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Subject: 
Re: Brickshelf and the AFOL community
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.general
Date: 
Mon, 16 Jul 2007 01:29:06 GMT
Viewed: 
5198 times
  
As someone who operates a blog (brickpile.com) about LEGO I agree that there is
very little revenue from ads.  The problem with ads in a LEGO-related site is
that there are only so many times people can click on links to legoshop.com and
there just aren't many other advertisers in the rotation.

Brick Journal has the same problem.  They get ads from Tommy's brick engraving,
a few AFOL's who do custom kits, but really there aren't any big-ticket
advertisers interested in AFOL's.

I've given this a lot of thought and haven't come up with any good answers.  The
best I could think of would be somebody like Plano or other maker/sellers of
storage products that AFOL's might want to use.

As for going to a subscription model, Kevin did try that a little bit, by giving
the option to donate in order to avoid the ads.  But there was never much effort
made to making that work well (such as one-click PayPal Subscriptions) and the
ads are easy enough to ignore that most people probably didn't bother.  If there
were bandwidth limits placed on non-paying users, or something like that, then
people might have been more motivated to pay.

Also, regarding bandwidth, that was sheer laziness on Kevin's part.  Yes, he had
a good thumbnail system in place, but what he failed to do was shrink the full
size images.  With most people having multi-megapixel cameras these days,
unshrunk JPEG images are BIG.  Brickshelf shrunk the images by using HTML
width/height attributes, which made it fit on the browser window, but did
nothing to help with bandwidth.  If bandwidth was an issue he would have
displayed the images in 640x480 or 800x600.  This could be done by leveraging
the existing thumbnail generating code.



Message is in Reply To:
  Brickshelf and the AFOL community
 
For those of you who don't know me, I've been in the AFOL community for a long time. I'm also one of the largest hosters of LEGO clubs and other LEGO-related sites. Most of these sites are donated to help the clubs have an internet presence, Some of (...) (17 years ago, 16-Jul-07, to lugnet.general) !! 

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