so meth gets 10gs a month? no wonder he won't sell
Again, those websites are giving you a very rough estimate of
gross revenue. This isn't some amateur, fly by night operation where one person gets all of the money and exploits everyone else for free labor. I'm not sure what websites give you the impression that such behavior is to be expected...
In the real world, hosting a website of this size costs a substantial amount of money. What we produce - in total - from ads each month and what we have available to donate are two very different numbers for that reason. So, if you look at these numbers and think, "oh, they're pocketing $X,000 a month," that's not accurate. First of all, the numbers don't account for expenses and traffic/market fluctuations affecting actual ad revenues. Second, we're still operating everything on the staff end on a volunteer basis, so our "take" is effectively zero. It all gets donated - and it's all donated from the hosting company's end. If that ever changes, it would only be because FULL TIME staff members would improve the site AND the donation output at a rate that would make such a staffing investment well worth the expense.
We've been getting by just fine with a volunteer workforce. We're not going to pay people just because we
can. It has to be justified such that it's a good investment for the community AND for our charities.
sell it and then we all move to a new site and then sell that and keep doubling up
Nobody who would make a serious offer for NikeTalk would be that stupid. (Well,
almost nobody.) The first thing they'd do is make you sign a non-compete and they'd probably keep you on staff for at least two years to facilitate the transition, so the users don't get spooked. When MySpace sold to News Corp, they kept everyone's friend Tom around for years as a mascot/figurehead. He didn't just take his money and start a new social network.
If you sell, you're cashing out and that's pretty much all there is to it. You're selling your place in the market to someone else. They're buying to usurp your position and eliminate you as a competitor.
Given that, I'm sure you can see why we're not particularly eager to sell out.
I don't even want a mobile version, I just want a way to have the full post area usable on my phone. All that HTML gets messy in some quality threads.
Yuku's at least a generation out of date. There's no disputing that.
IF we stick around, I've been told that
http://www.tapatalk.com/ is their solution. If we leave, then obviously that's dependent on the platform. Either way, mobile compatibility ranks pretty highly on our priority list. How could it not? Seemingly every other week someone's asking about it. The site's obviously deficient in that area and, as users, our staff members are as frustrated by it as anyone - if not more so. You have no idea how frustrating it is to simply lock a thread using a mobile device. The site we have today is clearly not designed for it.
I'd rather not comment on anything that's beyond my control. We've passed along the previous ownership group's promises to our members over the past couple of years and it's only hurt our credibility. We were on the verge of leaving Yuku more than once and it didn't work out for various reasons. So, I'm not going to say, "this feature will be ready by ______" or "we're moving to ______ by ______." I trust our team. Beyond that, I have to allow for other people to screw up and make us all look bad. For that reason, I can't make any promises and I don't want to build up people's expectations if there's any chance that we'll wind up disappointing them.
What I can tell you is that we're doing absolutely everything in our power to make sure that NikeTalk is running on a modern, competitive platform and that these necessary and long overdue upgrades take place as soon as possible. I'd rather prove the doubters wrong and leave users pleasantly surprised by the timetable than to wind up letting everyone down.
Better days are ahead.
