Feedback Request Donations + New Monthly Donation Meter

[Joe13]

@Joe Link,
If we started clicking one or two ads every day approximately how many people would it take to make a noticeable difference? And do we have to be logged in for it to help?

Hell, if needs be I'll click an advertisement every time I post if it will help.

Good question Lib

 

[MilitantBEEMER]

I personally will make a donation every time I sell a firearm or higher priced accessories on this website. The least I can do for all the great information this site provides.

 

[Sgt Nambu]

Sooooo! Clicks count, eh?

 

[Joe13]

Sooooo! Clicks count, eh?

Only Likes count!!!

 

[Kruel J]

I just upped to a Silver Supporter. It's the least I can do.

 

[F2CMaDMaXX]

Of course there are a ton of people here running ad blockers, but seriously, it doesn't take a genius nor more than 10 seconds to say don't run on this site.

For supporting the site, it has to be worth it?!
the ads here are not obtrusive.

 

[Joe13]

Of course there are a ton of people here running ad blockers, but seriously, it doesn't take a genius nor more than 10 seconds to say don't run on this site.

For supporting the site, it has to be worth it?!
the ads here are not obtrusive.

Same thoughts here - no scam adverts I have seen and no flashing vivid colors etc

 

[F2CMaDMaXX]

OK just got home and saw the meter, make it red please

 

[Joe13]

I don't get on the laptop much now having my foot up all the time and it doesn't show on mobile phones that I can find.

 

[Velzey]

I guess I just find it odd, I constantly see a steady flow of none contributing members using the classified section to sell all types of items. Members that their only purpose is to pop on here and sell items. Someone with less than 5 postings and they post a $1500 item for sale, and they never contribute. You can't tell me that a fraction of that sale cannot go to help fund this website.
Oh we are afraid if a fee is charged they will leave? They are not contributing now, so it will be a loss if they go elsewhere. I don't think so.

 

[F2CMaDMaXX]

From that point of view, i don't see a reason why a token amount of 'tax' couldn't be asked for when selling an item as a non supporting member.
Perhaps you can sell week long supporting member status, or you know a temporary or something, that maybe gives a taster of the supporting member status, very cheaply and will therefore allow the sale of items.

So it'd be like a demo for it, a trial membership if you will, and it would be cheap enough that it wouldn't be a bad deal to allow the sale of an item *and* you get supporting benefits for a short while.

 

[Member 5605]

There is a wealth of knowledge and people who can do stuff at cost with connections or in house to help with raising revenue and even lowering overhead....

Many will offer up expertise for nothing.

Sucks that $$ is tight for a lot of people. Stuff is sold to pay gas, mortgage and groceries. Looking forward to a change in 2017!

 

[Libertas7]

Good question Lib

Did you just call me a liberal?

 

[Joe13]

Did you just call me a liberal?

Never Im just lazy.



I like the idea of a part time membership for selling things.

Maybe a 3 month pass for $7-9?

(Xbox monthly is now $10 if you buy them by the month and tons of people pay that or the cheaper per month yearly subscription- I only know the new price because I got offered a free month and took it but have to cancel it before the 25th to keep it for auto paying)

I think the bronze yearly is $20?

I would go with more then $5 per quarter to give incentive to go for the yearly one if they think they might sell for more then the 3 months.


I also agree that a lot of folks are selling for gas and food (I'm guilty of that) and are mostly selling stuff for $500 or less - more often is the $300 and under crowd selling to live & for those folks $20 is half a tank of gas or food for a few days (or part of a month of Internet which is now a necessity in this time of technology.

Someone with a $1200-$2500+ gun obviously have some resources and I'd assume could afford the bronze at a minimum.

Would discourage the new members that post stuff for sale with their 1st post as well.

I think as a buyer though, you should have free access to the classifieds and not have to pay to browse.

I'd think setting up that kind of system wouldn't be too outrageous to implement.

It would also be easy for mods to glance thru the for sale ads and close/lock the ones with expired memberships and help keep things cleaner.

Although it's sometime amusing to see a new person res a 3 year old for sale ad and ask if it's still for sale and the OP hasn't been seen in a year or more.

 

[Joe Link]

So this may come across as somewhat strange... But here goes.

