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Comments
Those demanding the money rarely do.
I'll stop that sentence right there. There was no asking, and it wasn't LowEndTalk. It was you that sent invoices, with payment overdue reminders the next day. And anyone who doesn't pay your gets their status stripped and demoted.
That wasn't 'LowEndTalk' 'asking' anyone anything.
Another way of looking at that is demanding providers, some of whom may very well depend on LET thread posts, to pay a newly invented fee of $200/year or risk their tag and status. Even if they can afford it, there are some who may even call that extortion.
Consider the existence of OGF, either the owner want to kill this site or he doesn't know anything about Lowend.
100000$ per year, then transfer the cost to the price
I won't charge on users doesn't mean I can't exploit the provider(sry, I mean host rep because I didn't pay for the tag yet)then let the provider have to exploit the users.
can't let users pay to you?EZ bypass!
profit:)
Right now Provider Tag holders can post an offer every 10 days, so 3 times per month.
The fee is $13/month for the first six months, so that's $4.33 per offer the first six months.
After the first six months it goes up to $5.33 per offer.
If that is whats currently working, I would stick to the same model just increase the costs. Everything is going up with inflation and gas prices its to be expected.
That keeps a large fallout from occurring to this site.
Is this really the LET that you envision in future? That providers post every 10 days just to maximize their value? This is a vanilla forum and not the traditional forum. The front page will be filled with ghost threads.
If every provider posted every 10 days, very soon LET will be nothing different from WHT. The same offers being posted over and over again in fixed intervals, and users can't be bothered to look through the same offers.
I don't think it's wise to set max prices providers can charge while at the same time asking them for an annual subscription to post offers.
What will happen is that the cost will be transferred to the buyers, either by settings higher prices or by lowering the resources.
Big players such as OVH/Hetzner will most likely not pay a dime and just not post anything, pretty sure LET sales are mostly irrelevant to them, and even if they didn't advertise here, LET people will find those offers regardless, and most likely some LET user will post their blackfriday/sales offer as a general topic.
Providers selling NAT's for $2/year will no longer exist. So LET will eventually lose the LowEnd part and the community will most likely slowly start to leave. I really think @jbiloh is killing the community with this move.
A better way to deal with this in my opinion would be forcing every provider to have an affiliate program, and in "Offers" the provider would be forced to use LET's affiliate link and that would pay like 10% to jbiloh on each sale. Of course there still would be issues with providers that don't have an affiliate program and won't implement it just for LET's sake such as OVH.
This is pretty much bs. Who in this forum has asked for content? Who has asked said that this forum is not good enough? Any data to back this up? There is lots of contribution in the forum as it is right now, providers contributing and some users posting guides etc.
The world does not need more content that no one watches anyway.
1. Hire a full time video content creator
2. Hire a second supplemental tutorial writer
3. Fund the redesign of the platform to conform with current WP standards
4. Payoff the note used to buy the platform
5. Invest in ad spend on social media to drive more traffic to LowEndBox and LowEndTalk
6. Fund more giveaways, special prizes and etc
Fixed that for you. It's not about if it's a lot of money or not, it's just that it's not necessary so why should you throw money at it.
No, I was exercising the math for the purpose of comparison vs. what @acidpuke suggested.
I think you missed the option of 150 to 250 dollars range.
I think 200 dollars is fine. However, I'm not a provider.
let's look at this economically.
LET has to bring more than 100 dollars every 6 months in value to be a good/useful tool to pay. That's @jbiloh and his team saying that their subscription is worth that price tag. I think the most capable providers yes will 10x/30x/50x etc. (might be an exaggeration or not, but the point still stands... the people who benefit the most from it should pay) this value and will gladly pay for it.
Smaller/newer providers might not get the full value they expect, but honestly this all still remains on them.
I can understand people are upset at this and can see this as another method to squeeze $$$ out of the community (in this case, the providers). But realistically, come on guys. LEB/LET is an avenue for customer acquisition for companies. There are a surprising number of companies that have made their start from LE* and then moved on to different markets.
