iAmCaffeine wrote:My main issue is that buying premium for someone else costs more than buying it for yourself. That is completely counter productive to increasing membership.
I agree with you it's a bad policy. Just wanted to make that clear before I answered Ron's comment.
Ronaldinho wrote:However this has been lost over the years, I have no idea who BigWHAM is (never even seen him post?) but he's obviously doing this to make money no other reason, I suppose when you buy a website you don't have that love for it like you would if you built it from scratch so these decisions are 100% money related,
BW did post a bit when he first took over, but the people who didn't like his changes were pretty savage in their attacks, and he withdrew from the forums rather than stress about it. I can pretty much understand that decision.
But I would challenge you about who loves this website more.
Lackattack started it, and in the beginning it was his lovechild, but after the first couple years there is clear evidence that he got bored with it. After those first two years he withdrew from the community, rarely played a game here, stopped accepting PMs, and had the "Community Manager" handle all interaction with the community and the forums. He may have loved it at the beginning, but the love affair turned sour pretty early.
CC peaked in 2009, and by then there was almost no direct interaction with lackattack. Updates were fewer and fewer after that, and the "Community Manager" spent most of his time making excuses for why there were no updates, and vague promises of updates to come in the future. As the years went by, the promises got more vague over time, as he got progressively more embarrassed about having to make excuses for the absent owner. At that time (and note this, because it becomes significant) CC was still making (by my estimate) something between $250,000 and $300,000 a year. CC was in decline after 2009, but still making decent money. Lackattack, even if he was sick of the place,
could have hired an outside programmer to make some upgrades. (Actually, he did, but he cheaped out and hired unknown offshore programmers who didn't have a clue. He wouldn't spend the money to hire anyone good.)
By the end of 2012, CC was in freefall, and lackattack ditched it for an undisclosed price. All these numbers are estimates based on the number of the people on the scoreboard and the percentage that are premium, but I'm guessing that in the 5 years lackattack had made $500,000 clear on the site even
before the sale.
The next owner was El_Jefe. El_Jefe spent a lot of money advertising CC. Nobody knows how much money, but the El_Jefe reign was the only time that I saw advertisements for CC on other sites. Advertising isn't cheap, so I suspect it was a lot of money. The advertising didn't help. Thousands of new people came and checked out the site, but few of them stayed. The decline of CC slowed down but didn't stop. Whether the ads were targetted at the wrong group or whether CC is an acquired taste that needs to be sold by word-of-mouth, who can say? El_Jefe definitely lost his shirt, because his love affair with CC also soured quickly, and in under a year he was selling it again. During his reign, membership dropped from 14K to 12K, and the estimated income from probably an annualized $170K to an annualized $130K or thereabouts.
The third owner was/is BW. He too was a long-time player. Actually he was a Top 10 player long ago. Taking over CC was definitely a culmination of a long love affair. BW doesn't have El_Jefe's millions to play with, but at least he was a techie. The membership was still dropping rapidly, and the site was long overdue for a revamp, so with no money to pay for outside help, he started working long days writing updates himself. The first two changes he introduced -- polymorphic games and 12-player games -- were very popular and got tons of praise. After that, however, there were some unpopular updates, and the community which loved him in November of 2013 was hating him by January of 2014. Amazing how fast people will turn on you, and how viciously. If you'd read some of the stuff that was posted here in early 2014 you'd think BW was the left hand of Satan.
Since then, of course, membership has dropped even more, and revenue, even with the price increase, is probably below $100K annually. Part of the problem is that the people who wanted change didn't get enough of it to make them happy, and meanwhile the people who don't like change have gotten a lot more of it than they want. There's no solution to that. If the new owners had followed lackattack's Do Nothing strategy, the site would still have declined, albeit probably a little more slowly. We might be at 9500 members now instead of 7500. BW doesn't believe in waiting to die slowly. He believes in continuing to try new things, always hoping that the next update is the one that will ignite people's imagination and give the site new life.
So, Ronnie, I ask you now. Who loves this site most? The original founder, who cleared at least half a mill, and then walked away when it started going downhill instead of trying to save it? Or the second owner, who unfortunately didn't have any tech knowledge, but poured big bucks into trying to reverse the decline through advertising? Or the third owner, who took over the site when it was already half way into the grave, and has been working 14 hour days ever since trying to modernize it and save it?
Am assuming english classes were a nightmare at highschool. You poor thing.
