Quality of SP mentors/mods

[Clinton]

JJMcClure, with the greatest respect to HAWK, if she said that she's talking through her hat. Their forum doesn't exist indepent of the revenue generation, it's part and parcel of it. SP is, unlike some sites, a commercial operation and there's nothing wrong with that. As a business it has salary costs, rent and other business expenses. Sarah may, as forum admin, take care only of the forum and not get involved in backoffice accounts, but it would be naive to pretend that didn't exist. She wouldn't be running a forum if SP wasn't making money hands over fist on it. SP ain't no charity.

I disagree with hoop that more fluff means more revenue (or reducing fluff would reduce revenue). If you allow fluff it has a tendency to grow and grow and consume the productive discussions. Why do you think DP doesn't command high ad rates?

More fluff at an established forum like SP would lead longer term to a reduction in traffic and advertisers would start demanding discounts. Income would drop. IMO, if they reduce the fluff they will actually get more visitors, visitors who stay longer, visitors who contribute more and the ability to make even more money from advertisers (and the sale of their material).

[hooperman]

More fluff at an established forum like SP would lead longer term to a reduction in traffic and advertisers would start demanding discounts. Income would drop. IMO, if they reduce the fluff they will actually get more visitors, visitors who stay longer, visitors who contribute more and the ability to make even more money from advertisers (and the sale of their material).

Hmmmm. Allowing fluff raises pageviews, but longer term there is a negative impact as the "quality" of the audience goes down (less sales via the advertising). Certainly, bringing in effective measures to reduce the amount of fluff requires hard work, especially on SP's scale, and pageviews go down in the short term. Do you think that the people who run SP are more interested in short term gain, then?

[JJMcClure]

I've not been keeping up to date with this, so can you remember where she said that?

First post in this thread - http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=706611

JJMcClure, with the greatest respect to HAWK, if she said that she's talking through her hat.

What can I say, I don't understand how it can be true either but on the other hand I'd like to believe her and as I said earlier, I see no benefit to lying about it. If they're genuinely not using the forum to generate revenue then in my view they're leaving money on the table pointlessly.

I disagree with hoop that more fluff means more revenue (or reducing fluff would reduce revenue).

Me too. Fluff is not a good targeted audience, they're only interested in dropping their link and leaving and they form a negative feedback loop in that the more fluff there is the less 'proper' members there are and they're the ones buying the ebooks etc.

[hooperman]

What can I say, I don't understand how it can be true either but on the other hand I'd like to believe her and as I said earlier, I see no benefit to lying about it. If they're genuinely not using the forum to generate revenue then in my view they're leaving money on the table pointlessly.

Thanks for the link. I took what she said to be an effort to set herself and other volunteers aside from SP management - who are interested in generating revenue from the forum.

From that thread you linked:

Before I ask you to tell my why you think this culture change has occurred, I first need to point out that the quote isn't accurate in it's entirety. Our SitePoint community actually stands beside the SitePoint 'the company' and is not a money making venture in any way, shape or form. Forum staff are not responsible for making money for the company. There is no onus on me as Community Manager to generate any kind of income for SitePoint.

So forum staff aren't making money from the forum, but SP The Company is.

[tke71709]

So forum staff aren't making money from the forum, but SP The Company is.

Again technically untrue, Hawk is a paid employee and does make money for managing the forum. The onus of her job is not generate revenue directly but to keep the community running and growing so that SP can make money off the forum, we're just splitting hairs here.

Anyone who doesn't think that the forums at SP help to generate revenue is naive at best. How do you think they can afford to pay high five figures to authors to write those books they sell?

[Clinton]

Is that what they pay authors!?

[tke71709]

Is that what they pay authors!?

I was chatting about a project with a somewhat well known IM blogger (low end of the scale from a blog perspective) and he mentioned to me that SP approached him about writing a "book", I laughed and asked how many pennies they offered him and that was his response to me. I can't confirm that with SP or know if they pay their programming gurus the same amount but that is what he said at the time and he had no reason to lie as I was looking for a favour from him, not vice versa.

They've built up a hell of a mailing list, plus their forum members, plus their blog readers. I'm sure any book they push they sell in volume.

[Clinton]

High five figures suggests $50K+

I have my doubts.

[tke71709]

Like I said, I only have his word for it.

He does make 6 figures or so from his web properties and he was a fairly well known name at SP back in the day so that might have given them some branding recognition to sell the book. You'd have to ask some of their other authors to see what they were offered.

[HAWK]

Sorry guys, didn't mean to ignore you for so long.

Re $. Yeah, of course we make advertising revenue from the forums, that goes without saying. What I mean when I say that the forums are separate from the financial side of the business is that my job is not to build the community so that we can make money from them. We do not use our community to market or sell to. To illustrate that point - I have just made a policy that says that we will no longer feature sales or marketing threads. The front page is for discussion threads only. The purpose of the forums is NOT to make money. Take our Facebook community as a further example - we don't advertise there but we are focusing on building that community as much as possible.

Anyway, I didn't come here to debate or justify my position, but I do want to make it clear that once again, I don't have a hidden agenda. JJ, as always I appreciate you having my back.

How can we help, Sarah?
I'm sure you're working really hard. Where do you think the problem is?

Depends what you mean by 'the problem'. This thread is about the quality of staff. With the exception of a couple of renegade staff members, I'm generally very happy with the quality. I won't discuss individuals, so I'll leave it at that.

I think the issue is changing in my eyes. When I first started in this job I was concerned about the quality of the forums and the fact that things had changed since the days when I joined up. I have since accepted that a large part of that is a sign of the times. Forums were new back then. Spamming wasn't big business. Sure, we could have a paid forum (and probably will at some point) and it would probably be high quality like this one, but that's not what SP is about any more. I'm ok with that. For every 'this place sucks now' post I get a 'this place rocks' one. I'm not sure that there is an issue that needs fixing.

We are losing (have lost) some of the old school knowledge - like you guys - but attrition is a natural phenomenon. I think our focus has changed from a forum where experienced people (no pun intended) go to bounce ideas off their peers, to one where new comers in the field go to get advice and direction. We are still doing that really well.

When I first posted here at the start of the year, I was brand new in the job and I was panicking about the fact that things weren't what they used to be. I reacted emotionally to every bad thing that anyone said and I wanted to protect my baby. Now I think I see it for what it is, and I'm proud of it's good bits and accepting of it's bad. I don't want to 'fix' it, I want to develop it.

So... what can you do to help? You could start off by telling me what you think needs fixing.