| Charging would take away all the tabloid bullshit like Little Whip's blog (blogs for reaction) and only leave reasonable writers. |
Well first that is not likely to be the result. I'm quite unreasonable and could afford any premium site.
As for the main issue, no, there won't be a JoeUser premium program any time soon. The service to revenue ratio just doesn't work out.
Just looking at the math:
In a typical month we get about 300 new blog sites. Probably 3 maybe 5 of them would become premium members. Even at $40 per year, that would just not be enough.
Let's say 100 those blog sites that get created now became premium at $40 apiece. That's still only $4,000 per month. It's still not even close enough.
In order to justify making a premium JU, the site would have to make approximately $500,000 per year. And there's just no way that would happen. Especially when there's much easier ways with our other sites to do that.
What people need to understand is this:
Stardock, which owns this site, is a privately held company.
It is privately held not by some partnership or by investors but essentially one person. Me.
Because if that, I can have the company do things that are not profit driven such as have a free blog site simply because it's fun and cool.
Stardock does a lot of things that are not business related but simply because they're fun and cool.
As a CEO, my job is to serve the shareholder. And as long as Stardock remains economically strong (i.e. profitable) then there's no problem with JoeUser.
The problem some people run into is that they mistakenly think everything that I or Stardock do has to have some business justification. It doesn't. We're not publicly traded. As long as it's legal, we can do whatever we want. So when some user like LW's husband pisses me off, I can ban him and anyone else that decided to try to dogpile on. That's because JoeUser isn't a business. It's just a hobby that I share with anonymous friends from around the world. And it's going to stay that way for the foresable future.
