If I was in this for the money, you'd have figured that out a long time ago.

This discussion is over. Good work isn't free. Comments closed.

it's not uncommon for a previously free site to lose 80% of their visitors when becoming 'freemium'. That's something you should now (and it doesn't help providing free articles or good reasons to buy).

What you could do is providing a way for people who really like your stuff to donate to QS. That's how wikipedia works.

You have said that the community is strong but still a niche market, so you will have to work with your fans (people loving QS) instead of trying to please everybody.

Plus, 60$ a year also seems more attractive thant 5$ a month.

My two cents.

SPynO

I mean, think of this like a trade. It's nothing personal, you just overvalue your articles (from my perspective). You know my/our price; if you can't meet it, we don't come to an agreement, and the trade falls through. Oh well, too bad.

I should add that I would probably buy articles a la carte, however. I don't know how well that integrates with your subscription model, but I figured it couldn't hurt to give you a little more information about a potential customer's needs/wants. Heck, I'll even give it to you free ;D

I'm pretty good about correctly valuing cards, so I'm haven't been making $5 more than I would have anyway.

I’d rather lose readers than spam banner ads.

I'd like to also point that there are a total of 223,026 people to ever, in the history of time, register a DCI number. There's no way to figure out how many Magic players beyond these registered players who have ever played in a sanctioned event and that could be potential readers, nor how many of those registered players are either duplicates or inactive. A reliable source told me that only a small fraction of that number play actively (about 1/5th). I can however confidently say that in order to run solely as an add supported site we would need to have more than every Magic player in the world read our site ever month.

The Magic community is pretty strong (and growing) but it's still a niche market with a comparatively small number of eyes by internet standards.

All that said, if anyone out there has good suggestions which are significantly less vague then "host ads instead" we'd love to hear them. I'd even be receptive to "hey how about some free finance articles too" etc, but most people who suggest ads instead haven't looked into that economy very closely. If you have any feedback, ideas, complaints, thoughts, spare change, you can send them all to us. I'll ask that the submissions from the comment form be CC'd to me, and I'll try to address them all specifically.
http://www.quietspeculation.com/contact-us/

Chris

I ran the numbers; we'd need between 312,000-880,000 unique visitors per month to pay for the site's budget if we went ad-only. Banners aren't the only way to advertise, but about all ads pay the same amount (which is measured by CPM).

You guys might find this helpful:

http://www.quietspeculation.com/2011/01/adventures-in-freemium/

Also, if QS generates more than $5 a month in savings for you as a player, it makes sense to pick it up. If you don’t make $5 a month on it, you aren’t using our lessons or our lessons suck. Let me know which one it is : )

Put some adds and don't charge for content!