July 2, 2004
Free templating
I had no idea random people read my Tabulas so often.
Here are my general umbrella responses to various arguments made for keeping HTML templating.
1.) "Just let us have one"
The point is missed for you guys. The point here is that I think people really like that option, so giving them one free template will not do anything in the long run in terms of paid accounts. So giving you one free HTML template ... would be absolutely not be different than what the quota is set at now.
2.) "I love Tabulas, but free templating is the only thing keeping me here."
Then leave. I'm not holding a puppy hostage, threatening to kill it if you don't stay with Tabulas. You staying with Tabulas costs me money. So please, if the "no free templating" thing will make you move to Xanga (no free templating), Blogspot (no free templating), or Livejournal (no free templating), please go ahead.
3.) "The existing templates are all butt-ugly, and I need to be allowed to be creative."
This is the argument I can sympathize with the most. You are correct. I hate to see the same templates over and over again. But note that
there are new templates in development; my goal is to have at least 6-7 SOLID templates to use for ALL FREE USERS ... and note that you will still have access to the 'styling' sections of your control panel (the ones that control your site's color/font). So your journal will still NOT look like everyone else's journal ...
4.) "I can't pay you, but I would."
Right. For those of you in the US, I find it hard to believe that you cannot scrounge up $8 for a 3-month account. You can send money via snailmail (either by money order or check), and I find it very hard to believe that some people cannot obtain $8 (except those really really young kids, but you guys are disadvantaged on the web already).
Look, the argument boils down to this: "It is costing me far more to run this site than if I hadn't even created it. I need the money, and some of you need a little budge in the right direction to rightfully pay for a service you're having fun using." And since I am the creator of this site, I have the right to do the changes I see fit to help this site in the long run. I want your feedback, and it does mean a lot to me ... and in the ideal world, yes, I would offer all the features for free. But I would like to take this hobby and maybe one day make it a bit more. And to do that, I need to address financial concerns.
The new Tabulas 2.0 display/control panel is a lot better, so the whole pricing on the paid accounts makes it a steal compared to other sites like TypePad.
If any of you have a good legitimate suggestions on what I can do that would benefit most of us, feel free to comment below. Feel free to link this post to your friends if you feel the need to get more people involved in the discussion. I always love to hear back from the users.
Some clarifications:
1.) I am not in desperate need for money. As PM5K pointed out, I am not doing horribly with money since I have a temporary job here in Korea teaching SAT; right now these efforts are being made for the future... I need to get the ball rolling on starting to convert my users to paid, so I can reinvest that money into more servers ... and then in the long-run become a more 'professional' site.
2.) I do know the age distribution of Tabulas (this was posted a long time ago, but it comes down that most everyone is in high school and college). But I don't believe that the idea that "$10 is their next pizza or CD, so they won't purchase a Tabulas account." I do think that people, given the money, will pay ... even if they are broke. Most people who have paid accounts right now are within my age group ...
3.) Marvin makes a about finding what my target audience is. He makes a valid point that many people do write... but that is the older crowd. I would reckon people 20+ years of age use Tabulas to write, but people under 20 years of age mostly do it because it's "cool." Realizing that for some it's only a fad, those people _will_ make "impulsive" purchases ... and hopefully that will be a Tabulas account, instead of Britney Spears' latest CD.
Furthermore, those people who are capable of doing HTML have enough HTML knowledge that they may be aware that they have to pay for hosting to do their normal website; Tabulas is meant to supplant the whole "individual" hosting and to offer the tools that people use to make websites (journal, gallery, links page, hit logging).
So the idea behind making people pay for templates would not entice users who are doing this to write to switch to paid, but there are other great incentives for people who are simply doing this for writing in getting a paid account: categories, hit logging, (future) better syndication support, searching, (future) advanced community management.
4.) Google Adsense advertisements might be placed on free user's websites as well, but none of this will affect paid users. The advertisements will only be placed on specific free users' pages... if we feel the free user is using more resources than we feel is proper, we will start advertisement placing. Most likely it will be some sort of small equation (I feel weird using the word algorithm there) that will factor in when you joined, how often you log-in, and how often you post to determine whether you have passed the "threshold" or not. But this isn't totally set in stone; I may run a small beta test to see if the Adsense ads pay off at all before attempting to implement it on a wide scale across the Tabulas network.
