worked from your side of things, along the lines of how much it would need to be to replace the advertising revenue.

 

That might tell us whether it can be done for a realistic amount or not. 

 

I don't think you're too far off the mark Tony but we'd have to do a lot of number-crunching to get the right figure and balance. This is why there's a lot of testing going on to determine values and behaviour.

[Regularity]

In the late noughties, I helped a couple of friends to set up a forum, using a host site.

 

It was an interesting experience and it took up a lot of my "spare time" for a couple of weeks - I was soon glad to be rid of it, but I did write an introduction about the required etiquette, which other people have tried to pass off as their own, despite numerous people not actually reading it. The fun was in setting it up, less so in running it as system administrator. (Many years ago, I did spend a few months on a previous incarnation of RMWeb as a moderator, which was nowhere near the same thing.)

 

Anyway, the cost to us for a hosted solution (with rather limited technical support) for what was fairly basic compared to what we have here was £20 per month, and several hours per week!

 

I happily pay for Gold access not so much for what I get out of RMWeb, but because of the access to BRM, NGW, Traction, etc. I don't have to browse in the local newsagent's to see if, maybe, there is one article which interests me. I can do that without leaving the comfort of my own home. To me, the Gold Access is a bonus, but not the incentive. 

 

[MarkSG]

Just for comparison, I've been doing some calculations based on advertising revenue and visitor numbers to one of my own websites. If every regular visitor was to pay me just £1 a year, that would broadly replace the advertising revenue (well, actually they'd need to pay me  £1.02 a year to replace the advertising, but that's close enough to a quid not to be worth quibbling over). Or, to put it another way, if I charged a tenner a year for an ad-free experience, I'd only need 10% of my regular visitors to sign up in order to make it profitable (as the rest would, of course, still be seeing ads). In fact, any number of people paying a tenner a year would be profitable, as they would each be worth £8.98 to me (that's their tenner a year minus the £1.02 ad revenue that I'd otherwise expect them to generate).

 

So, why don't I do it?

 

Well, for a start, there's currently no incentive for anyone at all to pay me a tenner a year just for an ad-free experience, as if all they want is an ad-free experience they can simply install an adblocker. So I'd have to offer them something above and beyond an ad free experience, some form of additional content or additional privileges. And I'd need to put in a fair amount of work to offer that. And then, once I've got people paying a tenner a year, I then have a contractual obligation to them that currently doesn't exist. At the moment, if the site is offline, then I'm the only one who really suffers as it's my ad revenue that isn't coming in. But if people are paying for it and it's offline, then I have to provide them with some recompense, possibly a refund for offline time. I also have to be available to deal with customer service queries from people who are having problems with their payment, or are still getting ads even after they've paid, or are having issues with whatever thing I'm providing them as an incentive to subscribe. Or whatever. That will all take time, too.

 

The point is that charging for access to a website, while it will generate additional revenue, will also increase costs. So the fee you charge has to not only cover the cost of lost advertising revenue from each subscriber, but also the administration time and effort dealing with their subscription as well as the costs of providing whatever additional incentives you are offering them. If the fee is too low, then it may actually make a loss once the costs of the added administrative burden and the additional incentives are taken into account. But if the fee is too high, in relation to the perceived benefit of the additional incentives, then very few people will take you up on it, and all the work you put into setting it up will be wasted.

 

The real point here is that, when considering whether to offer a ad-free subscription option for a website, the question that matters isn't "How much do I need to charge in order to make up for lost ad revenue?", it's "How much do I need to charge in order to cover the administrative costs and pay for all the things I need to offer subscribers in order to persuade them to sign up instead of just using an adblocker?". And you can't answer that without knowing how much all these additional things cost. You can't go by ad revenue alone.

[Barnaby]

I haven't read every post on here but I've not seen mention of who owns the forum content?

Would any access to the content freely given need an agreement with the post provider, would each post provider receive a payment for such posted work if the site was charging for its use?

 

This site was a free site and all members give their input freely now the "site" is looking to refund itself to pay for the running cost.  This may require the site to produce viewable information of accounts showing costings.

 

For me if the intrusion of ads becomes too much I can always visit less frequently which would seem to diminish the reward made from having the ads in the first place.

I do notice other Modelling forums where there is no charge and not much interference by ads either.  They also have many of the same people from here who make similar posts on them.

 

I will give careful thought & consideration to any request for a paid membership and how that will personally affect me.

Status quo works for me.

 

Best

 

 

 

[MarkSG]

1 minute ago, Barnaby said:

I haven't read every post on here but I've not seen mention of who owns the forum content?

