Expansion Mansion just went from free to pay for membership. Thoughts?
expansion mansion
Sat, 06/26/2010 - 18:10
#1
oscar4111
expansion mansion
Sat, 06/26/2010 - 18:58
#3
doubleintegral
The forum is still free.
Sat, 06/26/2010 - 23:20
#4
flationable
BlankSlate wrote:
It must be inflation.
/drumriff
He'll be here all week, ladies and gentlemen! :lol:
Sun, 06/27/2010 - 04:35
#5
airtankgirl5
I'm of varying opinions. And neither one of them is in any way meant to bash on Bambi.
1. I haven't seen much updated content at EM in quite a while now, so I'm leery of a charge for what appears to be nothing.
2. However, I'm also a professional businesswoman, I know that hosting a site isn't free either, so some cost should reasonably be borne by it's customers.
So, ultimately, I suppose I'll just stay off EM until I get evidence of some good and regular content.
Sun, 06/27/2010 - 04:58
#6
Another good site gone basically. You absolutely have to pay for anything good in this world thats slowly going under. I guess im not getting on expansion mansion anymore :(
Sun, 06/27/2010 - 18:26
#7
doubleintegral
Once again, THE FORUM IS STILL FREE and there are plenty of people that share stuff there.
It's your prerogative to not pay to join the EM. I'm not either, for the exact same reasons you mentioned. But the forum is still there.
Sun, 06/27/2010 - 20:18
#8
Double im sorry I didnt see your last post. The forums are free as you said. I suppose thats good news
Sun, 06/27/2010 - 20:44
#9
Anytime you have to pay for something you used to get for free is a dark day.
That said, I didn't frequent EM that much anyway cuz most of their stuff doesn't appeal to me.
Mon, 06/28/2010 - 14:48
#10
As far as I can see the site's undergone a big transformation. From what I remember (I haven't really been on EM much in years) it was really just an archive of random content that you could usually find elsewhere (quite often in places where the artist/creator was still active)
For the poeple who still want to provide content for free then there are other places they can go (here would be a good start), while for those who think their content is good enough to charge for, EM gives them a platform to do it.
If the content is regular and high quality then people will pay for it, if not then the site will finally implode once and for all.
Mon, 06/28/2010 - 21:53
#11
Yousuck wrote:
Anytime you have to pay for something you used to get for free is a dark day.That said, I didn't frequent EM that much anyway cuz most of their stuff doesn't appeal to me.
Second
Mon, 06/28/2010 - 23:05
#12
The real indicator is that you must register for the forum merely to read anything. Most forums I've seen allow visitors to read, and register only if they wish to post. That's like, oh I dunno, passing a law without reading the bill first, and telling people no one knows how it will work until implemented. Put your name to it first.
Tue, 06/29/2010 - 04:24
#13
why doesn't the site have a donate button if it needs money that badly? Having membership to get content that a year or so older is not that smart, all of that content is save on peoples hard drives and not hard to get else where. With a donate button if you don't have the payment for next month turn off the server for a day or 2 turn it back on and say that you need the money. The membership thing would have been good to use a year ago when the site had three women who did inflation. two of them disappeared and the other not inflating anymore.
Tue, 06/29/2010 - 06:02
#14
Inflate123
Bandwidth is not free, so I never blame anybody for charging for their website. Especially one with a forum frequented by a lot of people -- forums are massive traffic platforms, which is great if you are selling ads but a nightmare if you're not. And for a while, Bambi ran at least three forums.
Interesting that there's a list of sites where the content and the content of their affiliates is not allowed. I'm sure they have their business reasons.
http://expansionmansion.com/forum/ra.php
Tue, 06/29/2010 - 09:45
#15
MikeydCT wrote:
why doesn't the site have a donate button if it needs money that badly? Having membership to get content that a year or so older is not that smart, all of that content is save on peoples hard drives and not hard to get else where
I think you're confused by what's happened here. EM in it's old form is dead. It died before when the previous owner couldn't afford to keep it running and Bambi took it over. Anyone who thought she was doing it as an act of charity has been deluding themselves. why take over something like that if you don't have plans to make money from it. A donate button might pay for your server costs but it certainly doesn't cover time spent working on the site or give any incentives for new content.
