Premium Membership Update

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Andy R

Andy R

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FOR PREMIUM UPDATE GENERAL FAQS PLEASE SEE THIS THREAD.

http://www.u2interference.com/forum...most-common-questions-and-answers-171663.html

Based on your feedback we have decided to refine the Premium Membership offer. We are working to find the right balance of features and value for those member who help keep the community running through their financial support and ad based revenue from those who wish not to upgrade. As the years and internet have evolved we think its important to stay competitive with other forums and offer features that have become standard.

We will continue to tweak the Premium Membership levels until we feel we have just the right balance. Interference cannot survive without the support of our members. The hosting fees, software licenses, programmers, etc are all part of the ongoing maintenance cost to keep our community running. We hope that with the outline changes you all will find that we are trying to accommodate all of our members and make Interference better for all of our members no matter which membership level you choose to participate as.

Changes:

  • We will no longer be charging upgraded accounts as subscriptions. There were complaints about this in the past and we feel it's more ethical to require members to renew each year instead of automatically taking money out of their bank accounts.
  • We have created 2 Premium Levels (Silver and Gold). You can see details about these Premium Levels at this link.
  • All members who were upgraded have automatically been upgraded to the Premium Gold membership level.
  • All Premium Gold members can now disable all the ads (see Premium Drop Down Menu)
  • Premium Gold now have space for a slightly bigger avatar (130x130 vs 125x125)
  • Premium Gold now have space for a slightly wider sig image (500x120 vs 400x120)
  • The Premium Silver upgrade is now $15 instead of the $18 it was before. The Premium Gold (ad free) is now $25/year.
I hope the new Upgrade Levels will be a good mix of bringing value to members so that you all will continue to support Interference and renew your upgraded accounts while at the same time giving all of our members options to decide how they want to participate.

We are currently losing money every month so the costs to run the site are negative. The financial sustainability of our community will depend on how many people renew their upgrades and the ability for the ads to generate revenue. So far the ads have been a total disappointment (no one clicks) so please consider upgrading to help support our community so we can remain a strong and vibrant place for U2 fans to congregate on the internet.

Thanks for your patience and feedback over the last month as changes have been made. We have some other upcoming changes that we think everyone will enjoy as well.

As always your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Andy
 
I fully support these changes and I think the members should be pleased about this. :up:

It was also nice of you to upgrade all current premiums to Gold.

I hope that the members will continue to support Interference by upgrading!
 
Sicy said:
It was also nice of you to upgrade all current premiums to Gold.
Click to expand...

:up:

Great changes.

I've had problems with ads that were layered over parts of the forum structure so I couldn't navigate properly, that's the only reason why I disabled the ads, the little ads didn't irritate me at all. Good feature.
 
Andy R said:
So far the ads have been a total disappointment (no one clicks)
Click to expand...

Please note, while I realize this will come across as bitchy, I honestly do not mean it that way.

But are you honestly suprised by this? The ads are useless, spam essentially, why would anyone click on them for any reason except by accident? It would be far better if the ads were *actually* relevent - ie. links to legit ticket sites, stuff like that. I have not once seen any link up there (and I do look at the ads) that looks like a site that seems to have something legit and worthwhile for me to investiagate. "How to make 10000000 dollars in one year?" Oh come on, I get 10 of those in my spam box every day. I don't click on them either.

And considering the resistence of members to the ads, there is an even lesser liklihood that anyone will click them.

Also, I realize that it's easy to critcize this, and I assume we have random google ads there due to the difficulty in finding people willing to fill those advertising spaces. I hope you find some people in the future, places that are relevent, as then I think you would find the ads to be far more successful.

Further, I realize you guys have made some awesome upgrades and investments into the site, and I appreciate them - the new forum is pretty awesome - but I wonder, if the site is such a huge financial hole, I still wonder how Elvis ever managed. I mean, if he totally absorbed this huge financial burdan, then not only is he awesomer than I previously thought, but he might also be a little crazy. But hey, u2 has that effect on people. ;)

I don't really know anything about the costs of running a place like this, but I do now, a forum associated with my university runs this exact same forum type (vbulliten or whatever) and while I realize the communituy is far smaller, so there isnt as much of a server burdan, I also know they do not get much money to run the site. Like, a laughable amount. So...

It just makes me wonder. I don't mean this as an attack, merely things I wonder about. Perhaps there are aspects I'm completely ignorant about, if so, please, fill me in. :)


Anyway, as for the rest - an ad free interland has made me extremely happy, thank you. I also think it was extremely nice of you to automatically upgrade us all to the gold level.
Also, bigger sigs = :hi5:

Thank you.

Annnd.....I'll just hush up now. :reject:
 
How was the site running before switched ownership? I vaguely recall paying less money for "membership" and seeing less ads even if I wasn't dishing out the $15. Does that mean the site was making less less money? Or is this a case of two negatives making positive revenue?