However, I do feel that it would be a lot better to run the Pud-run MarketBanker on the control panel portion rather than pushing advertisements on the Tabulas journals themselves. I'm thinking something along the lines of "force people to go through an advertisement page everytime they post, or it won't post publicly" type of thing. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, and it might go over a lot better (then the burden is again on the writer and owner of the journal instead of the reader).
Disclaimer: Most of you know this, but since some of you are somewhat new ... I will never ever resort to any type of pop-up advertisements, graphical advertisements, or any selling of e-mail addresses to get money. Your privacy is incredibly important (well, since it's my privacy too!)
Here are my general umbrella responses to various arguments made for keeping HTML templating.
1.) "Just let us have one"
The point is missed for you guys. The point here is that I think people really like that option, so giving them one free template will not do anything in the long run in terms of paid accounts. So giving you one free HTML template ... would be absolutely not be different than what the quota is set at now.
2.) "I love Tabulas, but free templating is the only thing keeping me here."
Then leave. I'm not holding a puppy hostage, threatening to kill it if you don't stay with Tabulas. You staying with Tabulas costs me money. So please, if the "no free templating" thing will make you move to Xanga (no free templating), Blogspot (no free templating), or Livejournal (no free templating), please go ahead.
3.) "The existing templates are all butt-ugly, and I need to be allowed to be creative."
This is the argument I can sympathize with the most. You are correct. I hate to see the same templates over and over again. But note that
there are new templates in development; my goal is to have at least 6-7 SOLID templates to use for ALL FREE USERS ... and note that you will still have access to the 'styling' sections of your control panel (the ones that control your site's color/font). So your journal will still NOT look like everyone else's journal ...
4.) "I can't pay you, but I would."
Right. For those of you in the US, I find it hard to believe that you cannot scrounge up $8 for a 3-month account. You can send money via snailmail (either by money order or check), and I find it very hard to believe that some people cannot obtain $8 (except those really really young kids, but you guys are disadvantaged on the web already).
Look, the argument boils down to this: "It is costing me far more to run this site than if I hadn't even created it. I need the money, and some of you need a little budge in the right direction to rightfully pay for a service you're having fun using." And since I am the creator of this site, I have the right to do the changes I see fit to help this site in the long run. I want your feedback, and it does mean a lot to me ... and in the ideal world, yes, I would offer all the features for free. But I would like to take this hobby and maybe one day make it a bit more. And to do that, I need to address financial concerns.
The new Tabulas 2.0 display/control panel is a lot better, so the whole pricing on the paid accounts makes it a steal compared to other sites like TypePad.
If any of you have a good legitimate suggestions on what I can do that would benefit most of us, feel free to comment below. Feel free to link this post to your friends if you feel the need to get more people involved in the discussion. I always love to hear back from the users.
Some clarifications:
1.) I am not in desperate need for money. As PM5K pointed out, I am not doing horribly with money since I have a temporary job here in Korea teaching SAT; right now these efforts are being made for the future... I need to get the ball rolling on starting to convert my users to paid, so I can reinvest that money into more servers ... and then in the long-run become a more 'professional' site.
2.) I do know the age distribution of Tabulas (this was posted a long time ago, but it comes down that most everyone is in high school and college). But I don't believe that the idea that "$10 is their next pizza or CD, so they won't purchase a Tabulas account." I do think that people, given the money, will pay ... even if they are broke. Most people who have paid accounts right now are within my age group ...
3.) Marvin makes a about finding what my target audience is. He makes a valid point that many people do write... but that is the older crowd. I would reckon people 20+ years of age use Tabulas to write, but people under 20 years of age mostly do it because it's "cool." Realizing that for some it's only a fad, those people _will_ make "impulsive" purchases ... and hopefully that will be a Tabulas account, instead of Britney Spears' latest CD.
Furthermore, those people who are capable of doing HTML have enough HTML knowledge that they may be aware that they have to pay for hosting to do their normal website; Tabulas is meant to supplant the whole "individual" hosting and to offer the tools that people use to make websites (journal, gallery, links page, hit logging).
So the idea behind making people pay for templates would not entice users who are doing this to write to switch to paid, but there are other great incentives for people who are simply doing this for writing in getting a paid account: categories, hit logging, (future) better syndication support, searching, (future) advanced community management.
