From the Editor: Twitter Tweaks, and a Membership Drive

“Every successful paid site competes with free sites, and as often as not, competes with itself by offering its own free content. The free stuff is used to upsell the customer to the paid varieties. The extreme application of this model is giving away 99 percent of the product and selling 1 percent…” —From Jack Shafer’s Slate article ”Not All Information Wants to Be Free”

I ran across this quote while testing changes for BGN, and it seems an appropriate lead-in for what will end with an open-handed pitch for you to fork over $25 to become a member of Boardgame News. First, though, a look at what’s new and different on the site:

• Twitter gets a bigger role. Previously I’ve used Twitter mostly to pass on details of when games are shipping from U.S. distributors to retailers – info that gamers want to know, but info that’s too brief for a standalone post – but I plan to use the service more frequently in the months to come.

  What will I be tweeting about? Rumors, rule postings, interviews, and all sorts of other material that doesn’t merit a post of its own, yet would still be of interest to BGN readers. I can throw that material out to you, the reader, more easily through Twitter than I can through a BGN post, so if you’re interested in such things, I encourage you to subscribe to the BGN Twitter feed. (Note that I’m breaking netiquette with this account and not following anyone, which will keep the feed chock-a-block with game info. Write to me directly if you want to submit material for coverage on BGN.)

• Fewer ads. My income over the past two years has come from game publisher and retailer ads and BGN membership fees in roughly a 50-50 split. (Google ads and other link programs have proved middling to negligible to the bottom line.) While I appreciate the support of publishers like Rio Grande, Asmodee and others, advertising has three problems:
  
  1. Ads are unreliable. No surprise here as this is the nature of advertising. If an ad program doesn’t work for a publisher, the publisher will pull it and put those dollars into some other form of marketing. My wife and I are seeing this happen repeatedly in the magazine industry, with several dozen titles cutting out columns or being cancelled as a result.

  2. Hunting down advertisers is time-consuming. As part of my effort to turn BGN into a sustainable job, I’ve spent many hours soliciting ads from all segments of the game industry, often with little success. That’s time wasted that I could have spent doing something productive to make the site better for users, i.e. you.

  3. Most importantly, soliciting and running ads leaves me open to questions of bias and impropriety. Publishers might feel that they have to place ads in order to be covered on BGN, and readers might feel that I’m writing about a game or publisher as a result of advertising.

     The first point is easily disproved as most publishers and designers that I write about on BGN have never placed ads on the site. As for the second point, some websites write more about companies that purchase ads than about those that don’t; I do not. I cover what interests me personally and what I think will interest readers. That’s the beauty of the BGN Spiel preview and the reason why it’s as massive and comprehensive as it is. I want to write about every game that I can! In detail and with notes from the designer! I’m not limited to writing about the few people who buy ads; I write as much as I can based on my research, with a standalone preview being the result whenever a game designer takes the time to answer my questions and send me material that readers will want to see.

  For those reasons, I’m dropping my efforts to solicit adveritising from those in the game industry. If a publisher or retailer approaches me about advertising, I might still run the ad, but in general expect to see fewer ads in the future.

• Full posts on the RSS feed. Given that I’ve removed the Google ads from BGN and am no longer soliciting advertising, I don’t need to worry about the site’s hit counts. If you sign up for an RSS feed, you’ll now receive the full text of all the new posts on the site, with pics included. You’ll still need to visit BGN itself to view Gone Cardboard, the Spiel preview, the convention calendar, and other such things.

• A constantly visible “most recent” column. While I liked the compendium of links to the most recent news, previews and columns that I added in January 2009, having that material in the right-hand sidebar – where it is visible on every page instead of only the front page – makes more sense.

All these changes are good for you, the BGN reader, as they will provide you with more game information with fewer interruptions in terms of clicking through an RSS feed to read a story or waiting for an ad to load – but what about for BGN and Ye Olde Editor? By abandoning the push for ads, I’m effectively cutting my income in half, and given that this site has always generated a part-time income for full-time work, I’m reaching out to BGN readers with this simple appeal: If you appreciate Boardgame News – the news, the game previews, Gone Cardboard, the columnists, and all the rest – then you should think about becoming a member. A BGN membership costs $25, just over $2 a month, and your payment will allow me to keep bringing you all the material that you like. As a bonus, you receive access to the super-colossal Spiel preview as well as the less impressive, but still desirable Nuremberg preview. That’s the carrot, dear reader. That’s the 1 percent that I’m selling – and here’s what some BGN members have had to say about it:

• “Thanks for all of your hard work! The new Essen preview has already made me start my post-Essen/BGG.Con budget plan...”

• “I looked up the Spiel 2008 preview today - this information gathering is worth every cent 8-) :-)”

• “It looks very good, even better than last year.”

