New terms - commercial content on RMweb

[Stubby47]

10 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

Why not ask that very question privately, instead of publicly?

 

It is intended to be a business deal, which would be confidential and not general knowledge to everyone. 

From a statement a little earlier, you won't be the first. 

 

Because asking in public might make others realise they too fall into that, or a similar, category.

[dj_crisp]

14 minutes ago, Stubby47 said:

 

Because asking in public might make others realise they too fall into that, or a similar, category.

 

Tbh I'm quite interested to hear the answer to your question. 

 

[chuffinghell]

44 minutes ago, Stubby47 said:

 

Because asking in public might make others realise they too fall into that, or a similar, category.

I thought that but as usual I’m wrong

 

I didn’t think it fair to fill up Andy’s inbox with generic questions

 

But as I’m not a business I obviously had no right to ask the question

 

My bad

 

 

Edited August 3 by chuffinghell

[adb968008]

3 hours ago, Garry D100 said:

 

We may need to rename the forum MothercareWeb with the amount of dummies being spat out and toys flying out of prams.

Noo not Mothercare… its one of the few British household names that makes Hornby’s performance look like a rockstar.

 

Mothercare Share price now 4p from £13 !

Edited August 3 by adb968008

[kevinlms]

46 minutes ago, Stubby47 said:

 

Because asking in public might make others realise they too fall into that, or a similar, category.

Good idea, he could say that AFTER coming to an arrangement, or finding out that he didn't need one.

Edited August 3 by kevinlms
More info

[AY Mod]

Do me a favour, give it a rest until Monday please.

[NHY 581]

1 hour ago, Stubby47 said:

 

Are you then distinguishing those who wish to sell items, eg surplus locos, from those who wish to sell services (eg weathering), or is someone who wishes to sell anything defined as a 'trader'?

 

Gold Membership already allows members to sell items, what is the difference between a private seller, and a small trader ?

 

Stu, that question has  been answered further up thread. Probably tricky to locate amongst the earlier Cambridge coloured Teddy fluff. 

 

No, my response is in relation to small businesses or trader offering a service or a product (s), subject to how Warners see the activities of said small business/ trader. 

 

As I see it, my suggested Platinum Membership could bridge the gap between individual members selling surplus items via Gold membership  and a larger business such as a model railway retailer  subject of course  to their definition by Warners. 

 

Hope this clarify things. 

 

Rob

[jjb1970]

47 minutes ago, Stubby47 said:

 

Because asking in public might make others realise they too fall into that, or a similar, category.

 

If you ask in private you should be put in touch with a person able to give a definitive and detailed answer tailored to your own circumstances.  Any public response is going to be generic, and few discuss commercial terms in public.

[micklner]

All of this relating to Business matters should have been in private from the start.

 

 

A lot of pages of  arguements, comments and  ill feeling etc etc would then have been totally unecessary.

 

 

The mods on here must already  know who the business concerned are ?.

 

 

[AY Mod]

3 minutes ago, micklner said:

A lot of ... comments ... have been totally unecessary.

 

There's one.

 

I asked for it to be rested until Monday.

[Michael Hodgson]

2 hours ago, adb968008 said:

Noo not Mothercare… its one of the few British household names that makes Hornby’s performance look like a rockstar.

 

Mothercare Share price now 4p from £13 !

I thought they went bust about 5 years ago?

[TT-Pete]

2 hours ago, AY Mod said:

I asked for it to be rested until Monday.

 

In the meantime:

 

 

[phil-b259]

On 02/08/2024 at 14:13, cctransuk said:

 

Nope - my adblocker always eliminated the ads anyway.

 

CJI.

Enjoy it while it lasts - websites can easily determine if an add blocker is is use and prevent access when such software is active.

 

In your haste to critique the “add boys” of Warners you are overlooking the fact that with the rise of effective add blocking software the revenue generated by simple adds has plummeted -  in many cases money is only paid out by the advertiser to the client if the user engages with the add in some way thus validating the whole purpose of placing the advert in the first place  - namely to get folk to look at it.

[Matt C]

On 02/08/2024 at 13:37, AY Mod said:

 

I drew my line first - Ner ner ner nerrr.

Andy stop it!!!

I just spat me ruddy coffee out all over the cat !  Now I'm  in trouble with the Mrs. .  And I can see the cat plotting revenge when I fall asleep later 🤣 🤣 🤣

[John M Upton]

The Internet used to be really useful until the advertising industry ruined it.  Look at social media now, that used to be useful but now Faceache has so much completely irrelevant advertising flooding your news feed that the few things you do want to see are lost in the tidal wave of pointless crap.

 

At least RMWeb is still readable and relevant, the membership fee is worth it to loose the ads alone!!  Everywhere else now requires an armada of adblockers just to make it even remotely readable.

[Phil Parker]

6 hours ago, micklner said:

The mods on here must already  know who the business concerned are ?.

