There are no for sale threads without market ads linked to them, or if there are (fairly uncommon), it's not really allowed/preferred

Whenever a market ad is made you have an option to have it post a thread for you which is where all of the ones you see come from unless they're like a "coming soon" post or "pre-order" post, etc.

Does this answer your question?

You do receive a discount fee for a sale if you are a + member. So if I sell my IM I would pay a fee of $17.75 instead of $25. The discount is not coming off or going toward the $35+ I donated to pinside, but coming off a sale fee if I decided to sell. I bet this works better to keep track of than if I sell 5 games for $____ then I get a free heart + for a year.

I really did not know the fee was so cheap. That $17.75 fee is nothing on a $5000 game put out there to thousands of Pinheads. IMHO.

A lot of folks skip the fee even if it was sold on PS. A lot of folks don't donate any money either. It is not mandatory, but just keep in mind how many gray heats you see. Just a guess, but I don't think the founders of Pinside make a lot of money working on and keeping up this site. My guess is they do it because they love pinball. So I am going to keep donating every year and pay my fee if I sell a game here and not sweat it. Bang for my buck Pinside is at the top of my list.

I think donations from sales should count. I have sold 2 mid priced machines on here and traded one. I made the recommended donation on each one including the machine I traded, but it didn't get counted toward my account as a donation as my heart turned grey shortly after the sales of the machines. Those three sales should have covered me for at least a year. I was pretty disappointed that it didn't count and I haven't donated since. Now if I sell another machine or something in the future I will make the recommended donation because its the right thing to do, but I do feel it should count as a donation to the site.

I suggested a while back some sort of "power seller" deal like ebay used to have. Base it off ratings and sales per month. I've paid nearly $200 in sellers fees for products currently. Not really wanting to donate on top of that myself as well.

It's tough. I like that I can sell on pinside and get access to another market, however how many who bought from us on the site would find our website instead and buy there? Unknown I guess. I will say I absolutely love the new store and glad they went that route to finance the site. I have to imagine that provides a lot more money than donations? Or at least it should soon enough as the marketplace grows and we all buy here.

Selling on Pinside is like fishing in a stocked pond. In regards to fees, a group of people will rarely agree on the details of how much is fair etc. Some level of fee seems reasonable for using up someone else's bandwidth and the fruits of their labor.

Considering that I use Pinside as much as I watch my DIRECTV, Pinside is one heck of a bargain.

The way it's supposed to work, as I understand, is that market ads are only for parts. If you're selling multiples of a mod, it's supposed to be in a shop. Those shops automatically get posted as the ads at the bottom of pages. Fees on items sold through shops are not optional, nor do I think the should be. I don't, however, like the feeling that I'm paying the fees for little benefit when others are opting out of paying them.

I only have luck selling small parts on pinside. I don't flip pins so when I occasionally sell a game it always sells on FB and not pinside. I like to just pay the $35 yearly fee and pass on small parts donation. Anyway if any of my fellow pinsiders want to hit me up a friend request on FB. Just do a search for Scott McDonald. My profile picture is the same as my avatar.

Robin has expressed an interest in revisiting the fee/donation relationship to red hearts and Pinside perks. So I believe a change is coming. I do not have a timeline for the change.

Until then, the only alternative for sellers to convert their paid fees into Red Hearts/RH+ is to open a moderator feedback thread and discuss the situation with Pinside Staff.

Marcus

My heart stays red, and I'm happy to contribute. I've only sold one game with the new system, and I donated. All fine with me really.

I don't see the point of the shops though, what am I getting out of them? I don't care about the ads at the bottom of the page, hell I turn them off, they're irritating. What is the benefit?

robin

No complaints here... you've done a heck of a job in building this community. I am happy to both donate and pay any fair fees associated with items I have sold/may sell.

My sincerest thanks and keep up the good work!

I would actually love to see pinball companies fight over ad space. Sell one single ad spot on the main page to the highest bidder. They are taking more and more money and in my humble opinion, not upping their games to be any better than say, 5 years ago when their machines were THOUSANDS of dollars cheaper. Let Stern and JJ pay for us to enjoy our hobby!

There is nothing wrong with this. Many sites strive to get big enough to generate this kind of income.

a lot of people sell off books on pinside because of the fees. feels like OTT money making scheme, surely the site isn't that expensive to run? but I do love the site

Even if you're right, so what? Robin owns the site and is free to charge whatever he wants. If you don't like that, you're free to post your pins elsewhere-- which currently means dealing with the idiots on craigslist, or getting buried in the recesses of Mr. Pinball.

