New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Thank you for the answer.
To clarify, if an admin is contacted about the LET giveaway ahead of time can it expect to be stickied? The porkbun one that was stickied comes to mind here, but I wasn't sure if that was something that happened to any eligible giveaway.
The Porkbun giveaway was a direct LowEndTalk giveaway. There was no administrative fee paid because there was no partnership with LowEndBox.
We choose to Sticky it, because we liked the giveaway.
That does not mean that any and all giveaways would be stickied. That is at the discretion of the administration team.
Put simply:
Would a good giveaway on LowEndTalk get a sticky? Yeah, I'd think so. Will all? No.
On a side note - I do have to ask why providers on LET are being charged to provide youtube videos and posts on LEB? Would it not have made more sense to keep LET free (as it always has been) and charge providers wanting to use LEB as the premium facing entity through LEB itself? It sounds like that money doesn't come back directly to LET and is kind of preying on the LET community to fund content for a different entity altogether in part or in full.
It needs to be reviewed and approved by one of the admins first.
I understand the question and don't discount it. I get your perspective.
LowEndBox funnels lots of traffic to LowEndTalk.
As the combined platform grows, LowEndTalk and LowEndBox together, there are more users on LowEndTalk to view provider offers and buy those services.
There is a contingent here in our community who views ads as unacceptable (they block them), views selling user data as evil (I agree and we don't do this) and still also disagree with asking those among us, who profit from LowEndTalk, to contribute to the growth of the platform. I believe that those companies who benefit should contribute to the long term growth and success of LowEndTalk and LowEndBox.
This isn't 2011, if we don't evolve through content creation and big funnel user attraction then the entire platform, including LowEndTalk will not succeed.
To achieve those goals we need some resources to afford those things. Hence the fee model for Provider Tag holders.
I know it's a balance. I sincerely believe that asking Providers, who profit from LowEndTalk, to contribute the equivalent of $16/months (or $13/month for their first payment) is not unreasonable.
Had we rolled this out two years ago before making this place much better, I would get the distrust. But its years later and lots of improvements later. We want to continue that story and now we need the resources to enable it.
The fucker is that despite how unsavoury one might find this particular situation, LET certainly remains far more entertaining than any other hosting-related forum, and in truth more entertaining that a lot of places on the internet.
In this all-to-brief lifetime, can any of us bring ourselves to sacrifice this rarified source of entertainment on a point of principle? Fair play to those that do, but I bet many won't be able to.
IMO, time to let this go and just enjoy fucking about like normal whilst we still can.
Will you tell us what success is, in your mind? What's your ultimate vision for LET?
That might help everyone understand if this is the right place for them, going forwards.
I'm not jbiloh, but it's obvious LET has been very successful in the past year. I'm pretty sure LET broke all-time records for signups, pageviews and posts in 2021. Because recently there has been a trend of posting to join giveaways or to get freebies.
These metrics are all doing very well. It's what matters for things like page rank and advertisers. No one cares if it's mostly ghost accounts here for the giveaways. Numbers are all that matters. Let's not forget covid has been really good for the hosting business. LET/LEB probably got a surge of traffic indirectly thanks to covid too.
I'm not sure how all of this relates to my question, unless you're suggesting that JB's vision for LET is to consistently have a lot of traffic, which I'm sure isn't the case as that's far too simplistic.
I suppose my reply is not really related to the long-term vision, but he has mentioned many times that LET has been making great progress recently. I'm pretty sure JB already considers the current state of LET as successful. This thread has gone on too long, but the gist is they have spent a lot of time improving LET/LEB and there have been many, many improvements thus far. Is that not success? Especially if you look at the numbers -- numbers don't lie. I recall we had two threads breaking the 1 mil view count last year.
And I'd like to know just what his vision of success is, if he's prepared to share it.
Why only $200/yr? Can we increase it more so that we officially kill off the rest of the cest in the industry?
The end is nigh.
@Nekki, great question.
Without getting into the micro details (and goals) of user counts, new threads, subscribers, the macro goal is simple:
A few years ago as I bought LowEndBox and LowEndTalk I asked myself an honest question. Would I want to visit LowEndBox? Would I want to spend time at LowEndTalk? The answers were no. Since then I've spent thousands of hours fixing that. We are making progress, real progress, but there is more to do. Today, I enjoy our content on LowEndBox, and I find LowEndTalk entertaining.
