I missed where Saks or Wal-Mart charged people a fee just to walk into the store to look. The NYT does charge you to buy the whole newspaper, but there's no specific charge for looking at the classifieds. I think it makes perfect sense to charge a fee to post sale items, but it doesn't make sense to charge people to view those posts. (And I don't think anyone here is disputing that the owner of the forum can do whatever he wants with charging people for it.)
I appreciate all the feedback, but I'm not going to be drawn into a debate over this. However, in the interest of clarity I will point out a few things and then leave it for the rest of you to discuss. Again, no one is "asking" anyone to do anything. It's merely an option being offered to those who want it.
First, Saks and Wal-Mart are retail stores. They make money from the sale of the
item, so of course they let you browse for free. Apples and oranges. Ebay is a big classified system, but they actually get a piece of the sale. They charge 15% for the ad plus a minimum of 3% for the PayPal fees. So depending on the type of item, Ebay gets 18% of every listing! Too, PayPal takes a chunk of all of our subscription fees, so GS only gets a portion of it.
Second, 99% of the information is in the title of an ad. If everyone were allowed to view the classified ads for free and the site doesn't get a portion of the sale, then people will simply view for free and then use a PM to work a deal in private, effectively bypassing the whole emporium system.
TGP has had lots of problems with this and they can get pretty aggressive in banning people if they catch you doing an end-run. And so at one point they made it so you could view the ads, but until you paid for a subscription you couldn't email, PM, or otherwise contact the seller. On vBulletin-powered sites with an emporium, the usual practice is to block non-subscribers from viewing the name of the person who posted the ad. So you could see the ad, but you had no idea who was selling and no way to contact them without subscribing (Xenforo's system currently lacks that option).
If you don't limit it in some way, then there's no point to having a subscription fee at all as the vast majority of people will simply bypass the system. I know.
Look, guys, I can do away with the whole concept and plaster ads everywhere,
like this, if you prefer. Yes? But that's a crappy option as it's a ton of additional work for me, and most of you will simply activate ad buster software anyway, so the income from that option would be minimal without getting draconian and intrusive. Those ads make the forums very slow and cause compatibility problems. I very much doubt the majority will go along with that.
And in response to some earlier questions, no, we get no support whatsoever from anywhere else. And the "22,000 members" figure includes every single account since the inception of the site, including all the spammers we ban daily. TGP has 140k members, with maybe 5,000 being active. Pretty typical for a forum. GS has perhaps 500-600 active members.
Even if the subscription system is well received, my expectation is that it won't even cover the monthly server, bandwidth, and software licenses. But I'm hopeful it will at least help a bit.
