Hmmmm....We don't have ads on our forum, as I'm sure is the case with many others. I really love the ad-free experience, but we also don't have much revenue. I want the best for our forum so usually try to buy the ad-free version, but am wondering if we could afford it.
I think we could pay a $250 fee up front. Even $10 a month might feel like a lot to us unless we grow a lot. We only have about 75 logged in members visit us every 48 hours, so it's hard to justify too many monthly costs.
We'd probably still use an ad-supported version, so maybe that's where we would fit into the business model.
Is there any way of charging us based on seats? The key is that big boards and the boards with advertising will be willing to pay far more than the smaller niche boards and those without advertising. It would be great if in your subscription model you could charge based on, say, the number of posts so that forums with less than 100,000 posts pay less than forums with more than 1,000,000. Perhaps it could be based on the number of concurrent users (across our entire site we only get about 2.5 pageviews per minute).
I hope the big board owners don't object to this idea because if you don't do something like this, you'll likely have to set the "ad-free" price so high that only big boards can afford it. That would actually hurt everyone because then the big board owners would basically have to cover all of your development costs without us small fries being able to pitch in some as well. (This is why economists generally approve of tiered pricing - it helps everyone).
The key would be finding the right variable to charge based on. Perhaps new posts per day? This should be something that the software would have to be able to access accurately through the API for the app to work.
Another great opportunity would be a fremium model where the individual user could pay to have the ads removed. I know I would do that. I hate ads.
