Richmond, VA
Quoted from Wolfmarsh:Here's my take on premium accounts.
At some point in every successful site's lifecycle, the resources demanded by the site start exceeding some barrier that makes it become an increasing burden to run. Resources aren't just disk and bandwidth. The time of people working on the site is a resource as well.
Pinside continues to grow pretty steadily, and that comes with some heavy choices about monetizing the site. It seems like Robin is giving a lot of options on ways to support this site, and I plan to make use of them.
Running the entire range from people who never donate to people who will purchase premium accounts, everyone will still have access to the same information, but some people may have a slightly different user experience based on tier. That's pretty typical in the SaaS world today.
To expand on this shortly..... To those that suggest that advertising would be a simple 'silver-bullet' solution to covering costs for Pinside; this is seldom true IME. Advertising systems require more maintenance and managing than the revenue system can generate in most cases. You need a tremendous number of eyeballs to make money. Advertising systems are often an avenue for drive-by-malware attacks.
Pinside will have a difficult path through this area of growth no matter what decisions they make. Perhaps they feel that this experiment is a safer option forward that the alternatives they have explored. I wish them the best as I know these things are not easy to pull off successfully.
