Marketing Microcosm

I see its now a flat rate of £5/month.

What is the thinking behind that? Do you think that will hinder take up, or is it a pragmatic decision that anyone not willing to pay £5/m is unlikely to make you much money anyway?

(feel free to tell me to stop being so nosey, just interested)

About page looks really nice, like an actual real professional site

Actually the purpose of the flat-rate fee is just to stop us going bankrupt very fast if it turns out we're the new Yahoo Groups.

We firmly believe there is more money in the transactions within a community than within a hosting fee, and that charging a hosting fee is to burden the forum with a problem of "How do we make it cover it's costs?".

And what happens if a guy creates a forum for his 10 golf buddies? That is unlikely to every produce transactions that will make us revenue, what then?

Whilst the cost of a forum is negligible, and the cost of an active user is negligible, if you have 10,000 forums with 100,000 active users... the cost is no longer trivial.

So the $10 per month, £5 per month... whatever that basic fee is, it's just to ensure that for 10,000 forums we'd be making north of £0.5m in revenue per year and thus would not be sunk by our optimistic naivety (that all forums would be like LFGSS).