Pray tell :pray:
 
I appreciate the upgrade to Gold

I appreciate the ability to turn off the ads (though I would have been content with an ability to just turn off the text ad, because I realize how important the ads are to the site)

I appreciate the listening to the feed back.

But all of this is shadowed by the fact that:

I F***ING LOVE iSpy!
 
BrightestStar,

Forums can be very inexpensive to start but as they ramp up to the size of Interference they become more expensive to operate. I believe we have about 80,000 posts per month which means we need a dedicated server and Server Admins to make sure everyone's info is safe. On top of the server hosting costs, I took out a loan to buy Interference. So I have payments on that to make plus paying a programmer, maintenance fees on the software, and I plan to keep investing to make the site better. Since July we have had 20 people upgrade which has generated less then $375 over the last 4 months which is not even close to covering the hosting much less any of the other expenses.

I just recently found out that the old Premium Memberships were actually subscriptions which means that money was pulled from their accounts each year without requiring a renewal. Elvis canceled all the subscriptions which included over 130 members who were paying but had not visited the site in over a year. Based on old threads and the over all sentiment about automatic subscriptions vs manual the mod team and I decided the right thing to do is to allow member to decide if they want to continue their upgrade instead of automatically taking the money out of their account. That being said the amount of people who renew is probably going to drop significantly since it's not automatic. So for me it's difficult because I am trying to keep investing in interference and keep pushing things forward to make Interference better but at the same a plethora of issues have prevented the site from being self sustainable so far.

The ads indeed have been horribly targeted. One of the issues is the domain name which causes Google Ads to keep showing ads based on the word "Interference" about science instead of about U2. I have been working with Google to try and get more focused ads things have improved slightly. Unfortunately for now they continue to under perform, that could change if I can get the site into better ad networks. Another reason the ads are not as relevant is that we have forum names that don't tell the ad software what the page is about. A good example is Vorsprung durch Technik which throws off the bot that tries to find relevant ads based on the page title, content of the page, etc.

Regardless, things will be OK and I hope the changes that have been made will be sufficient to bring value to the member to renew their Premium Memberships.
 
Sicy said:
iSpy is my favorite thing ever. :love:
Click to expand...

:hyper: Me too. :love:

bono_212 said:
I F***ING LOVE iSpy!
Click to expand...

So do i. iSpy. :bow: Its crazy watching it. :crazy: Should be fun when the set list parties come around. :lmao:

Andy R said:
BrightestStar,
Since July we have had 20 people upgrade which has generated less then $375 over the last 4 months which is not even close to covering the hosting much less any of the other expenses.
Click to expand...

Yay to me for being one of the 20 upgraders. :wink:

Andy. :hug: Thanks for the gold upgrade. :) Also i really like the separate premium menu, will make going to change a signature quicker. :up: Overall great changes. :up: Hope you manage to get the ad thing sorted. :)
 
I'm intrigued by the changes and am looking forward to checking things out further.

For what it's worth, I agree with Bri about the ads, but to be honest, I don't think I've ever clicked on an ad for anything on any site anywhere.

I'm guessing once I switch off the ads, I won't be having the navigation problem I was bitching about before. Can't wait to get home and find out. :)
 
Screwtape2 said:
What is that exactly? I can seem to find an explanation of what it is.
Click to expand...
It's basically a page that shows posts made across all the forums in a streaming format. As people post they drop down the page and the new posts show at the top.
 
Andy R said:
So far the ads have been a total disappointment (no one clicks) so please consider upgrading to help support our community so we can remain a strong and vibrant place for U2 fans to congregate on the internet.
Click to expand...

I'm not tremendously surprised. I hate ads, which is quite ironic in that I work in an advertising-related profession. I would definitely say that it's because 99% of internet ads I've ever seen have the credibility of e-mail spam and spyware, and the ads I've seen here--which you rightfully state have been poorly targeted--fit this usual pattern. It's certainly not your fault, in that you can only advertise what's out there currently, but I think that, until this systemic, industry-wide credibility problem is addressed, you'll have a hard time making money off of it.

I've got a long time until renewal time, but I have a feeling I'll be around a while.
 
I just stumbled upon this, and I just want to thank you.
I love Interference, and honestly would pay even double what you are asking.
It is a very fair price, and to me worth it.
I have met some of the most wonderful people, and made lifetime friends.
I have ben able to express myself through blogs and threads, and been fortunate enough to get to know fellow U2 lovers through the same means.

I would like to know how to make sure my membership continues...
where do I send, or pay and when do I know my memb. is about to expire?

Thank you so much for the upgrades, and well, everything.

:up:
 
Andy R said:
It's basically a page that shows posts made across all the forums in a streaming format. As people post they drop down the page and the new posts show at the top.
Click to expand...

Can I offer a suggestion? It would be very cool if you could customize which forums you'd like to "spy" on. For instance, I might be interested in seeing what is posted in FYM and LS, but not Out of Control (never was a fan of those game threads!).

Regardless, it's a pretty cool new function!
 
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