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We are making enough money with the pirates and we have other ways to monetize these users like direct payments on our sit. Also, the pirates seem to be heavily active on the game.
Tim, Instead of just making assumptions about what I was thinking, you could have just asked. We don't keep anything we do at HOTorNOT a secret, in fact we're tragically transparent. Were the assumptions I made 3 months ago wrong? I'm not sure, they might be.. but even if they were wrong, I would have no problem admitting it. Sometimes we are right from the get go.. sometimes we are wrong and have to readjust.
The truth is that I still don't think an advertising model was the wrong thing to pursue. The fact that revenue was already 1/3 of what subscription revenues used to be was a promising sign, because that was all generated using Adsense... selling direct would likely have landed us making more than before. Of course, it would have required a lot of hardwork, but I think it would ultimately have worked out.
No, this decision was not based on business models, it was based on us realizing that worrying about your user experience is more important than how you monetize. If we lost all our users because of the spammers, it wouldn't really matter which business model we chose to apply, right?
As for other free sites being able to deal with the spammer problem while we were not, I really can't say why. Maybe they're smarter than us, or in most cases, still too small to attract the attention of spammers... or maybe they do have a problem but it's just not apparent because they don't talk about it?
I don't know. I don't have insight into their systems, and it is always a presumptuous and unintelligent thing to do to make conclusions about other people's businesses without having any data. So was I wrong 3 months ago? I don't know yet. For all I know, I might be wrong NOW, switching back. What I do know is that until we are confident that we can effectively fight the spammers off without having to charge, we have to keep charging.
But lets be honest.. I'm not going to feel too bad about that, either. Even when I was in the 9th grade flipping burgers at Burger King for $3 an hour, I wouldn't have complained about paying $6 a month for a service that connected me with lots of hotties.. and we got a lot of feedback from women that any guy too cheap to pay $6 was probably not the kind of guy they wanted to date anyway (our system only requires 1 of 2 people to be a paid member for them to communicate.. so even under a subscription model, our site remains effectively free for most women) james