As for premium content, I think people are thinking of this wrong. For this site, and Jim Kukral’s launch, think of it more as paying monthly to have consulting access. In that respect, it helps show where this is going in my industry.

If Jim Kukral makes you feel like you received 3 hours of personal consulting from him over the course of a year, then I think it could be worth it to spend that $550 per year.

Blogs would have to stop being so sensational, what I like to call the “candy and dessert” posts and start giving people the meat and potatoes of what they want. And as long as the fee was relatively small, say $20/year for all of Gawker Media, I’d probably pay it. Though in that equation, I am paying for content only, unlike my membership system on BrandingDavid.

As for the limitation. I am a member in a few forums, and the paid ones seem to do best with a tight community. I picked the 50 person number based on making sure I would have the time to give personal time and attention to each person. If everyone came and bought a year membership on day one, I would owe 50 hours of consulting, and that is no small feat with my current daily scheduling.

As for expanding it further, while I think the “Dunbar number” would be a cool metric, I also want to take into consideration and each person I add might be in a niche that competes with someone else, and knowing that the information I am giving out will be used to grow online businesses, I don’t want to allow too many people from any one niche into the system, and so a low cap on members is another great way to achieve that. I doubt out of 50 people there will be more than 5 people in any one niche on the forum, meaning that my knowledge can still have huge value and power if enacted.

If I had 150 people, or 1500 people, the power of that information, either in a search engine or advertising sense could be greatly diminished for each member.

I think I have set myself up with a great value proposition, but I want to make sure that each member feels the same way, and so while I’d love to say that I’ll sell 150 membership accounts and too bad for anyone that feels like they are having their toes stepped on in a business or idea sense, I want to do right by each member.

I have a good example of this issue in another paid membership only forum I am in, where one person announced an idea, and not even a month later, another member had done the same thing. It creates a sense of competition that I just don’t like.

The community now posts a lot less than they used to, especially about projects before they are released, meaning that they don’t get feedback before hand, and some, I am sure, have had weaker product and service launches because of it.

While I do like the idea of private online groups, I feel they may be a hard sell to people like me. Someone launched a $47/mth group today – and I can’t imagine what info he’s giving away for $550 a year.

David’s plan at $10/mth is more reasonable – and I’ll be watching carefully to see how that works out – I hope it goes very well.

I do wonder why the limit of 50 people – I think I would aim for 150 – the so-called “Dunbar number” would make the site quite sustainable, and ensure that the community that springs up won’t get so large that people find it unusable.

WTL´s last blog post..A recreational badminton team goes to a tournament.

Bill Deys´s last blog post..Scared Customers

Bill Deys´s last blog post..Scared Customers

Again, to understand why this is happening, you’d have to look at advertising rates, and how quickly they are dropping. I think it was something like 10+% per quarter. If that carries on much longer, you’ll see people close up shop.

But as always, it depends on the goals of both the authors and the readers and what they want from blogs and whatnot.

Look at your favourite blog. Would you pay $5/m to have it continue or would you let it die?

Bill Deys´s last blog post..Scared Customers