• “Wow! It’s even bigger and better than I remember from previous years. Kudos for the huge amount of effort this must have been.”

• “The Spiel preview itself is worth the price of admission.”

Some people complain that I withhold game news and information from the general public, as if this information were free-floating like butterflies and I’m capturing them all for my own benefit. Not so. As Race for the Galaxy designer Tom Lehmann noted in a BoardGameGeek thread: “Eric Martin of Boardgame News gets his information the hard way, by building up contacts (years of effort), going to trade events, button-holing publishers, establishing email contact, tracking projected release dates, bugging them for information snippets, etc.” Keeping the preview members-only gives me a much needed opportunity to be paid for the hundreds of hours that I spend creating it. I’ve love to publish everything openly – and I do publish many game previews on the BGN front page, albeit weeks or months after the material appears in the Spiel preview – but just as you need to be paid for doing your job, I need to be paid for doing mine. Thus, I’m adopting the Consumer Reports model of asking the users of the material to be the ones who pay for it.

So if you visit BGN often, if you read all the news posts, if you look up titles on Gone Cardboard, if you repost news items and game info from BGN onto BoardGameGeek, if your club is listed in the game group directory, if you’ve had your convention listed, if you’ve had your game previewed or reviewed or your company profiled – now’s the time to pay for all that the site’s given to you. By doing so, you’ll keep the news flowing in the future in addition to having access to the mindblowingly large Spiel 09 preview, which will debut on July 1.

To replace the loss of advertising revenue, I need to have 400 new members by the end of June 2009 – that is, one hundred new members each month for the next four months. Given the volume of traffic on BGN, that total is doable. All that’s required is that you visit the member page and sign up today.

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Comments:

You must register with BGN in order to comment. Registration is free, but if you appreciate the news, previews, reviews and other material posted on Boardgame News, please consider becoming a member to keep the info flowing to your screen!

This is one of my most-read sites, and I’ve been a happy supporter-member for some time now.  I’m digging the recent upgrades, especially the Twitter feed and the BGN’s Most Recent side bar, and the full RSS feeds seemed such a natural thing, I didn’t even notice. I’ll plug the monthly subscription, since that option was added at my request. $5 a month automatically sent via PayPal is great for me (I hope it works for you, too, and you aren’t losing too much in fees).  It’s more per year, but at rate that barely makes a blip in my budget. Posted by Brett Myers on Feb 21, 2009 at 11:01 AM | #

I’m in my second year as a supporter, and I find it totally worth the money. The Essen and Nuremburg previews are what sold me, and they keep improving each year. Last year’s Essen preview gave me almost everything I needed to know to plan out which games I wanted to go ahead and pick up straight from Essen and which I could safe about waiting for (and I say *almost* only because some of the US companies are are being a bit more tight-lipped about they’re thinking about bringing to the US than they were in the past - not a fault of Eric or the site). While BoardGameGeek is an incredible resource for the gaming community that we can ill afford to lose (support them, too!), BoardGame News is the best site for those of us whose German skills aren’t the best to be able to keep up with the news. I occasionally see news there that isn’t here yet, but it is much more frequent that the opposite it true. If you enjoy being able to find out what’s going on in our hobby of choice, you really should be supporting this site, too. Posted by David Reed on Feb 21, 2009 at 12:05 PM | #

Has anyone gotten twitter feed to work on igoogle home page?  I added it the other day but I’m not seeing any content.  I feel like I’m missing a lot that is now coming via twitter. Would there be any way to have like a weekly summary article of twitters on the site proper? Posted by Lee Fisher on Feb 23, 2009 at 09:28 AM | #

Lee, writing a summary of the Twitter posts would defeat the purpose of doing posts via Twitter, namely the ease with which I can do them. I haven’t used igoogle, so I’m not sure what’s going on there. Anyone else have a clue? Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Feb 23, 2009 at 09:41 AM | #

Lee - I’m not sure if you can get it with just an RSS feed on iGoogle, but there are a number of Twitter Gadgets for iGoogle that should work. Also, the Twitter feeds are in a big box on the front page here, so they really don’t need to be summarized anywhere - unless you mean into a RSS post once a week.  I suppose it wouldn’t be too much hassle to do a “Recent Tweets” update that was essentially a copy/paste. Posted by Brett Myers on Feb 23, 2009 at 12:09 PM | #

FYI my igoogle did pick up a twitter today.  I’ll keep an eye on it. Posted by Lee Fisher on Feb 24, 2009 at 09:48 AM | #

I’ve being supporting this site for several years now and very happy I’m doing so. Great material and worth every 2$/month it costs me. I hope other people will appreciate the load of time invested in this site and donate that small amount. The free stuff is worth the money! Posted by Gilad Yarnitzky on Feb 24, 2009 at 12:12 PM | #

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