As you rightly say, no-one is going to willingly pay money for old content that used to be free. What exists now is a paysite that is designed to attract new content providers who will get paid for the higher quality content they produce to attract new punters. If you're not willing to pay money for your expansion porn then you're not part of EM's target demographic.
Bambi certainly isn't the bad guy in this. At the end of the day she's just someone who's trying to make her living in a niche market.
Wed, 06/30/2010 - 02:45
#16
doubleintegral
BlankSlate wrote:
The real indicator is that you must register for the forum merely to read anything. Most forums I've seen allow visitors to read, and register only if they wish to post. That's like, oh I dunno, passing a law without reading the bill first, and telling people no one knows how it will work until implemented. Put your name to it first.
Thanks for bringing politics into the discussion. No really, that's JUST what this forum needed. It wasn't even an adequate analogy.
The forums are locked to the public for two reasons: to reduce traffic (and thus reduce bandwidth costs) and to prevent the forums from being indexed by Google, Bing, etc. (which also costs bandwidth). Anyone who's ever run a web site and checked their stats knows that Google's search engine bots are ALWAYS crawling all over your web site.
Inflate123 wrote:
Interesting that there's a list of sites where the content and the content of their affiliates is not allowed. I'm sure they have their business reasons.
The reason is that users were posting those sites' copyrighted material on the forum and/or in the gallery. Those sites demanded that their material be removed, and EM did so because it didn't want to get sued.
There was a photographer chick who posted a ton of her own pregnancy pics on her Flickr account back in like 2006. Her pics found their way to EM multiple times over the next couple of years, until she found out (last year I think) and wanted them taken down. On her photostream she even had a pic of a settlement check she received for going after someone that used her photos without permission. We had to search through every forum post and every gallery pic to remove her stuff. It was a pain in the ass, but within her rights to pursue the action and within Bambi's best interest to comply.
So there you have it.
Wed, 06/30/2010 - 21:37
#17
Let's look at this in another light. Just Picking a somehat plausable number, let's say that 10,000 people visit the site regularly. Then the site owner says I can make some money on this and charges a monthy fee of 6 or 7 dollars (I don't remember the exact amount). By doing this act, the owner will lose anywhere from 60% to 90% of it's 10,000 regular visitors. However, now the owner has somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 people signed up for the monthly fee. Doing the simple math on this, the site owner has just made anywhere from 6,000 to 28,000 dollars in one month. That is a shit load of money right there. Even at the low end, if this was your main job, you would be making $72,000 per year which is a very comfortable income. All I'm saying is that this is entrepreneurship at it's best. Make content free to rope in thousands of viewers then start charging so that te core members stay and the lesser ones fall away. Because of the high volume of people a good thousand or so would remain to pay the bills. It's a good scheme if ya ask me.
Thu, 07/01/2010 - 02:05
#18
doubleintegral
EM is not losing 60-90% of its users because THE FORUMS ARE STILL FREE.
Also, your $72k/year number is way off base. Mostly because I don't think EM's user base is large enough to have 1000 subscribers, but also because that number also assumes that Bambi has no operating expenses related to running EM. She has a webmaster that she paid to design the new site. There are costs associated with her props for videos and photoshoots. And then there's the hosting costs, and possibly even additional bandwidth charges.
In short, EM was undoubtedly a losing venture for Bambi before she started the member's area. It may still be a losing venture, but I can't blame her for trying to recoup some of her costs.
Fri, 07/02/2010 - 02:40
#19
Inflate123
Quote:
Inflate123 wrote:
Interesting that there's a list of sites where the content and the content of their affiliates is not allowed. I'm sure they have their business reasons.The reason is that users were posting those sites' copyrighted material on the forum and/or in the gallery. Those sites demanded that their material be removed, and EM did so because it didn't want to get sued.
Sounds like a darn good reason to me.
Fri, 07/02/2010 - 02:47
#20
Inflate123
doubleintegral wrote:
In short, EM was undoubtedly a losing venture for Bambi before she started the member's area. It may still be a losing venture, but I can't blame her for trying to recoup some of her costs.
I often suspect that anybody who says "everything on the internet should be free" has never actually tried to provide anything on the internet for free. Even if you write a story or morph a photo, someone is paying for the server space to store it and the bandwidth to deliver it. Something might be free to the end user, but it sure isn't free to the provider.
It must be inflation.