Pinkbike engagement and comments on articles will absolutely destroy the numbers here.
Destroy how? We aren't trying to be Pinkbike and PB isn't trying to be a UK print and digital media brand.
PB is the global ruler in terms of traffic and online news and content for mountain bikers. They are not our competition and we are not theirs. They make their money by being the biggest. That's not how we make ours. If I looked at PB and tried to beat them we'd be crushed. We just don't have their money or resources.
On the topic of who clicks the ads - No, they are not mistaken clicks. Here's what would happen if the clicks were mistakes. The clickthrough of that user would result in a bounce. ie. they'd end up on the destination site and quickly leave without making a purchase. That would count against us in the big giant ad algo and the result of that happening a lot would be that the networks would avoid placing ads on our site on the basis that they tend not to generate actual revenue in sales for the advertisers. The fact the eCPM rates don't drop to zero is precisely because the clicks that we generate ARE converting into sales at a high enough rate to keep our reputation and therefore price our site commands in the marketplace auctions relatively high and stable (geopolitics aside). Advertsing works because if it didn't brands wouldn't spend billions on it every year.
Or to misquote someone famous that I'm sure will be corrected here shortly, 'Half of all advertising spend is completely wasted. The trouble is trying to work out which half.'
There's a structure here that us old folk can cope with!!!
Ahhh I miss the old classifieds 😁 now THERE was a structure for us oldies that liked a good old rummage in the middle aisle 😁
While I'm on that subject, has the 'new' classified structure worked for you @Mark? Do you pull in a fair bit of money through it? I never go there at all now but then again if it was the old style we all look back on fondly, and I bought a few things I never knew I needed, you'd still not make a penny from it I suppose unless you charged a nominal fee for listing?
I too loved the simplicity of the old classifieds. That was just a separate forum and it needed careful moderation. It really didn't provide any real mechanism for us to help promote it anywhere because it was a forum and not a classifieds system. Google never recognised it as anything but a forum so stuff posted in it for sale would never surface in any search results for people looking for stuff. Also, it earned us nothing at all. Now it's an actual real classifeds system with the ability to upload images (remember the old system had no facility for that at all) and split things in to categories - it surfaces in search engines as the correct type of thing and it also allows us to create filters that list items for sale across the site in a way that was impossible with the old forum based system. The result is we can now earn some revenue from it - not a lot but it was zero before and it actually gets more traffic and visibility than the old system did - despite what many may say to the contrary. I understand that perception. The old system meant that all conversations between sellers and buyers would happen out in public view. That was npot always a good thing and we suffered from lots of trolling posts to sellers by what we all came to refer to as ad spoilers. ie. people who never had any intention of buying but took joy in pointing out why the seller was taking the piss and charging too much or something or other. That sounds on the surface like it should be a good thing, but it wasn't due to people being arseholes and so actually put people off using the classifieds out of fear of being accused of fraud or something. Now conversations between buyer and seller happen in private. Because those conversations are no longer public the perception is that the classifieds is not as busy as it used to be.
So eatmorepizza your solution is for the site to be entirely funded by the subscribers like me, whilst you browse for free?
Subscribers should get benefits.
There's a magazine, members features, no ads, photo uploads, a like button, discount club etc.
The money I saved on my Garmin watch would easily pay for a few years worth of subs.
Destroy how
Simply in number of views and comments left on their articles/videos/news. Of which they publish far more.
In reply to the guy saying this forum is busier than Pinkbike's. He was comparing STW to Pinkbike. Not me. I know fine you're both very different business'
Having seen the slow demise of my previous internet home (Boards Magazines Forum) I am more than happy to pay for a digital subscription to keep this ship afloat.
God, blast from the past! I came here from boards too (i can only handle 1 forum in my life and this was the only one i found with a similar vibe)
I seem to remember that forum died a death well before the magazine actually closed. Over time it developed a clique of regular posters constantly bickering with each other. Resulting in good regular contributers drifting away and new-comers being put off posting as they were either shot down by a load of know-it-alls or every thread just turned into the same people arguing with each other irrelevant of the topic.
Seems to happen to forums over time.
Also had similar path: trying to get (probably badly written) off the shelf forum sorftware to scale with a real user base or to shoe-horn in new features/ match brand. Run by people as a side project to the main business, having to deal with upgrades and the resulting user demands and complaints whilst balancing the need for ad revenue vs usabilty.
Damn thinking about it, seems like its hard work to run a forum.
