I’m a little tired of everybody having a premium section
I was just over at www.searchengineland.com and 2 pages into reading article titles they tell me I got to pay to read more. On twitter I saw that www.jensense.com has a “Pro” section. www.seobook.com, www.seomoz.com, www.webmasterworld.com, www.shoemoney.com and I’m sure there are others all have premium sections. I miss the old days when everybody talked online and you did not have to pay them extra. These people are all now very rich because they gave great advice online. Now that they are all famous they want to make an extra buck. They get lots of business from giving away information in the past and now they just rest on that fame and charge for their information. They don’t have to prove that they are smart any more so they want to charge us for it.
Another thing that has happened is that the forums suck now that everybody has their own website. You used to be able to go to one or two forums and talk with everybody now you have to go visit 20 websites to talk to the same people. At least everybody is getting on twitter but you don’t get discussions like you did on the forums.
My site is still free.
I do appreciate that Barry
Yes, the forums aren’t what they used to be because experts realised that they could monetise their knowledge and build a following. Like you I don’t like paying for premium content , mainly because I am unlikely to learn new stuff in those places except once in a while and partly because the prices are too high in a personal ROI sense.
That’s because they need newbies as potential customers (for other services), not experts who might outshine them. A price tag works well to keep some competitors out.
I have kept my loyalty to Webmasterworld as it was the first authoritative forum I encountered and I have been a speaker at Pubcons a couple of years now. Some of its leading lights have left, never to return, and have built their own sites. Good luck to them.
This is the big problem with popluar sites – people see tham as a way of turning them into big money spinners and forget the purpose of the site in the first place. Once a premium section appears it’s generally the start of a decline of the site as user is what makes the majority of sites what they are.