 

We know who the big players are, and they have been contacted long before August 1st.

 

What we can't know everyone who prints the odd 3D thing and flogs it via mentions on RMweb. But then, realistically, they aren't the ones who we are really worried about. This would always be a work in progress, and something will be sorted out for the tiny trade later. The challenge is to work something out that doesn't cost more to run than it brings in! But that's our commercial section's problem.

 

This is all about establishing the general principle that if you wish to use RMweb for commercial gain, then RMweb should receive a bit of that income to help pay the bills.

[Phil Parker]

OK - I've had a little tidy-up to remove the Ad-blocker posts. Interesting, but off-topic.

 

6 hours ago, AY Mod said:

Do me a favour, give it a rest until Monday please.

 

Spot on. Now, I am about to drink a bottle or two of 6.8% cider. It is lovely, but if I spot people ignoring @AY Mod's request, moderation might be a little less generous 😁

 

Let us take the comments on here, and sort out clarification next week.

[AY Mod]

1 minute ago, Phil Parker said:

Now, I am about to drink a bottle or two of 6.8% cider.

 

Pah, I'm not watering mine down.

[MarkSG]

4 hours ago, John M Upton said:

The Internet used to be really useful until the advertising industry ruined it.

 

Actually, advertising saved the web. Or, rather, made the web profitable.

 

I'm old enough, and have worked in IT long enough, to remember when there was no practical means of generating revenue from a  website, unless you were actually selling things (like Amazon and their predecessors). If your only product was content, then it was incredibly difficult to monetise - you could try selling subscriptions, but people were, and still are, reluctant to commit to a regular payment that was enough to be worthwhile to the publisher. Advertising did exist, up to a point, but it was clunky, clumsy and difficult for smaller publishers to sell - if you weren't big enough to have a dedicated ad team, then nobody with the money to spend was interested in advertising with you.

 

Back in the 90s, the talk of how the web as a publishing industry would be funded was all about "micropayments", whereby a system would be created whereby users would pay teeny, tiny amounts for viewing just one page - maybe something like 0.001p per page - but that would, of course, add up to a reasonable amount if you were a regular user of a particular website. But it never happened, because the infrastructure to make it happen was never developed.

 

What did happen was that somebody invented the advertising exchange. In particular, Google invented Adsense. And it literally[1] changed everything. By acting as an intermediary between publishers and advertisers, whereby any organisation, of any size, could sign up and either offer space on their website for adverts or place adverts on websites, with minimal technical knowledge and no need for a dedicated advertising or marketing department, it opened up advertising as a genuine means of paying for the provision of content on the web. And where Google led, others followed. There are now thousands of advertising exchanges available to advertisers and publishers, all of which work in much the same way.

 

I first put Adsense on one of my websites in 2003, not long after Google launched the programme. At the end of the first week, I'd earned just over $3 (it was all USD to begin with). By the end of the second week, that was around $5.  I put some work into developing the site, and after a few months it was reliably $20 a week. I added a new website and put advertising on that, and after a while the combined revenue was £100 a week (by then, Google offered payment in local currency). I added more websites to my portfolio, and in 2014 I quit my day job to work full time on my own business running a primarily advertising-supported web publishing firm which was typically earning £200 a day - and sometimes considerably in excess of that. 

 

Without advertising, that business wouldn't have existed, and neither would any of the websites it published (except, possibly the very early ones which really were just a hobby). And it wasn't just me who benefitted. Advertising enabled a whole slew of online content to spring up that, without it, would never have been viable. Something like 95% of what most people view on the web is advertising supported. And most of that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.

 

But.

 

Advertising revenue has been on a downward trend for a while, and recent changes in both the legislative framework and browser design have contributed to that. The cookie law has had a significant impact on advertising revenue. So has the move by browser developers to deprecate third party cookies. Many well-known websites have suffered as a consequence. As have many, like mine, that are not so well-known.

 

Advertising isn't dead, yet. But a lot of web publishers are having to revisit discussions that would have taken place in the early 21st century around other funding sources. Subscriptions are back on the agenda. We may, yet, see micropayments crop up again - and maybe this time the infrastructure to support them will come into being. And, also, we're seeing a return to direct advertising - where the advertiser deals directly with the publisher for the right to advertise, rather than using an advertising exchange like Adsense - because direct advertising isn't impacted by cookie and privacy concerns in the same way. And some publishers are trying to solve the problem by simply adding more and more adverts and trying to keep them in front of people's eyeballs for longer so that the drop in per-advert revenue is compensated for by their increased visibility. That may well work in some cases. But it isn't a universal solution.  Nor are any of the others.