4.) Google Adsense advertisements might be placed on free user's websites as well, but none of this will affect paid users. The advertisements will only be placed on specific free users' pages... if we feel the free user is using more resources than we feel is proper, we will start advertisement placing. Most likely it will be some sort of small equation (I feel weird using the word algorithm there) that will factor in when you joined, how often you log-in, and how often you post to determine whether you have passed the "threshold" or not. But this isn't totally set in stone; I may run a small beta test to see if the Adsense ads pay off at all before attempting to implement it on a wide scale across the Tabulas network.
However, I do feel that it would be a lot better to run the Pud-run MarketBanker on the control panel portion rather than pushing advertisements on the Tabulas journals themselves. I'm thinking something along the lines of "force people to go through an advertisement page everytime they post, or it won't post publicly" type of thing. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, and it might go over a lot better (then the burden is again on the writer and owner of the journal instead of the reader).
Disclaimer: Most of you know this, but since some of you are somewhat new ... I will never ever resort to any type of pop-up advertisements, graphical advertisements, or any selling of e-mail addresses to get money. Your privacy is incredibly important (well, since it's my privacy too!)
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dingdingding
<b> - POP3/IMAP Accounts</b>. No, really. A lot of people would pay for a user@tabulas.com account.
<b> - Aliasing for paid users</b>. <a href="http://levi_urashima.tabulas.com">http://levi_urashima.tabulas.com</a>? Noice.
<b> - Make the \"Tabulas\" name more marketable.</b> Google has it\'s logo, Yahoo has the smile-punctuation thing; Tabulas should have it\'s own banner.
<b> - In reference to above, make a banner contest</b>. For free accounts, of course.
<b> - Blog of the day...?</b>
Okay, it\'s 6 in the morning and I\'m sleepless. Gotta go, before I spout out more crap.
Cheers.
roy
mattcompton
dingdingding
Say, like 20m.com. It gives users the choice of what type of ad (popup, banner), and how it looks (pure text, generic, pinkish...).
And more features. Of course, more features:
- <b>Make the messaage center function more prevalent</b>. People don\'t see it, much less use it.
- <b>More features for the community</b>. Tabulas was never about the blogging. It was more about the community, just people talking to each other through posts.
Also, should you be making features for the community, paid users shouldn\'t be on higher ground. People hate people who are better than them by nature - making paid users have more features in the community will make the \"mass\" hate them; thus, making the paid account option undesireable.
- <b>Lesser fees, more paying users</b>. No, really. Drop the price a bit. It makes the paid account option more attractive. Compare it to something more tangible in real life (say, a chewing gum a day), and people will dig it. Sub 5 dollars should be good.
roy
I also don\'t think that the \'masses\' hate the paid users. The paid users help keep the free users free. Otherwise teh service would shut down. It\'s not a class war ...
dingdingding
But just because you say it won\'t be a class war doesn\'t mean that it will cease to be so. Remember - this is the same audience that feels that they are owed something by the net.
But hey - maybe that\'s(paid/unpaid dichotomy) what\'ll make the paid account option more yummy. *shrug*
Anyways, regarding the payments.
Yeah, forgot about that. Shit. And manual bank transfers are a pain.
But still, $28 a year induces vertigo to most. Make it $2.50 a month. Or 80 cents a day. (Okay, I\'m kidding!)
But seriously, the rule of thumb here is: if people want to pay, they will pay. No matter how costly it is(within acceptable parameters, of course), they will pay.
If they don\'t, they won\'t - even if they did have the means. Even if people have to use default HTML templates. Pressure won\'t work. It doesn\'t persuade, it annoys. Trust me. ;)
So yeah. I\'m pretty skeptic of whether stripping HTML template support would make users pay. But it\'s your call, man.
Cheers!
--levi
Anna_Ganda (guest)
MikeyMike
I do think that MacDaddyTatsu has a point about a button graphic that proudly displays you as paid (\"Gold\"?) user. I think that would help a lot and be easy to do.
Might you also do that for Lightbox7??
You are right that many kids (from their parents) have money to spend on what they really value. In the US, it\'s billions of dollars a year.
That\'s an excellent idea about forcing an ad view for non-paids when they post! Best of Luck Roy. I really apprieciate your efforts!!
alleycat03
markitotz
Your plans are just. But please let putting ads be the least option.
