We had to take the forum down as the load was huge on the server. Did some tweaks, hopefully all is now well.

didnt we have a big clicking campaign a while back to get new equipment? did it fail or was the equipment not good enough?

along the same lines, can you tell us how you get money, as in can we just click the ads on top or do we have to buy also? If its just clicks, if every person in the Other Forum clicked once say every five posts, you'd be a rich man in no time ;)

Maybe a direct paypal link and ask people to send in some (trivial to them) token to represent all the bargains they have received. $5 from 1000 users would sure help pay for a new server. :)

I'm up for that! I haven't even been a part of this Forum very long and it has already saved me far more than $5.

-Matt

ameture ;) you jumped on the bandwagon a couple years too late, back when the dot-com bubble was floating high a lot of us got 100's some even 1000's of dollars worth of free stuff :)

That's what I've heard. I guess the band is all played out :)
Oh well, at least I still can have high quality movies.

-Matt

He only gets a referral fee if you purchase using the links. Every once in awhile he posts a bunch of special deals that give him a higher pay off that you can participate in if you want to help out DVDTalk.

The best thing you can do is to actually use his links when you make a purchase.

And check out his complete store referral list:
http://www.dvdtalk.com/support.html

There's more than just DVD stores there. :)

for those of us who aren't planning on purchasing anything for a while are there any regular ads we can click?

<b>randyc</b>, and for <b>damn_skippy</b> <i>et al</i> I believe that Amazon offers a system for allowing small payments ($1 upwards) to be made to third-party sites....

<A HREF="http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/subst/fx/help/how-we-know.html/058-2864286-3228366" Target="_blank">Check it out</a>

what did i do benedict?

Ayup, they call it the Honor System"; it lets you have a little box on your site that visitors can use to make payments of $1 or more via Amazon's ordering system. They charge $0.15 flat rate per payment plus 15% of the total amount, the rest goes in your pocket.

I've mentioned this before, and I'll mention it again, I really think a voluntary donation thing like this would earn you a lot of revenue. There are nearly 20,000 members of this site now, and while nothing like that number are "regulars" as such, I'd still say you've got a core of several thousand devoted regulars who'd happily chip in a few bucks. Even if someone only donates $1, I'm guessing it'd be a hell of a lot more effective than them seeing hundreds of banner ads.

thats a lot amazon is taking though.

Mebbe, but I'm willing to bet that just about every member of these boards has an Amazon account already, but they probably don;t have a Paypal one. I know I wouldn;t sign up for a Paypal account just to donate a few bucks to a website, but the Amazon system lets you just use your existing account details without having to sign up for anything new; if you have cookies on your computer, it's basically a couple of clicks and you've made your donation. If Geoff chose to do something like this, then I'm sure the extra donations would greatly outweigh the Amazon charges.

If you take a $5 donation, which would probably be something like the amount most people would be willing to part with, then Geoff gets $4 out of that. Still nothing to be sniffed at when you multiply it by a couple of thousand members. Could easily pay for a new server or two if nothing else.

Nothing. I meant that the Amazon "micro-donation" system might be useful for people not able or willing to use Paypal. :D For some reason your name came to mind!

This idea of donating money directly to Dvdtalk was suggested a while back by a few of us a number of months back. I even emailed Geoff to see how we might arrange it.

Geoff shot us down.

I have also tried suggesting additional affiliate programs like Crucial.com however this has gone nowhere with no response from Geoff. I also suggested he better target the links on the top of his website and eliminate bigstar(no one shops at that dying site anymore) and replace it with one that will generate income like Deepdiscountdvd.com. I also think the links on the top page should be forum specific( Dell should by on top of the Pc Hardware forum for example). all of these suggestions in the past were not responded to.

I really have decided that change is not going to happen in a way that will increase revenues :(

Oh well I still use the dvdtalk links, but really do not know what more Geoff can expect unless he tries to make some changes.

It is really too bad :(

Geoff's a busy guy. Give him time and he comes through though:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthr...47#post1173953

-David

I just wanted to let all you know that your feedback is not going unheard. I am trying as hard as I can to respond and address all the questions and feedback posted here and sent to me in e-mail.

I started this week with 770 e-mails in my inbox that I needed to respond to and so it's been uphill from there. Also Tuesday was shot as I spent the day kicking my server trying to stop it from caughing up more blood.

So here's my response to so many of those great suggestions we've gotten:

1) Added a link for people to easily bookmark out shopping page. It was a great suggestion... Thanks!

2) Replaced BigStar link with <a href="http://www.cdnow.com/from=cr-2225175-1">CDNow</a> I'll switch that to Deep Discount when they get an affiliate program going (they don't currently have one)

3) Here's the DVD Talk Links to programs users have asked us to join:

<a href="http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=cZdGXyuEAtc&offerid=7965.10000063&type=3&subid=0" >Crucial.com</a><IMG border=0 width=1 height=1 src="http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=cZdGXyuEAtc&bids=7965.10000063&type=3&subid=0" >
<A HREF="http://wetrack.it/shippingonly/af.cgi?5">Shippingonly.com</A>
<a href="http://www.qksrv.net/click-280928-1109310" target="_top" >Best Deal Magazines</a><img src="http://www.qksrv.net/image-280928-1109310" width="1" height="1" border="0">
<a href="http://www.qksrv.net/click-280928-2202639" target="_top" >eBay</a><img src="http://www.qksrv.net/image-280928-2202639" width="1" height="1" border="0">

4) I'm looking at forum specific links, to do it will take some non trivial work. But I will put it on my things to investigate list

5) Here's our paypal donate link for those of you who wish to make a direct contribution:
<!-- Begin PayPal Logo -->
<FORM ACTION="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" METHOD="POST">
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="cmd" VALUE="_xclick">
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="business" VALUE="[email protected]"><INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="item_name" VALUE="DVD Talk Donation"><INPUT TYPE="image" SRC="http://images.paypal.com/images/x-click-but04.gif" BORDER="0" NAME="submit" ALT="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
</FORM>
<!-- End PayPal Logo -->

6) Will Click for DVDs will be switching over to DVD Club forum. Just need to do some of the prep work to make this happen

I care. I listen. :)


[Edited by gkleinman on 06-14-01 at 02:33 PM]