A few weeks ago I was listening to Alex Jones (DISCLAIMER: I don't really take him seriously, but I like a good conspiracy theory, even if I think he's a nutter) and he made a really good series of points. He was talking about how ad revenue across the board is shrinking, this is due in part to the rise in ad-blockers, and the fact that there just isn't as much money available for advertising as there once was. As a result of this, several years ago, he had pushed more and more into marketing branded products, for him this is obviously all the goofy stuff like dietary supplements, and prepper supplies (the guy knows his market!).

My suggestion is largely along those lines. Lets design some products for NWAF to sell. I realize this is a complicated endeavor, but one major way to do it would be to sell them through amazon or another large online retailer, have them handle ordering and fulfillment, and then take that money to make it support ongoing operations. The complexity of doing this through amazon is that it requires a UPC for every item. This makes short runs difficult, and they have some gun-aversion in their sales policies.

Yep, this is known as 'affiliate marketing'. From what I understand it's a great source of revenue, I just don't know anything about it. I'll add this to the list of things to look into

As a firearms site, this is primarily gear oriented, and lots of ideas are shared about what to buy. I'm more than willing to devote design and production efforts to helping the site out. But here's my specific idea:

If you guys have ideas for products you want, made of metal, and mostly flat, I'll cad them up in solidworks, let everyone approve them, we get a headcount on how many people want it (with some overrun for people who are not paying attention) I can have things laser-cut for relatively low cost, and if there are a number of different items made from the same material, it does nothing but drive production costs down. An example: If you want 100 butter knives and 10 spoons, but they're all made from the same material, the shape of the 10 spoons just goes to meeting the minimum quantity, provided we don't need to buy more material.

Lets make a few examples, you guys want to do AKM flats? Great, direct me to a drawing of what you want, and I can probably make a few hundred of them for $5-10 each, NWAF sells them for $15-20 (going rate) the profit goes to supporting operations.

If you guys decide you want a bunch of bottle openers that also have a screwdriver blade on one end, and a 1911 barrel bushing wrench, and an M4 stock spanner, along with a bunch of hex wrenches, that's totally doable too.

One of the most valuable things I can donate at the moment is my labor. This is my offer, let me know what I can do.

I really appreciate this offer, thank you. Merchandising hasn't worked out very well for us in the past, but I'd still like to explore this.

I run an ad blocker and video blocker for the obvious reason that most do, they are extremely irritating (especially the auto play videos) and I have to defend myself or I would go crazy. I don't turn it off when I go to a specific site (like here), but, if I/we did, and then clicked on an ad or two (or more) each time we were on the forum would it make a big difference?

So Joe what Im hearing is some of us.. techy people need to get together, grab my old server I have sitting around, launch about 10 - 15 VM's on it and have autoclickers that click on the ad banner and then close the page.. LOL

But seriously in all reality, I do have a old Dell poweredge server with dual xeon 2.4ghz processors and 32gb of ram, and I think its 5 drives across the front with 75gb each, if you want it and it would help you host.. all yours dude.

@Joe Link,
If we started clicking one or two ads every day approximately how many people would it take to make a noticeable difference? And do we have to be logged in for it to help?

After I saw the donate meter in the corner today, I was actually thinking.. hmm might be time to put a bit of a membership onto my paypal CC
also my gun range dues have come in and were lower than last year (2nd year member now) and so.. might be able to throw some to the site.

Sooooo! Clicks count, eh?

While clicks do help, encouraging people to click ads solely to support the site is the quickest way for us to get banned from ad networks and/or upset our direct advertisers. Please don't click ads unless you're legitimately interested

Ad views (impressions) are the #2 most important metric, meaning the more times an ad is shown the more we make. This is the reason we lose revenue when ad blockers are used.

Of course there are a ton of people here running ad blockers, but seriously, it doesn't take a genius nor more than 10 seconds to say don't run on this site.

For supporting the site, it has to be worth it?!
the ads here are not obtrusive.

Thanks! I do my best to avoid running obnoxious ads. Though they pay 3-4 times more, we don't use pop-ups, pop-overs, pop-unders, etc.

I would suggest maybe doing a flat rate fee for firearm ads. Make it reasonable, say $10 to list a gun. For the amount of traffic NWFA sees I think that's super reasonable and worth it to sell a piece. I've had ten times better luck here with selling and buying than armslist.

