FAO Everyone - RE Advertising Banner

[SarahPVC]

Just thought we would explain to you all why the banner has appeared in the top left hand corner.

Myself and James have decided to branch into advertising. We have had some people complaining about this like CTW 'selling out' etc but basically me & james decided this was the way forward for CTW, we need to cover the growing costs, ie server, promotion costs etc and are going to put all money made from it back into the site.

 

We feel we have got a lot of talented DJs on the site and want to give them all a chance to prove themselves and we want to promote them properly, we cant obviously do this without the necessary funds.

 

We want to be able to hold our own nights and give our members chance to all meet up to see our very own Djs play. What a buzz that would be to host something on the scale of Gatecrasher one day!

 

We felt that advertising was the only way forward to enable CTW to become more than just a message board.

I beleive a few people have a few issues with the site running slow etc we are going to look into this.

If anyone has any issues they dont want to post on here you can email / PM myself or James, we value everyones opinion.

[MattD]

I think it's a good idea. If it helps the site move forward, I'm all for it

[James]

I'm just mirroring exactly what Sarah has stated and that I have been and always WILL be in this game "for the love of clubbing" and no other reason. The server & software licence costs last year ran into the £1000s and now that the site is almost twice as popular and growing at a ridiculous rate its clear we need some other financial support apart from out of our own pockets just to keep the site running. We are already over our 40gig data transfer limit a month and to get onto unlimited bandwidth deals i've been quotes prices of no less than £600 a month - that should put things into perspective a bit ! Unfortunately you still cant earn anything even near that figure in advertising and so it certainly doesnt solve the problem in either case. We're also REALLY wanting to get a new media server which can host video from clubs we want to take and also DJ mp3 mixes from CDs and other bandwidth intensive stuff. We also want to host a proper web radio station which again is not cheap as you need proper licencing etc.. The site will continue to make a loss for a good few months if not a couple of years until we're able to make 'real' money from doing our own nights and even providing merchandising etc.. BUT... once it does you have our word that it will ALL go back into growing this fun project and NOT to support our clubbing habits! My dream is to TRULY make this a GLOBAL site - again to do this it requires bigger and better servers and proper coverage of clubs abroad and doing what we do over here in other countries - I'm 100% certain its going to happen but its still a long way off. I also want to set up automatic ordering/printing of pictures, online payments for tickets, automated guestlists - loads - all carry a license costs nd/or an amazing amount of planning - my allocated 3 hours a night after w*rk is just not enough !

 

As with any decisions I make i'm ALWAYS concerned about what others may be thinking - rightly or wrongly. Some people tell me "you can do what you want you built it" but i dont agree with this - the site is nothing without its people and you cant just choose to ignore them - we [censored] together and we all benefit. Anyway, heres a post talking about my concerns over advertising a while back - i was the last person who wanted to go the advertising route but its a necessity now ...

 

http://community.clubtheworld.uk/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB12&Number=48580&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

 

Anyone who knows me and has been around from the beginning will know my precise reasons for building this site and continuing to develop it so i'm not too worried about 5 people out of 1200 complaining. I would just say that rather than moan about it why dont you get involved like 10 or so others are doing regularly. The biggest lesson I learnt last year was that you cant please everyone - I thought I could but was proved wrong unfortunately.

 

To be quite honest it would almost be better if we didnt grow and stayed at 1200 members for a while so the server costs dont shoot up - but it would seem kind of crazy to restict the growth of a successful site as i know many of you are really appreciating meeting up with new people all the time.

 

I'm still 100% positive that we will truly be able to have an event of 1000s one day - where everyone has seen or heard of everyone - imagine that !

[SarahPVC]

Well said James - i think between us we have covered everything.

[Signum]

I think most of us agree on what you've said, hear hear!

[Blink]

James, I never realised quite how expensive this site was to run, anything (within reason ) that you need to do to cover costs and keep your dream going are fine by me.

 

Personally, i have no problems with the banners at the moment, as they are small, and aimed at the populous of the site. I think it is quite useful that you can be chatting about a night, then you can click on a banner which will point you to their website where you can purchase a ticket for it (seems like sensible integration to me).

 

As an aside, is it set up at the moment, so the sites who's banners you have up record how many hits they get directed from this site?