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Ownership of LET/LEB
I've noticed that over the past few months, @Liam has been very active in keeping the community running, writing frontpage posts, doing forum administration, and so on. I just sent a PM about a spammer, and it was dealt with in under 2 minutes. Overall, Liam basically runs the show.
On the other hand, @Chief has basically done nothing for either LET or LEB in the past few months - at least, not as far as we can tell. Things are not getting done (thanks button?), other staff didn't or doesn't have access to the things they need access to, unposted offers are apparently piling up (despite Liams frontpage work), there's a lack of transparency and zero feedback from Chief, and it seems like he is permanently busy with things that are not LET or LEB, which is worrying considering he's the owner. Simply put, things are slowly falling apart... and as far as I can establish, it's because the one with the access doesn't have the time (Chief), and the one with the time doesn't have the access (Liam).
The only conclusion I can draw from this, is that it would be better for LET and LEB to transfer the ownership of the sites to Liam, as he has shown to invest significantly more time, effort, and care into LET/LEB than Chief has. Now of course I might be missing something that's going on behind the scenes, but that in itself would be a worrying situation.
Thoughts?
Comments
One word: yes.
Im not sure if ownership, but possibly more permissions.
Part of the reason I'm talking about ownership in particular, is the financial situation. According to BuySellAds statistics, LET/LEB bring in thousands of dollars a year in advertising revenue a year, and apparently the amount of ads keeps going up.
Chief appears to basically run LET/LEB like a business, delegating tasks to a few low-paid or unpaid 'moderators', while receiving the profits himself. I can live with ads to keep the site running, despite my ethical issues with advertising, but the current situation seems very unfair.
Transfering ownership would also mean transfering the control over the advertising revenue to Liam, and to be honest I would trust him a lot more with organizing that fairly, than I would trust Chief - especially seeing as the latter contributes pretty much nothing to the community at this point.
In someway or another it is.
I'm all for it, but I don't see it happening.
Since Chief has control, yes. I did not detect any bit of serious business mentality in how LowEndAdmin ran things.
Trust. This is what it comes down to. And what's the #1 rule on the internet?
Trust noone.
Pretty sure if LEA known about this shitstorm he wouldn't be happy, but I'm sure he always had known of the potential for LEB and LET. @Chief simply put it in action and achieved it.
Deal with it, nothing's going to change, ever.
You think @Chief will give this baby away? hah, not in a thousand years
I cannot see Chief being fond of this idea to be honest but then again, if the people here demand it, I can't see him having much choice. Maybe he needs to be a little more open with what is going on so LET members can be more empathetic to him. But hey - he deserves a degree of privacy.
"Hand over LET/B to someone else or we'll..." - what? Desert the site? Not likely, but that's the only thing that will affect him enough to make him want to do anything about it.
Oh no, the community is kicking the basket of money now Those filthy ad dollars.
We've seen Chief recently -- in past month... To token ban me and post CC related company offers.
Sorry to rehash, but since LEB/LET changed ownership it's been totally speculative who-dun-it mystery. Why the site was turned over to profiteers is beyond me.
I am behind what @Liam is doing on here. Civil fellow who seems to put the time in, read, contribute and outreach when needed.
Do I see someone giving up their free meal ticket to benefit the community? Not a chance in hell I'd say.
$98,700/YR to be exact. According to: http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/12523 and http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/150905 That doesn't include whatever they get for that big Colocrossing banner on the front page of LEB, unless that is there for free in exchange of hosting or something. But we'll never know.
I could of sworn LEB had another ad option that I do not see too. Because I did this in a previous thread and it was over $10K/mo between both sites. Where does/did those BuySellAd transactions originally go to anyway?..
Not exactly chump change.
srsbsns thread incoming.
Hah, yeah let's see you give up $100k a year, to sit back and do absolutely nothing. Well, less nothing than you already achieve anyway.
$100k? That's significant for a site that is just Vanilla forum software ala Vanilla install with a few graphic ad blocks on the right side.
Sad in my opinion that people are buying those ads... When the site has free Offers area. I mean the site dimensionally is the homepage and handful or two of relevant classifications of posts. It's not like WHT where there are HUNDREDS of Offers posted a day in a half dozen offer categories.
You've got to be kidding me?
Do the math on the ad spots. Add up between LEB/LET's ad spots, if they're all sold out (which only one spot isn't) it's a cool $8,225 per month.
What needs to happen to slap @Chief in the face, is for every single advertiser to cancel their advertisements - so he suddenly has nodosh.
Try crunching the numbers to get a rough estimate of how much WHT brings in per month on ad revenue. Hell, a sticky thread for one week can be $500 alone. That doesn't include the high cost of banner ads, other forum stickies, premium memberships (that most of us have vowed to not renew again), etc. They rake in the cash like you wouldn't believe.
While we're here... @Liam - do you even get paid for what you do? Not looking for a monetary figure..just..please say you get paid halfway decently? lol
Uh, you might try multiplying by 12, not like 5.9* :P
LEB = $4525/mo (current figure, was over 5K, I swear it. I think an ad spot got removed)
LET = $3700/mo
LEB + LET = $8,225/mo
12 months in a year = $98,700/YR
Yeah, a combined profit of $98,700.
1 ad is spare on LET if anyone wants to buy it, I had thought about it but I'm not going to fund @chief's luxury.
Awaits @shovenose to create shoveforum.com
Nah... though I was reading this thread and am coming up with some ideas...
I don't believe any of the financial dealings of LET/LEB should be posted public, its none of our business to judge the owners. Lets face the facts--everyone here who runs a VPS host knows the power of going onto the homepage and seeing the results of the "free" post. Get over it...businesses are always in business to profit..100k/year or not everyone overall enjoys this community...Just my two cents.
Why isn't that surprising at all. inb4 shoveventures.com
They are already public on the buysellads site and that is through the choice of the LEB/T owner
This is public data.
Uhm, yes it is. Without us as users, there would not even be a LET/LEB.
Which is why LET/LEB being a business is a bad thing. It was a community.
I'm quite curious how you can claim to speak for "everyone", especially in a thread where some clear discontent is being shown.
del