More power and good luck to you and the rest of the Tabulas community.
taris
Go tabulas! =)
MacDaddyTatsu (guest)
That way people visiting your Tab would see that you have a paid account and could click a link to tell them why they should get one too!
MacDaddyTatsu (guest)
(The above was a joke and not intended to be taken seriously...)
In all seriousness, I think that you need to do SOMETHING with the Tab to get some money coming in each month. It is a service that many people use and many more people will BE using over the next few years as blogging becomes more and more a part of life. Make something from this anyway you feel comfortable doing so!
I do remember really scrapping together the cash for my Tab, but that was due to horrible crisis in my life. I cannot see how ANYONE would have trouble getting enough together for a year account. Not with all that it will offer.
I hope that you will consider also making several additional templates availible for the paid users. Have some tinkering friends through some together and have some additional templates for the paying crowd.
Aside from the templating and money issue, I think that additional publication support would be great. Is there a way to use the RSS feed from the Tab to create dynamic text in the form of a JavaScript app? That way a person that isnt sauve enough with RSS can cut and paste in some javascript into another site and have it display tabulas entries. Maybe allow only posts of a given catagory to appear or something. Something like the Oxyscripts news publisher. A paid feature?
Just something to think about. Its all you!
haiphong
Your whole point about html and hosting is right on. I come here for the community aspect of tabulas, one that has been seriously hindered from when I first joined. I already own a few domains and shell out a monthly rate for hosting, where I could easily have my own blog setup using one of a billion different scripts available for free or even a mediocre one I wrote up. The fact that I can easily access friend\'s accounts, and have this sense of \'tabulas community\' is why I paid for an account here. Also to support a fellow student that actually knows what he\'s doing (for the most part lol). I hope you bring more of the community together here, bringing back member directories and such. THAT would be a push into the right direction for tabulas 2.0
HK1997
HK1997
marvin
Check the age range of your users. How many of your users are actually working? How may working people are actually into blogging? How many of them actually know or are capable of paying through pay pal or money order?
I can dish out $3 dollars a month, but like what I said before, most of us, I think, would pay only if we could, but we couldnt because we dont have the means to.
If you ask people why they\'re actually blogging, the answer you\'d probably get often, if not all the time, is that they want to express themselves through writing or that they just want to keep a record of the things that happen to them.
You\'ll almost never get an answer that they\'re blogging because they want to design. I mean, why would you want to pay for designing something? You work hard to create a design just to pay for it in the end? It\'s just quite absurd.
My point is that the essence of blogging <b>is</b> writing, not designing. Charging for designing is like McDonald\'s putting a price tag on salt when your fries can actually do without it. You\'ll only start earning when you charge for the fries itself. But, of course, charging for your fries is out of the question since Burger King is just a click away.
Putting ads on our journals, I think, would be more profitable than charging for templating. It would be a lot easier for you to do and earn and it would be more bearable for most of us. Besides, you cannot charge all people for templating since not all people are actually using the templating function, but you can put ads on everyone\'s journal.
Another is to impose an expiration period a la hotmail. If a user doesnt use his account for, let\'s say, 30 days, his account will expire and will be deleted. This will decrease the number of users and therefore, I think, decrease the amount of money you have to pay for site maintenance.
It saddens me that I will have to pay just to express and practice my creativity. It saddens me that that I will soon be limited by money. A lot of great future artists never come about because they have no space to showcase their talents due to lack of resources. But hey, this is your site, and you\'re not out here to save the world. You\'re here to do business, so do whatever you want to earn the money that you need to keep your business running.
roy
Plus I just don\'t deleting stuff like that for no reason.
dingdingding
roy
schneider
Because I\'m not a frequent mail user, Hotmail disables my account often. So I switched over to Yahoo. Hah!
roy
I\'m always quite reluctant to put ads on journals; I feel that there is a purity to a journal uncluttered with advertisements ... and actually, advertisements do not pay much at all. The point of the paid account, while unlocking features, is primarily to show that the <em>user</em> supports the site; needless to say, $28/year is actually a lot more than I could ever get from any one journal in one year from advertisement.
However, my main problem is the general underlying beliefs that a lot of people have. The internet, as much as it swings to the left-wing ideology (free for all!) ... is still governed by capitalistic limitations. A lot of people feel that they are OWED these types of services, and this is the mentality I have to change.
