I did not have the impression that staff are paid. At least, back when I was a moderator on a different avatar site (which has since closed down), I did not receive any compensation -- neither real nor virtual money. It was helping to ensure that threads were in the right place and everyone was following terms of service. However, there was quite a bit of behind-the-scenes that I was involved with! That's a perk in and of itself. But, I can understand how being compensated might motivate users and/or staff to be more active.

I only assumed that doing a job meant you got paid, lol. Volunteer work doesn't seem to really fit either. [lol] I wonder what the money goes towards that all the users pay for CIs and Mennies(sp?) then.

Keeping the site alive mostly. Does it still run in the red Jelly? I know it did last time I heard.

We barely scrape by. We have a donation amount that Inso said was the barest minimum that we need to hit every month. We've only managed it four times in the past twelve months [sweat]

I feel like that's all the more reason to put more incentive out there. More active users having fun = users sticking around and telling their friends. In theory, that would hopefully boost "donations". It's too bad I can't stick around and help. If only I didn't have a family, lol. But I'd never trade them for the world.

Do you guys advertise anywhere?

We've not advertised for years. Basically, everything comes down to funds, and advertising that's going to give useful results doesn't some cheap. Inso put a lot of research into the results any of the advertising he paid for, because getting people to sign up is only the first step, and it counts for nothing if they never even post, and that's often the way.

You can pay out a big chunk of change for advertising and watch the registration numbers shoot up, but if what you have to offer doesn't appeal to these people you've basically thrown that money away. At one point we used to advertise regularly on Facebook, every Wednesday. There was always a significant jump in the amount of accounts created; the average was 20-30 per day at that point (mid 2009), which would jump to 80-100 on advertising day. But that never equated to 5 times as many more active accounts, sadly, it just doesn't work that way.

The ratio for the amount of people who actually post out of new accounts created has consistently been around 1:10, and by post I mean just that FM thread with the single post, never to be seen again. The amount who become active members of the community is considerably less. Some days registration would jump to over 1000 people, like so:
But the reality of those high join amounts is a larger amount of never active accounts.

It really is a Catch 22 situation for us;
We need more features so we appeal to more people so the active member numbers increases.
But we need the donations from that increased amount of people to be able to have more features in the first place...

[gonk]

I'm not sure I've acheived my aim here >< which was to try and show that there's a whole lot more to advertising than meets the eye. Advertising isn't some activity panacea that if we have it things will suddenly be all ok again. It would require metrics and various other logistic-type terms that people who know what they're talking about bandy about, i.e. not me [ninja]

I still hold by what I've always said; which is if donations increased by a decent amount, and maintained that better level, so that Inso starts to see us as a viable option again instead of just a money pit, then he would be willing to invest in us again. Where as right now we don't make enough for that to be a justifiable option.

Facebook is tweaking its algorithms to essentially not promote anything the poster doesn't pay for. It might show things to people who like the page, but unless most of the people who see a post like it, reply to it, or repost it, it'll drop like a rock. Heck, even if the person running the page pays to have their post seen, Facebook will only push to a small number of the people who follow them and require the same like/comment/repost an unpaid post needs to be visible.

A lot of authors in the writing community are leaving Facebook over this. I don't see Facebook as surviving many years longer.

We're seeing the same issue with the NPS Facebook pages. We can't use any of the pay-for features so unless a lot of the local interest groups repost something of the parks then our posts are dead in the water. Which sucks because a well thought post takes 2 or so hours to put together, more if it's in depth or requires any photo work. It's a huge time sap for little return.

We missed the boat with Facebook advertising, didn't we. :( If the keywords Inso had used at the time had been different, we might have gained more active people. I don't know what he did use other than anime, but hindsight makes me feel that wasn't the best choice and terms like cosplay and dress up might have netted a better result.

That really sucks that Facebook's doing that now! I wonder if that's because they're heading for financial straits, or they're just looking to increase profits by as much as is humanly possible >.>

It's so right that social media's a great way to get our face out there, but it's not something that we've managed to be consistent with so far. Mainly because everyone's got other things to do.

I actually got here from a facebook ad that promised "Better than Gaia Online"! Makes me laugh now that I've been here a while, just because of how much of an understatement that was.

AW! That gives me warm fuzzies!! :'D

It doesn't apply just to advertisements, actually. They're also posting less of what your friends and family post.

Facebook keeps trying to get my feed to show what they think I'm interesting in and I always always always change it back to "latest posts" and they always always always change it back >.<

I always have mine set to recent posts rather than top posts as well. I still think they filter it a little, but I'm not sure how much of that is because of my habits of clicking the "go away" button when I don't like something someone posts.