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Originally Posted by Adrienne  That is an interesting idea Seeker. With both tho, do you think enough people would be willing to pay? It also might add more forum admin and mod overhead. |
Yeah, I think a number of people would be willing to pay for a private forum on top of this forum. For example, people like Aspiring-to-Clarity who have stopped posting because her family could start accessing her posts. There's other people we've dealt with privately (as moderators) who stopped posting and asked us to remove their posts because they realized it was being googled. There's also several people I've talked to who use their real name on here who explicitly are very guarded in what they write because they don't want their real name to be goggled with what they write or want their offline family to know of an issue they are facing. Even in my Social Growth Threat right now, there are some people who aren't writing what's going on with them because they don't want that to be public and viewed by non-forum members too and I've been contacted privately to setup some type of system for us to communicate privately. I believe there is a good number of people who would be willing to use such a private system on top of this forum, and whom would benefit in a way they are not able to benefit from this forum. How many exactly, I don't know.
It will add forum overhead no doubt about it. However, with the income, a forum administrator could be hired to take care of the increased forum overhead, plus some of the current forum overhead.
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Originally Posted by Rose of Cairo $20 a year isn't much. I mean, it's just $20! Hello?!!! If they're not willing to invest twenty bucks in their personal development, I highly doubt they mean it seriously. |
I know the $20/year is insignificant to some people of us using this PD forum. I know if this forum became membership-only, I would pay that amount, and would probably even be willing to pay much higher. However, that's only because I've been in here a long time and I can look back and see how how much I've gained from it.
However, when I first became a member on here, I would not have paid that amount at all. I wouldn't even have considered it. I was reading books about PD, as well as reading Steve's blog, however, I wasn't in a financial place in my life where I felt it would be reasonable to pay $20 for a discussion forum. I didn't start posting much until 7 months after I first became a member (My first account actually wasn't this account), and I didn't really start opening myself to good PD feedback until maybe a year after I first became a member. I only became open to being open to getting good PD feedback on my personal life after having participated so long on this forum and seeing other people get great results from it. So people like me who were in that place won't pay the $20.
Furthermore, the $20/year isn't just about paying that amount of money. It's also about having to reveal who you are to the administrator and perhaps moderators of the site. So given that this is a personal development forum where a number of people want to stay anonymous from even the administrators and moderators (such I did at first), having the requirement to pay $20 will prevent them from becoming members. So those people won't pay the $20.
I'm sure there are many people who are serious about their personal development who wouldn't pay the $20 to use an online forum, but yet use this forum in a way that helps them grow and contributes to this forum. Simply to state that they aren't willing to pay that amount to equate that to mean that they aren't serious about personal development is a fallacy.
Furthermore, this forum serves as a wonderful introduction to personal development to people who aren't serious about it. I can name some members who came on here not serious about PD the way others might be, but who had questions about improving their own life and who overtime have become more and more serious about personal development. Having this requirement to pay $20 to even start participating on this forum would cut those people off.
Therefore, having a subscription-based model will substantially reduce the number of people using this forum. I'm not saying we shouldn't move to a subscription-based model. Maybe it's for the best, even though it would completely change this community.
However, I am saying that there are many people who are and who would be serious about personal development who would be cut out from using this forum. To simply state that $20 is an irrelevant amount is only to address things from your own personal perspective, and not to address it from the perspective of all types of different individuals whose personality and concerns are quite different from your own.
On the other hand, by adding a private membership-based forum to this site, it would allow the current community to keep existing, while adding another additional way for many people to use this forum to grow in a way they currently aren't able to. This could produce additional revenue which could allow the hiring of someone who can serve as forum administrator which would take off the load of administrating this site from Erin and Steve so they can go and produce more podcasts and products for us
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