 

I don't know where this will end up. But I don't think it's a good development. Advertising works best when it pays enough  for web publishers to be able to use them sparingly, without overloading the page with irrelevant content, and without the need for more complex means of generating revenue such as subscriptions. If advertising doesn't pay then it isn't just the publishers who are the losers. We're all the poorer for it if our favourite content ceases to be free, or even ceases to exist.

 

[1] Yes, I really do mean literally, not metaphorically.

 

[TimberValleyRailway]

Honestly I don't get why some people think it's such a problem. If charging people for advertising is what it takes for this goldmine of useful information, tips, help and advice to stay up and accessible for all then I'm all for it.

Edited August 3 by TimberValleyRailway
Typo

[RJS1977]

I agree with the principle, whilst having some concerns about how it will work out in practice. It seems to me there are a number of different categories that businesses could fall into:

 

1) "Big players" - Manufacturers like Hornby, Bachmann, Heljan, Dapol etc and the bigger stores like Rails, Cheltenham, Kernow etc - the sort of shops that have multi-page adverts in the front of Railway Modeller.

2) Smaller shops like Alton or Addlestone, the sort that might have a single or half-page ad in RM. Also some of the kit manufacturers like Roxey, Branchlines, Dundas, etc - usually 1-5 employees.

3) "Hobby" traders - the sort who maybe have a couple of tables at a show and either have "day jobs" or are retired, and regard a good day at a show as making enough to cover the petrol and the stand rent. I'd also throw in some of the smaller "bits and pieces" manufacturers here, like Keen Systems - if they have any magazine ads at all, they're likely to be one of the "small ads" in the back of RM.

4) "Professionally run" shows - as most of these are run by Warners anyway, this isn't really an issue!

5) Amateur/club shows which either raise money for the club, a local charity, or a heritage railway etc. 

6) Clubs or heritage railways commissioning (or maybe testing the waters before commissioning) limited edition wagons etc, again to raise funds for their own projects and not as a personal profit-making exercise.

7) A member who is looking to import a model/commission something etc for their own personal use, who puts a post up beforehand to see if anyone else is interested in coming in with them to help split costs.

8) A member who posts a photo of  a 3d print they've made for their own personal use, with no intention of selling, but then gets responses of "Can you do one for me?"

 

Provided the agreements/payments are carried out in a way that treats all these groups fairly, I'm all for it.

[NHY 581]

7 hours ago, RJS1977 said:

I agree with the principle, whilst having some concerns about how it will work out in practice. It seems to me there are a number of different categories that businesses could fall into:

 

1) "Big players" - Manufacturers like Hornby, Bachmann, Heljan, Dapol etc and the bigger stores like Rails, Cheltenham, Kernow etc - the sort of shops that have multi-page adverts in the front of Railway Modeller.

2) Smaller shops like Alton or Addlestone, the sort that might have a single or half-page ad in RM. Also some of the kit manufacturers like Roxey, Branchlines, Dundas, etc - usually 1-5 employees.

3) "Hobby" traders - the sort who maybe have a couple of tables at a show and either have "day jobs" or are retired, and regard a good day at a show as making enough to cover the petrol and the stand rent. I'd also throw in some of the smaller "bits and pieces" manufacturers here, like Keen Systems - if they have any magazine ads at all, they're likely to be one of the "small ads" in the back of RM.

4) "Professionally run" shows - as most of these are run by Warners anyway, this isn't really an issue!

5) Amateur/club shows which either raise money for the club, a local charity, or a heritage railway etc. 

6) Clubs or heritage railways commissioning (or maybe testing the waters before commissioning) limited edition wagons etc, again to raise funds for their own projects and not as a personal profit-making exercise.

7) A member who is looking to import a model/commission something etc for their own personal use, who puts a post up beforehand to see if anyone else is interested in coming in with them to help split costs.

8) A member who posts a photo of  a 3d print they've made for their own personal use, with no intention of selling, but then gets responses of "Can you do one for me?"

 

Provided the agreements/payments are carried out in a way that treats all these groups fairly, I'm all for it.

 

 

And this couldn't wait until Monday as per Andy's request because.................? 

 

Rob

[Colin_McLeod]

6 minutes ago, NHY 581 said:

 

 

And this couldn't wait until Monday as per Andy's request because.................? 

 

Rob

 

Because it was a well thought out and "food for thought" post that does not require any fire fighting from the Mods.   The Mods are entitled to the weekend off, of course,  but the world doesn't stop.

[NHY 581]

3 minutes ago, Colin_McLeod said:

 

Because it was a well thought out and "food for thought" post that does not require any fire fighting from the Mods.   The Mods are entitled to the weekend off, of course,  but the world doesn't stop.

 

No of course not....just gives them more to read through/ sort out on Monday morning......which they wouldn't have to do if.............

 

But if you think it's okay, then fill yer boots I say....

 

Rob

[Colin_McLeod]

5 minutes ago, NHY 581 said:

But if you think it's okay, then fill yer boots I say....

 

Charming.