I'd have no real problem with this in principle, but would be very concerned if some cruddy ad network JS was used that tries to track people all over the web to do it. Also, something like using Facebook logins, etc. would be completely off the reservation.

Personally, I don't think the current fee scheme is out of line at all for the service being provided, though it is the nature of folks that have been trained by Google and Facebook that they should expect "free" things at all times.

I'm guessing from the way you phrased that that you don't actually have any idea what it takes to run a site like this. It's more than just out of pocket costs for servers etc, is your time not worth anything to you? Mine is worth a lot personally, you want to pay me by the hour you'd better have a fat wallet.

Robin, you should just run banner ads if people want to pay you for them. Just make them non-nasty, host and serve them yourself, no scripts and tracking bullshit, and call it a day. That should be good enough for this cottage industry.

Thanks for answering the shop question, makes more sense now. I don't know that it's useful for me, but I'll try and check it out further.

If I'm not mistaken, isn't Pinside a day job now rather than just something on the side?

My issue with shops is that it's a separate system from my web shop which means there are inventory control issues. I can't have a situation where Pinside sells the last cable but my webshop doesn't know. Then there is the issue of common parts not related to a specific machine.

robin have you given any thoughts as to how to resolve the inventory issue? When we last talked; I think you said you were interested in coming up with a spec which we could use to integrate with our webshops. Armed with that spec; and some kind of "test system" I could start writing a php module to work with my eCommerce store.

When we get a pinside order we have an account called "pinside" on our site that we programmed in we can add the order. Helps us track sales for yearly taxes, inventory etc

I for one am in for this. Been requesting it for years so lets do it!

I personally think ads are a great option as long as you are the curator of what is in the rotation. If it's just a random ad network, meh.

On another site I am on, they allow any paid member to buy an ad for $10 per 100,000 views, and they approve ads so it's all relevant and useful.

I would be 100% for this, as a viewer. I use ad-block, so I never see any of the pinside market ads. But something like this, where I knew that (1) I wasn't being tracked, and (2) was relevant to the site, then hell yeah.

I think It's only fair to make some of these fees mandatory, it takes money and time to upkeep a site like this. I'm also ok with banner ads, as it's been stated it's a norm on a lot of other sites. Either way thanks for reminding me to renew my donation.

I've donated over the years and always am honest if I sell a machine here. Sold two premium machines here and was happy to pay the fee. Then just had to renew. That's the last time I'll be contributing here.

Isn't everyone running add blockers and hiding behind a VPN so we wouldn't see the adds anyway?

I will say that I was frustrated when I made a marketplace add "featured" expecting to get the lil' red heart. I saw it as a win/win for me and pinside. come to find out it doesn't qualify. Not the end of the world but it did impact my decision to do it on my following adds. I'd rather annoy everyone and chew up more server space bumping for sale and wanted adds every few days

Actually - I can't believe I am saying this - this is a brilliant idea. Pinside has done more for JJP and Stern, and less for JPoP than their own websites have . Do it robin!!

Uhhh. I am in a similar business as Robin, and I can tell you it would cost me at LEAST half a mil per year to run this site. Plus Robin and co have come up with some of the best ideas I've ever seen for a site like this. It's easy to use, super mobile friendly, pictures are a snap - the shortcuts are well thought out, shops are unobstrusive...
Robin deserves to reap the benefits IMO. The community is a huge part of the site - indeed it wouldn't be valuable without it - but it's a symbiotic relationship. The community already gets the benefit by being able to communicate efficiently. This place kicks ass

I've been running high traffic websites for over 20 years and I can tell it, it costs significantly less than $500K/year to maintain a tiny (ie. sub 1M user) web forum and site.

Are you including five developer salaries in that estimate or something? If so, that's three too many, and the actual bandwidth, storage and compute resource costs to handle a site of this size are a rounding error compared to salaries. Which is why I find the idea that Robin can't offer image support to all users curious - storage of terabytes of data costs pennies a month.

I also like banner ads as long as they aren't intrusive. Just put a simple banner at the top or bottom with an ad.

All pin companies benefit from the discussion here.

Where?

Can't see swapping out one revenue stream (fees) for another (ads). Seems from business strategy it would be too tempting to generate revenue from both.

Yeah, where? Even LRS in azure is $100/mo for 5 TB blob storage.

I guess what I am thinking in the back of my head is. Can we just fund pinside. If we had a donation drive, would something like that work or help. I'm tired of problems. I want solutions. If we could do a fund drive would that help and or how much would we need. Is it even feasable?