Overall, we will turn LowEndBox into a destination on the internet where IT professionals, hobbyists and technologists visit daily, or more often, to consume high quality text and video content (through our YT channel). The content will consist of news, hosting offers with exclusive discounts, editorials, polls, interviews, tutorials, etc. A tightly integrated experience between content at LowEndBox and LowEndTalk is a goal through the redesign of LowEndBox currently ongoing internally.
We will expand our content team, currently at two (@raindog308 and @Not_Oles) by adding one more individual.
We will enhance our video production through hiring a video content expert. YouTube has an enormous pool of users who will appreciate the new value we are creating through the continuation of our 2021 initiatives. Plus, everyone loves a deal, so the more folks who show up to LowEndBox or LowEndTalk looking to save a buck are more likely to stick around if we are generating interesting content.
We will publish more than two articles per day on LowEndBox, with the goal of hitting 3 pieces per day once our redesign is completed.
I see LowEndTalk and LowEndTalk as a unified platform -- and in order to give people reason to stick around both websites we need to build off what we are already doing. Yes, LowEndTalk is more heavily trafficked today than LowEndBox but that was not always the case. LowEndBox went through a very rough patch in prior years and is now moving forward in a positive direction (unique views up 70% year over year). That is in large part due to our content creation strategy.
Currently LowEndBox is the 3rd highest referrer of traffic to LowEndTalk.
The more traffic both websites receive, and pass back and forth to each other, the healthier and more interesting the platform will be.
For the folks who say "in ain't broke, don't fix lowendtalk" I say that if we stop evolving and enhancing what we do on the entire platform the future looks less promising for the success of both LowEndBox and LowEndTalk. If there are fewer users, there are fewer offers, if there are fewer offers there is fewer fee/advertising revenue, which reduces our capabilities. The number one goal is to make this place more heavily trafficked, and I believe we do that through content creation, giveaways, just cool content, etc.
Well, thanks for answering. Sounds very similar to the sorts of things you talked about when we had discussions about producing content for LEB many years ago.
I'm not clear what the aim is for LET though. Is it to just to have the people you attract to LEB also use LET? If so, what sort of plans do you have to make it more appealing to IT Pros, hobbyists and technologists?
I haven't seen concrete numbers on this.
You only said it's the "third" without percentage.
"Third" could mean either of the following:
The importance of LEB would be vastly different in these two situations.
Also, how many visits are "direct" instead of coming from another site?
If I'm visiting a forum, I would have a bookmark or type the URI, not searching or clicking from another site.
Now would be a good time to bust out them pie charts and graphs.
@jbiloh
Reading the last few postings.
Can you post a "price"/"service" list of optional things that can be purchased (their conditions if applicable) in a way that is transparent to all providers and host-reps? (ie: sticky in the providers forum, grant the host-reps access to said forum).
some of us, would like to know what "options" there are. And that would also be a "level playing field"/transparency sort of thing.
Still waiting on a further price increase before I consider it. $200/yr is too cheap in my opinion.
The end is nigh.
Honestly - you are 100% correct.
Use it and enjoy it while it's still what it is, and move on when its done (soon-ish).
I'm not even sure why I got triggered so much. Perhaps because I started enjoying the place a lot, and it pains me seeing it going to shit, but in the end of the day - nothing lasts forever, so might as well enjoy it while we can.
Thank you for the reality check :-)
That’s the spirit!
Revenue, not profit.
it's business logic
do you support LET company ?
There is nothing in the works right now in that regard, so nothing to share.
How much traffic does LowEndBox get at the moment? is it in the hundreds, thousands per day or more than that?
Companies that can't pay this fee shouldn't get a provider tag anyway.
Good decision to keep this website going.
Literally, of all things literal we should make it $500 imo
Right now, according to Google Site Kit, the last month has been:
Total Impressions
783K
+18.9% (change over prior 28 days)
And here are some exports from Analytics:
https://lowendbox.com/advertise/
Just scroll down.