Nope. It doesn't. This forum is not quiet. There have been over 2k posts in the last 7 days.
theres been a change in forum behaviours possibly - plenty of posts but maybe not as many thread starters as of yore. I'm quite a rare topic starter even through I post in threads quite frequently. I've apparently started 198 threads (relative to 23,000 posts) over the last 16 years and I'm genuinely shocked that it's that many - thats an average of 7 a year! That seems like loads to me - impossibly many threads. It feels like I've only ever started a dozen or so threads in total - I can think of 3 maybe. I don't think I've started a thread this year.
Some people start quite a lot but there was a time when quite lot of people started a lot of topics and there was also be quite a lot of duplicate thread starting - both accidental and deliberate. A relatively small number of topics to a page compared to now maybe contributed to the feeling that the forums was busier as topics could quickly fall off the front page.
Now the page is longer with more older topics on view so accidentally duplicate topics are less common - but also certain types of conversation have become part of long running mega threads. So from a situation where threads could fall off the front page in less than a day we now have several threads that are over 10 years old still being posted in frequently. Weirdly many of those long-runners seem to have been started by people who no longer seem to post
That difference might be a result of a shift in the actual forum users, or a change in their behaviour (has forum / social media behaviour more broadly shifted?). It could be a page length thing - having more threads on the page reduces multiple thread starts. Could be a moderation thing in that duplicate topics are often lock by the mods.
If the facts of site traffic don't reflect the feelings of the sites users then I wonder if there little adjustments - things that would make the forum feel as busy as it apparently is - caps on the size or age of threads maybe, mods only policing duplicated topics ifs problematic also. Encourage more thread-starting perhaps - although how you'd do that I'm not sure. Thread-starters are perhaps born rather than made.
Remember when there was anxiety about being a thread killer - seeing a topic plunge of the page after your reply 🙂 Imagine being the guy who's post kills the Trump thread.
but you do not have to and you get the same experience no matter what you do
Nope. This is simply not true.
Pinkbike engagement and comments on articles will absolutely destroy the numbers here.
So why are you still here then if it's so much better somewhere else? Genuine question, it makes no sense to me.
Well, unless it isn't, of course.
Why is there no longer a link to the Bike Forum at the top of the Chat Forum (and vice versa). This is the sort of thing that provokes some of the comments in this thread.
EDIT - yes, I'm blind. Ignore me 🙂
@Cougar - I didn't mention anything about anywhere else being "Better". the reply you've quoted was to another user regarding engagement numbers. And I've already explained what I meant by it to Mark a few posts back
That's the fourth time you've asked me why I'm still here. It reads like you think you're some sort of self appointed forum hardman/bouncer here looking for weak excuses to jump in and goad other people into leaving.
I think it's genuinely amusing that the OP typed in another thread a couple of years ago that they would happily pay a subscription to the forum if there was a way to post photos and like posts.
After reading Marks posts regarding the running of the mag and the forums I decided to subscribe and take advantage of the discount code, unfortunately I don't seem to be able to get the bloody thing to work, when I select digital only and pay bi-monthly I get a message saying that this product isn't available, I really want to support Singletrack but their not making it easy.
The only other forum I use is emtb forums, it's a very different experience.
@mark will fix it... same issue I and matt had I expect. For some reason there's a subscription already in the basket. Probably needs a global fix 😉
That's the fourth time you've asked me why I'm still here. It reads like you think you're some sort of self appointed forum hardman/bouncer here looking for weak excuses to jump in and goad other people into leaving.
Not at all. As I've said, it's because I don't understand it.
I'm not singling you out - at least, not intentionally - there's a few people on this and parallel threads who have waded in variously going "it's all shit!" If I went to a pub and there was another one down the road that was busier, had better beer and didn't charge a nominal membership fee then I'd go there rather than bleat on about how shit this one was.
But perhaps the other place is owned by Tim Martin and is full of vodka-on-cornflakes racists, in which case I might stay put. But then I'd be offering constructive criticism rather than sitting there complaining bitterly whilst nursing my third pint of tap water and proclaiming how the place should be grateful for my patronage.
The real question isn't why he's still here but why he keeps coming back in new guises. If it's that bad why bother going to the trouble?
@stue go to https://singletrackworld.com/cart
if there’s a sub already in your basket you can checkout or remove it and pick another type. Apologies for the not helpful error message - we are looking at that.
@mark I understand the need for persistent carts, to a point. But should it not expire after a sensible period of time rather than stick indefinitely (assuming that's what it does)?