Would any access to the content freely given need an agreement with the post provider, would each post provider receive a payment for such posted work if the site was charging for its use?

 

The general rule of thumb for user-generated content (UGC) on websites is that the creator owns the copyright in what they post, but they grant the website operater a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to publish it. So the site doesn't have to pay you, and once you've posted it you have no right to retract it or insist that the site deletes it. (Many forums do have the ability for users to edit or delete their own posts, but there's no legal obligation for them to do so).

 

That's sufficiently common that it may well be considered an implied term, but, if not, it's easy enough to add to the site's Ts&Cs that you have to agree to when creating an account,

[fiftyfour fiftyfour]

40,749 members and 40,749 different ways of interacting with the site. I drop in every few days to see what's newly released or newly announced covering the WR in the 1980s or 1990s, or to ask or react to the occasional question. If everyone paid £10 a year and the forum still lost money with income of £407,000 it's time to change servers!

[MarkSG]

1 minute ago, fiftyfour fiftyfour said:

 If everyone paid £10 a year and the forum still lost money with income of £407,000 it's time to change servers!

 

The biggest overhead of running a professional website isn't hosting costs, it's staff costs.

 

If a website is just a hobby, and the person running it has a full-time job, then all that really matters for the website is getting enough revenue to cover hosting costs. But if the site is being run as part of a business, with full-time (or even part-time) staff looking after it, then it has to generate enough revenue to pay them. Because time doesn't come for free unless you're relying on volunteers. 

[Dava]

3 hours ago, AY Mod said:

 

I don't think you're too far off the mark Tony but we'd have to do a lot of number-crunching to get the right figure and balance. This is why there's a lot of testing going on to determine values and behaviour.

You could put up a simple poll with 3-5 price options to test levels of price sensitivity & perceptions of value for money.
 

Dava

[Phil Parker]

9 minutes ago, Dava said:

You could put up a simple poll with 3-5 price options to test levels of price sensitivity & perceptions of value for money.
 

Dava

 

Not sure that would help much - people tell lies. There are plenty who will tell you they will happily pay extra taxes for the NHS, look after granny etc., but when in the privacy of the polling booth, vote for the lowest taxes possible. Opinion pollsters have been trying to counteract this for many years at election time.

[MarkSG]

8 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

Not sure that would help much - people tell lies. There are plenty who will tell you they will happily pay extra taxes for the NHS, look after granny etc., but when in the privacy of the polling booth, vote for the lowest taxes possible. Opinion pollsters have been trying to counteract this for many years at election time.

 

Also, even if people are accurate and honest in their statement of perception, it doesn't necesarily tell you what they will actually do. I think that £20 is a reasonable price for a typical OO gauge wagon, and maybe £30 for a good one. But that doesn't mean I'm actually going to buy one. Price is only one of a number of factors that goes into a purchase decision. Even something that's well within what I can afford to pay and am willing to pay isn't going to be paid if I don't want the product on offer.

[Chris M]

Those running the site are entitled to run the site how they think is best for them. I’m grateful for all the work and finding out into this forum by Warner’s and its employees. 
I currently visit this forum a lot but I don’t it’s not Important enough to me to pay for gold membership. I had noticed the adverts becoming more of a pain. I expect that as ads increase my visits will reduce and that’s ok. It’s been great having access to all the information here for free but, being realistic, you can’t expect to get something for nothing for ever.

[Barnaby]

If a charge to visit is made and I take it up I will then expect to have some say in its running or direction other than to just go or stay. 

 

I still have my saved copies of the free MI 1 to 5 that Andy produced,  they still get a read and are very good.

[phil-b259]

3 hours ago, MarkSG said:

 

Well, for a start, there's currently no incentive for anyone at all to pay me a tenner a year just for an ad-free experience, as if all they want is an ad-free experience they can simply install an adblocker.

 

Adblockers are becoming increasingly ineffective - advertisers are not stupid and will not pay good money to website owners for adds nobody will see!

 

The more add- blocking features are rolled out and interoperated into internet browsers / operating systems the more intrusive and difficult adds have to be.

 

So while I can put up with traditional adverts - the new pop ups etc are considerably more annoying and a mini-subscription service (without all the other stuff Gold membership has) that just removes them so would be a significant attraction given the usefulness and friendliness of the forum -  and worth £10-£15 a year in my opinion.

 

As others have touched on NOTHING in life is free - and its about time people faced up to paying for things rather than pretending easily blocked advertising can bankroll everything.