LFGSS survives by donations

Oh and do Rapha still give affiliate cash? I might post the link in that thread as the sale is on.

Apart from the good deals and sellers on classifieds and DBAD- entertainment, the sheer compound knowledge of the forum hive-mind is gold. I don't really know how much time I spend lurking, but it probably beats Netflix
Monthly donation started!

@Velocio Still opposed to advertising?

I think I've got a regular payment set up but not sure how to check?

I had no idea about this, and over time have spent plenty of monies on many of these...

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_manage-paylist

Thanks. Looks like I need to update the payment...

Monthly donation setup, happy to help this awesome forum.

How does the crc wiggle thing work as i have bought a few things recently . I have quidco linked for a few pennies back ?

If you have a quidco browser extension, then the forum will never get anything as you're getting the money.

The reason that affiliates are collapsing as a source of revenue is because of cash-back browser extensions and programs. Affiliate fees are a way of rewarding referrers of new customers for that introduction, and once a relationship is established then typically the customer is going direct and the affiliate fee is not paid.

Affiliates = payment for customer acquisition.

Yet businesses cannot afford to make payments for customer retention. Instead they retain customers by offering discounts on the actual goods.

Because cash-back programmes were created to exploit the affiliate system, by moving from customer acquisition to getting fees for the regular customer retention... it has eroded the profit margins of the retailers, and so they've been pushing down the % fees. It used to be 4-5% for a customer introduction, Merlin Cycles are now down to 1% and choosing not to acknowledge all transactions, Wiggle / CRC are closer to 2.4% and programmes like QuidCo give you 1% but they keep the 1.4% for themselves.

This is not a criticism... but it is the nature of the beast.

Cash-back programs mean that the revenue stream that has paid for LFGSS and other sites the most over the past decade are drying up and the sites need to either:

• Come direct to the site users for donations (what we do)
  
• Put adverts everywhere (what sites like road.cc do)
  
• Create paywalls for subscribers (what publishing sites do)
  
  

In the early days of the forum, the eBay affiliate program alone paid for the whole site on less traffic than we had today, and with enough spare money that we threw parties and donated to other cycling causes. Today, eBay with 100x the traffic does not even cover 1% of our costs.

Oh well.

If you're using a cash-back program, please donate. There is no point trying to boost the affiliates we use.

Oh and do Rapha still give affiliate cash?

No.

They are considering it again... but they stopped due to low quality leads (cash-back sites).

Still opposed to advertising?

Generally yes, but perhaps this is the reality of things.

An approach recently suggested the site could make £2k+ per month from advertising. Though I imagine I would have to integrate them in such a way that they look like content so it defeats ad-blockers, and it would very aggressively track people. I'm not happy considering the impact this would have on the site (amount of adverts on every page) nor the data we'd be giving away to 3rd parties.

Re caps, @batt and I were working on getting some new caps made (mostly Batt, cause he's designing and actually talking to Milltag about it). The list shows current interest at 61 caps if I counted right. If you're interested we could sell them through the webshop?

If the unit cost of a cap is above £5 (inc VAT) do not do it.

It's not worth it. Just go to Apis directly.

All you'll be doing is giving the majority of revenue to a third party, and making virtually nothing for the forum.

There is also almost no point making low volume runs of caps, you need to start at 250+ to get that unit price down.

If you want to know why caps have not happened, it is simply that the economics are not there. Even at <£5 unit price you need to factor in a 5% wasteage as some will be low quality and cannot be sold (or will be refunded and replaced), and you won't be posting them recorded as the value is low and some will go missing, etc.

You cannot cut the numbers too close... you must produce a large run, at a low price, and aim for a retail price of minimum £10, with P&P on top.

Only then, will a few quid per cap actually end up back as the forum as a donation... and that will only happen when all 250+ have been sold (because until you've broke even you've not actually made any profit).

It's harder than it looks, and it's easy to just make caps and to have no actual money to show for it (the Milltag or other kit producer route).

Oh, and if you do just make caps because you want caps... note that all you've now done is clear what demand there is. Meaning that if someone were willing to front the cash flow for a larger unit run... they'd now be taking a greater risk because demand has been wiped out.

Okay I see where you're coming from there. The fact is we're dealing with to low of a demand and high production prices because of that, so like you say it's not really viable to get a certain amount made and sell at a 10 GBP price point with donation included. Moreover, nobody has been willing to front the large sum of money needed to make it economically viable, given this history I don't think it's likely that somebody will be willing to do this in the near future.

A possible solution might be, since we're dealing with low demand how about selling at a transparent cost price and let people add a donation themselves on top of that? The least it'll do is attract attention to the fact that LFGSS is ran on donations and more importantly it will make people more likely to donate in the short term. If we look at the amount of traffic you get I think the current listed demand at 61 might be the tip of the iceberg?

Anyway if this project doesn't get your blessing I'll probably stop pursuing the effort

A possible solution might be, since we're dealing with low demand how about selling at a transparent cost price and let people add a donation themselves on top of that?

That works :)

Also... whatever price Milltag tell you will be minus the VAT.

We are not VAT registered, so we must pay Milltag VAT. You must factor in that whatever price they tell you needs 20% added on.

We've made that mistake in the past (more than once!) and it's typically been me that picks up the shortfall... hence I no longer have much love for making merchandise.

This looks suspiciously similar to spam... I hope you haven't deployed a botnet Velocio?

1 Attachment

I'll check my monthly donation and amend

Alright, sweet! VAT is definitely something I would have forgotten, thank you

Nope... is that Reddit? I don't really use Reddit, the pagination and threading is broken on there.

I'd advertise Crown for a while, only requiring impressions and click through stats...

The one who quoted the £2k+ recently based on our home page numbers are https://www.snack-media.com/

The adverts appear to be image based display banners mostly. Major campaign stuff, and obviously lots of betting sites.

What about offering advertising space to liked/trusted bike related companies who are already advertising elsewhere (like you did before)?

I don't think anyone would mind a banner at the top that with a few decent brands advert on rotation?

Fuck betting sites, keep it ethical (if you can)

Tried before, it does not work.

Those who are the most relevant and trusted from our perspective are mostly small businesses, LBS's, co-operatives, frame makers and bike builders. Their profit margins are so narrow and there's a good tension between wanting to give them more, and them not being able to afford to experiment with banner advertising. End result? Very little income (<£200 per month) for a large number of page impressions (we're still serving millions of pages per month)... and this takes up inventory (ad space on pages) that would otherwise net 10-20x (if we put betting adverts on it).

And if you do go solo like this, and sell your inventory... you also have to pay £200+ on the software that enables it (gives them stats, reporting, control to provide media, etc)... and yup, it means you've made a loss.

This is why we stopped doing adverts when I previously experimented with it. Unless I permit someone else's ad-insertion tech, and they sell the inventory to absolutely anyone and are only motivated by maximising their % of sales... we simply don't get enough £ to make it worth it.

And if we did do that... then yeah, 25-45 year old males is the dominant audience... you can absolutely be sure we'll be sold to betting companies, etc.

Either the donations get larger and more stable such that we can live without Wiggle / CRC, or we eventually sell ourselves to any advertiser who can pay.