They gain benefit from the community by advertising here. I don't think it's too insane for them to request a bit of funding for the provider tag since it's @jbiloh and team's job to foster and maintain a pool of buyers (aka the forums).
To put it bluntly...
LEB/LET is selling access to you, the non-provider-server-buying-community-member to providers at 100 dollars every 6 months. While that might upset you the non-provider-server-buying-community-member, the "unwritten contract/agreement" is that the additional capital will fund for more "free" and significantly higher quality content for you to enjoy and consume. It's a transaction. Previously, this access as a product was free to providers.
Content making is hard. It costs more and more now to make it happen. Give this a shot. If this doesn't work out (or if the providers don't see a value in it), then they can cancel their subscription and it's done. If you don't like it then simply stop going to LEB/LET.
But I think the team is worth the investment and worth giving a shot to see how this grows. They're open to feedback and open to discussions.
That's pretty much it.
200 USD/year is not a particularly outrageous price
$100 every 6 months is very reasonable. The ROI is well worth it.
I agree with jasonM:
This is LOW end talk.
See any that do, that often?
I think quoting the per-month price masks the barrier to entry. If you're a newer provider who has never been on LET, you have to file for Provider tag approval and pay $100 (or $80 if the discount holds) before they're making any offers here. That's why newer provider tags being offered some sort of subsidized "try us out" deal seems needed (be that something like $20 for 3 months with your first set of offers or a "coupon code" that's good for providers only during their first 4 years). I'm not sure mega-threads or responding to request threads is going to be attractive from an income/commitment ratio vs using other forums as your launchpad.
Make these payment terms possible for the providers.
I understand. This is part of why we made the recent adjustment to give Host Reps more capabilities (able to market services directly in request threads, for example).
This is definitely worth thinking about. Will discuss internally.
This is a smart tweak.
We've announced the change.
LEB+LET is often referred to as a bundle.
Shutdown LEB and only operate LET, and then the costs would be more reasonable.
LEB pushes a ton of traffic to LET. If LEB goes away, there are fewer people on LET, which means fewer buyers of services for the providers. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Please show statistics, not just "a ton".
LowEndBox is the #3 referral source for LowEndTalk behind Google Desktop Search and Google Mobile Search.
One of our goals the past few years has been ranking LowEndBox highly on important keywords on Google. For example, LowEndBox used to rank 10-20 on "Cheap VPS" but now ranks #1 behind the paid ads.
That didn't happen by accident. That's the content strategy working.
Google pushes traffic to LowEndBox. LowEndBox pushes traffic to LowEndTalk.
free for first 2 or 3 offers/yr and charge few bucks per offer after that.
Ranked 3rd, but what percentage?
"Google Desktop 45%, Google Mobile 44%, LEB 3%" and "Google Desktop 30%, Google Mobile 29%, LEB 28%" are very different ratios.
If there's no LEB, some of the search traffic would go to LET directly.
My opinion is: Fee should be just to distinguish serious providers. And it should not be more than $12 / year.
Just because many (or few) providers make good sale through LET platform, doesn't justify to pay to post offers.
notice that $16 / month is not the cost of advertising. It's for paying provider tag. it's like renting a booth. You need to shell another bucks to actually do the advertising, e.g. paying employee (to response to question, posting offer, etc), do promotion / discount code for LET.
It's not about $16 / month, because most provider probably already allocated that kind of advertising budget. It's about adding unnecessary annually fee. I mean, chance are, if you are working as a host rep on a forum, you will get paid more than $16 a month.
it will be happen
it will be happen
IMO it'd make more sense to use CPA (cost per action), for example a fixed percentage per purchase, with a maximum cap per year. Providers that earn more from LowEndTalk posts pay more for the exposure.
Otherwise, $100/year would be a reasonable price. CPM and ROI would likely still be better than many other advertising platforms, making it a good deal.
Probably the best advertising option in the entire industry as far as ROI is concerned.
@jbiloh I guess my point with suggesting CPA rather than a fixed fee is that someone like @Cam who sells a lot of <$5/year services shouldn't have to pay as much as someone like @dustinc who (my guess) would sell at least 50x more services and earn at least 100-500x more revenue from LET.