I would personally not like to see banners or ads, if possible. I'm just thinking out loud.

I was, I'd suggest want to check your math again. You must have an unbelievable deal on storage space and no costs at all for bandwidth

The "cost" of storage, etc, is irrelevant. It's a simple question of value.

-For a user, like me, do I get enough enjoyment out of Pinside to send a donation every while. Sure.

-For a seller, does Pinside generate more business for you than you would have normally gotten, enough to pay a commission for doing that for you. That's for them to figure out. But if it's not worth it to you, then don't use it. But don't try to use it and then also not pay for it.

I was donating $50 a year to Pinside before RHplus, be for I had a parts company and before I had a separate web store. The value of the information gleaned here is well worth a small annual donation. (Entertainment value is a bonus.) Now I am making decent sales to a targeted audience for damn near nothing. 5% is a bargain even to me. Most of my sales are 7 to 25 bucks. VERY happy with the site and fees.

I think the use of pinball related banner ads is a great idea! I'm also curious why you guys don't collect advertising fees up front from those(non distros/general public) selling pins on here. You could always give a couple free relists with each prepayment or have some of it go to the plus accounts. Its seem as though this would generate more money, make sure everyone is paying their fair share, sellers will get serious about pricing and ad quality and it would cut down on fraud.

Amazon S3. Google Compute Engine. DigitalOcean. Linode.

If you want to save even more money, self host. 4TB drives are less than $200 for consumer models, which are perfectly fine for storing ephemeral stuff like images in PMs at a low read volume.

My bill this month for S3 storage of 13TBs of crappy images is $297, and that's the expensive storage. If you create a NAS using cheap M4 instances with magnetic storage I bet I could get that down even more.

You say you started Pinside while you were still in school - perhaps you're not aware of the various options or don't have experience squeezing every penny out of a startup's budget for hosting. There's plenty of ways to save a ton of cash. I'm happy to offer my services free of charge if you'd like to look at some options to make Pinside run on cheap VMs via horizontal scaling techniques. I literally do this for a living at huge scale - 100,000 concurrent users, 30M active users, 50ms response times.

Pinside has an API. I could work with you on developing some methods to perform simple inventory management functions? If you could PM me your requirements, I can see what can be done.

You already are! Your donation helps fund Pinside

I hear you. I'm re-thinking the current pricing structure to transition along with the site. But some things make that a bit more complex. For example, the red heart currently gives people a discount on the marketplace fees. But if those fee payments would award a red heart, then you would get a discount on a payment creating said discount. Uhm yeah.

So yes, some changes are needed, but I need to figure out the best alternative.

I did actually already implement one change: From now on, all voluntary marketplace fees (the ones for parts and wanted ads) count as donations and will give your account red heart status.

I have a feeling hosting this website on consumer model hard drives is not a good idea...

..Using Amazon is. And we actually did until a few years ago, when we moved to our own storage due to the cost. S3 may be more cost effective nowadays though, I would have to make the calculations again.

We also hosted on Linode for quite a long time, until we ran out of resources vs budget there.

There's some small rounding error happening here

All joking aside, I appreciate that offer. I'm definitely interested in learning more about this, but I currently don't have a lot of time to go and redesign (part of) Pinsides infrastructure. Hosting is not our biggest cost item anymore, time is.

I would like to think forward for our next step up and see if I can go all virtual (VPS) hosted again - it's much more flexible/scalable. Happy to hear your suggestions for the best platform and setup to do this so by all means, send me a PM!

If you decide you want to talk Azure instead of AWS, hit me up.

Also note that Amazon has a Canadian data-centre now as well.

Well, fair enough - to me, based on my monthly spend on AWS, the S3 costs are a rounding error if not *litterally* pennies. If $300/month is a big enough dent that you'd notice then there is definitely ways we can find to save you money.

send me a PM!

Done.

Well if Pinside has "crossed the line," they should mark it zero.

Quick update regarding voluntary marketplace fees (as in: contributing to Pinside when ending a parts or wanted ad on the Pinside Marketplace).

Yesterday I already announced that, from now on, the system should properly recognize all voluntary marketplace fees payments as donations and will award red heart status.

I have now also gone back and awarded red heart status to everyone who made such a contribution in the past 12 months.

So if you suddenly have a red heart next to your name today, that means you were affected by this. Hover over the red heart icon to reveal the date you donated.

That was awesome of you, robin. Cheers!