To equate this to the idea of an \'artist,\' an artist, regardless of how poor he is, still requires money to purchase canvas and paints to make his paintings. Tabulas is the digital equivalent to the canvas; it\'s this wide-open tool that you can do as you wish. You _must_ pay for your canvas if you use it, just as you must pay for Tabulas if you use it moderately.
Hope this analogy makes sense...
dingdingding
- <b>Templating contest</b>. Not, I\'m not kidding. People create templates for the users to use, and the best ones get free accounts.
Here\'s why it\'ll be good.
- 1.) The whines about the lack of aesthetic value of the pre-made templates;
- 2.) It\'ll...fix the hurt feelings created by your move. Let\'s face it, some people are not gonna like you. The tabulas populace is not exactly solidly comprised of rational people, and reasoning with them won\'t help very much. Hopefully, this will.
- <b>Volunteer maintainers</b>. Make it like Wikipedia. People donate code to the site (say, plug-ins, etc), or help in the dev process for free accounts. I understand that it\'ll be hard giving trust to someone who you can\'t see, but that\'s what the net\'s for. (Release the code too, under GPL. Heehee. ;))
I\'ll think about more later. But for now, I would recommend doing as less as possible that can cause hurt feelings between users and you. The good establishment does not screw it\'s customers. (\"Do not be evil\", in short. ;))
PM5K (guest)
First of all I don\'t think Roy is hurting for money, as he just bought a 400.00 camera with hard earned money from teaching.
I think it\'s more about the fact that he puts everything into Tabulas and would at least like to break even for starters.
Having said that I\'ve talked with Roy about this for some time and I\'m not even sure he bought the bull shit when it came out of his mouth about people not being able to pay THREE DOLLARS PER MONTH for Tabulas.
I feel like I had more to say but I guess that\'s all for now....
roy
It\'s more of a future thing.
schneider
Tabulas without custom templates but ad-free is okay. Tabulas, with ads, however cool it is, sucks. I do not want ads with Tabulas.
So... do what you wish. :) (I\'m still a loyal Tabulaser, anyway)
Oh, and like HK1997 said, please assert your being the owner of Tabulas. This blog is quite obscure, if you ask me.
Peace!
HK1997
HK1997
So here\'s my two cents...just random thoughts.
What is your ultimate goal with Tabulas?
According to my estimates and inferences acquired while enjoying Tabulas (which maybe totally wrong), I\'m not sure if profitability is feasible on the current path. The vast majority of your users seem to be highschool/college students with very limited incomes. $10 is their next pizza or crap hop CD ... Not a tabulas account.
If you are molding it into something that would provide a source of income...
-Attract people who pay...Get rid of the those who won\'t.
-You gotta nag...and not just on your blog. How many new users know that Roy is the man behind this site? Yes it is annoying. Yes, you will lose users. But ads and popups do work. I\'m not asking you to sell advertising, I mean more like an attention grabbing page that reminds us to get a paid account before we get to post an entry. Right now, you have a two sentence reminder on the page we see after we make a post that is very easy to ignore.
-There\'s nothing wrong with making money. If you come out upfront and say that this is a business and if you\'re doing all this to make a buck, then I\'m sure we\'d all understand. Then you have to attract the right people who are willing to pay for your services (post college with some spending cash...pre grown up ... like me!). If you that\'s all you rant and rave about, then you\'re gonna lose some users. If Mark Cuban felt that Shaq was the sole key to winning a championship, he\'d have absolutely no problem giving up Nowitzki and Nash.
-I\'m looking at the front page and it took my eye a few seconds to wander my eye onto the \"paid accounts\" button. Everything else about this page seems to say \"FREE\".
-Maybe the main reason that you have paid members is you have attracted a handful of people who recognize the magnificent work you do and appreciate the sleepless nights that you put into this. There may be a few, but I don\'t think the vast majority of your paid members paid you because they really needed hit logging or storage for 25 CSS files. I suspect you may have a lot of people who fall into this category but are unable to or are unwilling to pay
Allen
phineyae (guest)
wait... What am I saying. I have a paid account. duh..
Well then I just wanna say \"well said Roy..\"
I remember when I 1st signed up for Tabulas I was frustrated with just one template so I paid for mine.