WatchPatrick, I understand you are trying to generate revenue from the site. But why do you need at least $3000/mo to do newslinks? How much time of yours does it take to compile them?
Maybe you could get people to pay $1-$4 a month and generate some revenue. But $30 a month for newslinks? And people think real estate prices are high...
If you get 100 subscribers and shutdown the newslinks from everyone else, this site will dwindle quickly.
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elliemae's website
Patrick has been running this site for years, for free. Gets donations, but that's it. He runs no obnoxious ads, and yet he spends a chunk of time on the site that might otherwise be spent working.
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Menlo Park, CA
Yearly, that's $36K, which is not all that much money. It takes about 4 hours a night to do a good job at it, plus the sysadmin stuff. If you got the NY Times each day, that's $20/week, and then they get more money than that much again from advertising, which I don't have (except for a trivial ad which makes $1/day for me). Or look at what people spend on the coffee they drink while reading the newslinks.
I did have subscribers at $5/month back in 2006-2007, but everyone who pays anything at all feels entitled to quite a bit of customer service, so I swore I'd never charge that little again.
I've used up about 3.5 years of my life doing this now, for a net loss. I have less money than when I started, just because of this site. It was fun, because I'm on a mission and believe in the message, and thousands of people have written over that time to say how much the site has helped them, but that doesn't pay the bills.
So I tried letting the users generate the links to liberate myself from the nightly grind, but then I got complaints that it's not very good. True, it's not, but it was free. You can have free, or good, but not both.
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Patrick, it sounds like what you need is to get a job and move your family to a place in which you can actually afford to live. Menlo Park isn't on that list.
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I can get a job and then afford to live here, but I can't do that and do the newslinks.
I like it here and I want to stay, but I'm competing for living space with fairly rich employees of websites that actually make a lot of money, or that have a lot of investment money. I could bike over to Google or to Facebook. I could become one of those employees and give up my own thing, or I can see if some of the people who complain about the quality of user-generated links will pay for quality.
I think I know the answer already, and it's all OK. The forum is doing well, and I think that's probably the future of the site.
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I was afraid I couldn't afford Danville but an opportunity came up that we simply could not ignore. That's the only reason we bought.
http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson082012.html
Read this if you haven't already. There's no politically correct haze with VDH. It's straight down the middle.
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Patrick says
One of my favorite greasy spoons had a sign that said "You can have it good, cheap, or fast. Choose two", so true.
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rootvg says
interesting read. welcome to the bifurcated aMerica, where the politically privileged enjoy a quality of life greater then that which they put into the system, all the while crying about how they need to "help" those that they are pillaging. A collapse of the system would be the simplest and greatest equalizer
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errc says
Yes, that's a good way to put it. This is an overgeneralization, but here's the far left and right:
Wealthy leftist rent-seeker, standing on throat of manual laborer: "I'm trying to protect you from exploitation!"
Poor right-winger, with throat being crushed by unproductive rent-seeker above: "Damn you libtards! If you dare move your foot from my throat I'm going to cut your taxes! That will show you!"
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Los Angeles, CA
Why dont you just use canned forum software.
Does it really make sense to hand code all this mess and the result is the same? Only reason is programmer's ego.
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It's not ego as much as the power to make the software do what I want.
I did start out with canned forum software (Wordpress), but as I ran into more and more things that it didn't do, and found out all the shit it did to that I hated, it morphed into my own thing.
I'm grateful to Wordpress for the kickstart, but there's no need to switch to any canned thing now.
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True, you have custom forum software now might as well keep it.
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Patrick says
this seems to assume that taxes are the protection FOR the poor laborer, when in fact, they are the foot on their throat. Taxes take from the productive and give power to those that seek control.
“You compare the nation to a parched piece of land and the tax to a life-giving rain. So be it. But you should also ask yourself where this rain comes from, and whether it is not precisely the tax that draws the moisture from the soil and dries it up. You should also ask yourself further whether the soil receives more of this precious water from the rain than it loses by the evaporation?”
― Frédéric Bastiat
“The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”
― Frédéric Bastiat
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Rents are taxes and taxes are rents.
The very wealthy tax the public via their non-productive ownership of land, and also other natural resources which they did not create, like radio spectrum and certain forms of IP.
The best solution is a single tax -- a tax on rents.
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Emeryville, CA
Have you ever though about using Wildcat! BBS?
:)
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Wow, that's ancient.
Never thought of it since I don't do Windows, but I started out with similar things on Mac and Linux. Used to read usenet news each night back in 1992 or so.
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Patrick,
It seems to me the death of the website as we know it (if you don't want to consider publicity). Some business models are not meant to be. I'm not going to pay $30/month for the links.
Thanks for all these years of generous dedication.
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You're welcome.
It's all fine since either I get paying subscribers, or I get the free time to do other things and a nice response to the dozens of people who complained, namely "Well, you weren't willing to pay for it."
Either way, the forum will continue, I'll sell my upcoming book, and have more time to work on new services, like a list of all the paperwork you need to make an offer or to sell a house in California without an agent.