I never really understood the value in giving away your competitive advantage (knowledge of what sources work). It's cool if you want an ego stroke... but is it really smart business? Talking about concepts makes sense... delivering stuff on a silver platter (which most of you want) makes no sense
edit: there was even a thread here outlining how someone was selling local leads to businesses and it still had tons of haters moaning about its TOO MUCH WORK!!
Here is a concept for you guys... if its easy everyone is doing it and it won't last long... if its hard nobody is doing it and you can create a long term business
You make excellent and very logical points.
A community is not really an ideal place for the info that does reside on here. Forums were supposed to be more about collaboration and contributing, more so like a never closing wikipedia entry where all good points could be added to the original post, by contributors part of the 'thread conversation'. Unfortunately due to irresponsible people things like that just couldn't be added here, options wise to be able to add on and edit contribution posts.
Right now I'm focusing on getting things set up to where we can begin the intake of paid members into two groups, we don't have set names for these two groups, I suppose we can label them with some "feel special" names like "Gold Premium" and "Glitter Premium" or whatever.. But the point is to maintain two groups, both paid, both separate from the free area, as an upgrade. It's really more of a paid holding pattern for some time while we curate and organize the huge amount of good vs mehh content, resources and tools we've built up on the forum and behind the scenes over the years.
Again, slow and steady. The private and paid areas and groups will all have more than enough value tied to it so that you may see this as an investment and not as a tax. I could easily go the whole tax route and say to hell with everyone and fuck the value play altogether. But as I've stated and showed many times before, I have a real vision for what I want to shape the WickedFire brand into, and it's not just a forum.
I'm also heading a small crew of developers to re-purpose or re-calibrate most of the behind the scenes R&D apps and scripts I've designed and had others make on our behalf, most have been working prototypes with plans for something more robust but never made it to that point. Much of it was focused on gaming the affiliate networks and campaigns/traffic sources. More so keeping the networks in check. Now that we're out of it, there's no reason to let them have it easy much anymore. I firmly believe that if any one source had access to any of this, they could very quickly become a behemoth of a network if that were their purpose. So the question remains do we responsibly decommission them so no one single entity has access to them again or do we break them up and re-purpose them for paid access or do we just sell reports instead of giving total access, etc. Then there is the SEO/SEM/REPM stuff, and that's a whole 'nother set of challenges on what do we do with this, how can we make this work for the next chapter or do we just scrap it and forge ahead? From network beacons to profitable niche dev resouces, it's like a boneyard behind the scenes that we never gave much access to and it's something on top of what you see out here, that needs to be handled as part of this reshaping of WF. I'll be listing out some short manifests of what we've got and a quick 'wtf is this thing' line on it, maybe some screen shots for the really in-depth shit. And I'll leave it to those in the upper tier group to collaborate and see what we can do with it and let them play around and see if they can figure out better uses for it too.
But again, this whole project to take the forum from what it was for the last nine years and turn it into what I want it to become will take time, two years by my estimation. So if you're going to join and pay, and you just want to read the fun shit from before in the many sections that are now password protected, that's fine, you join the standard premium group, I'm playing around with $50'ish price point, and you don't have to contribute anymore anyway, though you'll have more value added to it. You'll also get much of what's used and abused trickled down to you from the other premium group at some point, just not first access. Though it will never be fully shared on the free forum areas.
But for those who want more value on top of the additions to that, there's a far more serious group, though not really that much more expensive at like $80-$90 a month. When I have the final plan that Brandon and I agree upon I'll put it up and list what you get and it's on you to decide if you want to come on in or not. I'm going to cap the shit out of it if things become troubling to manage during this revamp period, but as for now, it's more so pay to play, let's see who fucks up and who doesn't fit vs an application process.
We're pretty close to releasing it, just need that final rundown of what everyone gets, flip the coin to decide on the price and group labels, set it all up and start going at it.
If anyone has any examples on how I can curate, organize and distribute this better than in my complex mind, please pm me a better solution. I'm pretty open for that at this point.
Everyone else resurrecting your old accounts, cool story? I mean, you came here, you leeched, you left here, and now that it's showing signs of being valuable again, you're back... and you want praise and applause? Go fuck yourself. You're not cool so stop announcing it and making yourselves look ridiculous.