I guess I just find it odd, I constantly see a steady flow of none contributing members using the classified section to sell all types of items. Members that their only purpose is to pop on here and sell items. Someone with less than 5 postings and they post a $1500 item for sale, and they never contribute. You can't tell me that a fraction of that sale cannot go to help fund this website.
Oh we are afraid if a fee is charged they will leave? They are not contributing now, so it will be a loss if they go elsewhere. I don't think so.

I like the idea of a part time membership for selling things.

Maybe a 3 month pass for $7-9?

(Xbox monthly is now $10 if you buy them by the month and tons of people pay that or the cheaper per month yearly subscription- I only know the new price because I got offered a free month and took it but have to cancel it before the 25th to keep it for auto paying)

I think the bronze yearly is $20?

I would go with more then $5 per quarter to give incentive to go for the yearly one if they think they might sell for more then the 3 months.


I also agree that a lot of folks are selling for gas and food (I'm guilty of that) and are mostly selling stuff for $500 or less - more often is the $300 and under crowd selling to live & for those folks $20 is half a tank of gas or food for a few days (or part of a month of Internet which is now a necessity in this time of technology.

Someone with a $1200-$2500+ gun obviously have some resources and I'd assume could afford the bronze at a minimum.

Would discourage the new members that post stuff for sale with their 1st post as well.

I think as a buyer though, you should have free access to the classifieds and not have to pay to browse.

I'd think setting up that kind of system wouldn't be too outrageous to implement.

It would also be easy for mods to glance thru the for sale ads and close/lock the ones with expired memberships and help keep things cleaner.

Although it's sometime amusing to see a new person res a 3 year old for sale ad and ask if it's still for sale and the OP hasn't been seen in a year or more.

As nice as it would be to make a little on the classified section, the cost outweighs the monetary benefits. Having a free classified section without restrictions is our single largest draw in terms of attracting new people to the site. Many of our most established (and generous) members have come for the classified section and then began participating in the community.

What I'm thinking for the featured ads is a $5 flat rate per ad. Not sure how successful it will be yet, but we'll see

I personally will make a donation every time I sell a firearm or higher priced accessories on this website. The least I can do for all the great information this site provides.

Much appreciated! This is my preferred option, voluntary donations after an item has sold. It would help if we could come up with a way to encourage this

 

[Joe Link]

OK just got home and saw the meter, make it red please

Good idea!

 

[308]

If clicking on the slickgun adds helps, then I'm happy to keep clicking on them. Sometimes there is an actual good deal awaiting. But not always.

 

[Velzey]

I thought the "Supporting Vendor" classified section was a great idea until I tried to sell something there. Very low traffic. I placed the same ad in the normal member section and sold the same item in 4 hours, it sat in the supporting vendor section for a week. That section needs to be moved to the top of each general member classified section.
A featured ad is a great idea, but I think people are use to the classified section being free so they will continue to use it as free. You have a great resource to generate funds here, just need to take a few risks and see how it works out. Changes can always be reversed.

 

[F2CMaDMaXX]

There is a supported vendor classified??.......

Seriously though, that might be better to have them pseudo sticky in the regular section, I doubt many people would actively hit up the vendor classifieds. It just doesn't sound like there would be anything but a store flyer there.

 

[AMProducts]

Yep, this is known as 'affiliate marketing'. From what I understand it's a great source of revenue, I just don't know anything about it. I'll add this to the list of things to look into

I really appreciate this offer, thank you. Merchandising hasn't worked out very well for us in the past, but I'd still like to explore this.

What I'm thinking for the featured ads is a $5 flat rate per ad. Not sure how successful it will be yet, but we'll see

Merchandising is difficult if you don't have an automated venue for sales. It's also online gun sales are quite difficult. If you want, I'll dig through my "big box of weird stuff" and see if there's anything in quantity, if so I'll send it up, treat it as a consignment sale. You owe me nothing until it sells.

Also, $5 flat rate per ad is fine, I would even be willing to pay $5 per sale over a certain dollar value. The big thing back when I had to end my supporting vendor membership was I wasn't selling enough to even cover the cost of the vendor membership.