Majority of Park Slope Parents Won't Pay to Play
We asked, you responded: If the survey we ran yesterday is to be believed, slightly more than half of the subscribers to the Park Slope Parents group are unwilling to pay anything for the service; only 20 percent are happy to pay the proposed $25 fee (or more). Yikes. That does not bode well. We…
We asked, you responded: If the survey we ran yesterday is to be believed, slightly more than half of the subscribers to the Park Slope Parents group are unwilling to pay anything for the service; only 20 percent are happy to pay the proposed $25 fee (or more). Yikes. That does not bode well. We suspect they’re going to have to back away from this idea.
Park Slope Parents to Start Charging for Membership [Brownstoner]
I think those of you scoffing a people’s reluctance to pay are being disingenuous or just don’t understand how the web works.
The fee will kill the site. Period.
They will be very very lucky to get 20% of the users to convert to subscribers, and their annual growth will be very hard pressed to keep pace with attrition (people leaving the area, their kids grow up, lose interest, etc.).
Also, since the site depends on its users to develop content, the volume and quality of its content will decline as its userbase declines.
So the trajectory would be:
13,000 members when free
2,500 members 1st year of subscription
2,200 2nd year
1900 3rd year
1400 4th year
800 5th year
or something like that.
And if you assign a value of “100” to the content currently on the site, I think you’d see something like:
content value: 100 (now)
content value: 90 (1st year of subscription)
content value: 75 (2nd year)
content value: 60 (3rd year)
content value: 40
etc.
Much of the valuable information is very local and very time sensitive. If you want info on the local daycare places, you want information that is less than a year or two old. Anything older is unreliable as the staff at the daycare place will have likely completely turned over in the interim.
The rest of the information — the information that is not local or time sensitive — is generic parenting advice that you can get on 600 places on the web for free.
I’m not saying the site owners don’t “deserve” money. I’m just saying they are going to kill the goose laying the golden eggs by trying to carve it up to get at those eggs.
If they want revenue, they should transfer to their own domain and start selling ad space to diapers.com (which can then have impartial reviews by the site users etc. etc.).
If they have some moral problem with “going commercial”, then I hope their morals are a comfort to them when the site shuts down in 3 years (or goes back to being free…).
I think the PSP list would do just as well with 1/4 of the people (probably it’s size in 2005). I’m shocked people use the website at all. I get the daily digest of the list and only open it about 20% of the time. The lifetime membership idea is a good one. I can imagine paying $25 one year and then never again. I never contribute to the board, but there is some useful crap that gets tossed out there once in a blue moon (dr gorden for example).
They’ve done fundraisers and nobody ponies up. They’ve solicited money and gotten a 4% response. There’s a joke in here somewhere about the mind of the Park Slope parent.
(Who was complaining about getting a zillion emails from the BoCoCa list? Just change your settings and get the daily digest or nothing at all).
If it were a brand new site, maybe they’d pay. But I and many others have grown up using Yahoo forums for free for years. The Internet is free! is a mantra that is hard to overcome.
(free except for you need a computer and Internet access, but after that, it pays for itself)
I’d pay 5 bucks a year. The point is that it has to be nominal. One or two of these moderators might be getting antsy about resume gaps or somesuch and led us to this place.
And from what I understand, that 30,000 count is not strictly accurate. It includes both the membership of the main yahoo group and the classifieds group, which are almost guaranteed to have huge membership duplications. The real count is likely to be closer to 15,000. And I haven’t read anywhere if they’re counting low-activity (less than 1 login/month) or inactive members. Might have just missed that.
I like the lifetime membership idea…also, why don’t they host a silent auction/ raffle/ paid event of some sort to raise some money.
I get why they need $$, and I appreciate the group, even w/the crazies, but I think the subject was broached a little too abruptly.
And, to be fair, they have been asking for voluntary donations through listerv messages and the website, so those saying they’ve never head a solicitation weren’t listening–although, the soliciations were never that “loud”.
$25/yr = less than a small latte per month. I’m not saying I’d pay for this list, since I’m not a parent and have no plans to be, but the idea that it’s an amount the vast majority of park slopers would have any difficulty coughing up is kind of laughable.
“I don’t want to pay $25” is fine. “$25 is too expensive” is a bit of an absurd stance.
id pay 5 bucks for a lifetime membership
max
Per yahoo’s policies, you can’t “resell” the use of the list serve, so the money will be directed to the website. In actuality, the money will be used to pay former volunteers and now “employees” to monitor the list serves. I can see both sides of the story, my beef is why does it have to be $25, and not something more nominal like $10?
The problem to me is that the costs that justify the fee (listserve moderation) don’t add value to the site–for me. If anything, I think PSP suffers from excessive moderation, and I’d rather see it as something closer to an unmoderated Craigslist site. So the $25 isn’t worth it to me.
Those to whom the army of moderators are worth it are welcome to pay; the rest might be better served by the free listserve that someone will probably set up eventually anyway.