Niketalk is worth $490,472

[GTA 809]

Method Man wrote:

Idk but it'd be cool if the mods had give aways every once and a while lol 

I wouldn't rule it out, but keep in mind that pretty much every giveaway conducted on a major site is sponsored.  

We're pretty adamant about retaining the independent spirit of our community and IF we were to do a contest, we'd need to make sure that everything is labeled clearly and transparently so that our staff members aren't called upon to personally "endorse" any product or service.  We come to NikeTalk to share GENUINE opinions.  The site would lose a lot of integrity if we were putting ourselves up for sale.  An advertisement in a clearly labeled space is one thing... but subverting the community for private gain is completely unacceptable. 

The only company sponsored giveaway I can think of that would be mutually beneficial and wouldnt tarnish the NT "brand" (for better lack of a word) is Eastbay. Similar to how they have reps on here that are helpful and answer members questions and in turn members might see that and might be more inclined to purchase from Eastbay vs one of their competitors. Everyone wins but more importantly NT's integrity stays intact.
But it would have to be executed right. 

 

[Methodical Management]

C'mon Meth, you know a Veryon is a $1m whip 

He can't afford that even if he sold his soul. 

I assume he'd find one used.  It's only fair.  The person he'd sell his lungs to would be getting used organs, after all.  

The only company sponsored giveaway I can think of that would be mutually beneficial and wouldnt tarnish the NT "brand" (for better lack of a word) is Eastbay. Similar to how they have reps on here that are helpful and answer members questions and in turn members might see that and might be more inclined to purchase from Eastbay vs one of their competitors. Everyone wins but more importantly NT's integrity stays intact.

But it would have to be executed right. 

Product wikis are a common sense feature for our site.   It would make it much easier for people to locate and compile a comprehensive store of information regarding a given product.  It seems natural that users interested in a product would then wish to purchase it, which makes a referral link a fairly unobtrusive means of making that feature possible. 

Finding the right partner for that would be of the utmost importance, but if it were to work out properly the upshot would be obvious:  using referral links to purchase products you were already interested in would benefit the site and, more importantly, the charities we support.  

Contests are a bit harder to execute without coming across as though you're shilling, since you have to push the contest info to people who AREN'T searching for that particular product.  Some sites execute far better in that department than others, but more importantly it would have to be a win/win for all involved - and, for us to even consider a contest, the benefit to the users and to charity would have to justify it.  

A lot of sites try to sell contests like they're doing YOU a favor, but we know that they're being paid by a sponsor to promote the products they're "giving away."  Some users don't care, as they just want their one in a billion chance to win a prize, but others find it tacky.  So, you have to be careful what you wish for in that regard.  We've never been about reducing ourselves to the lowest common denominator.  

To this point, we haven't had much freedom to explore ways to fund the site beyond the standard ad units due to the constraints of the platform.  Everyone wants new features etc., but the money has to come from somewhere.  The challenge is to figure out how to bring in the additional revenue in a way that 1) respects the integrity of the site  2) provides maximum benefit to the end user  3) is handled as transparently as possible, so it's easy to distinguish between "paid" content and legitimate, user-generated content.  

Most sneaker sites fail in one or more of those respects.  The line between "editorial" and "advertisement" is blurred beyond distinction and every aspect of the site is commercialized and exploited.  We don't want to go that route, but we do need to find a way to finance the improvements that our members demand.  It'll take some fine tuning and we're committed to utilizing feedback from our fellow members every step of the way.  So, comments of this nature are tremendously useful and I'm sure we'll be providing more opportunities for you guys to evaluate different features and options moving forward. 

 

[mossman75]

Originally Posted by 160jordansdeep

where is my cut ?

here you go

 

[MetalMario]

how much are shares?

 

[scientific method]

With Yuku being so unreliable, btw it has already started doing the time machine deleting posts thing today, why don't they just go back to Ezboard? I mean, I assumed the "upgrade" would really just be as simple as everything staying the same except replacing "Ezboard" with "Yuku" in all the graphics and URLs. They completed started from scratch and created something that doesn't work. Also, is it traffic that causes the time machine effect, because it seems to happen around 10PM central daily, which is probably around peek hours.

When Insidehoops switched from Ezboard/Yuku to Vbulletin, the way they handled username transfers was if you were Sci Method on Ezboard/Yuku and someone jumped and registered it first on the new board, the admins let you send them a msg and gthey reset Sci Method on the new board to a password and gave it to you over PM on Yuku so you could take the name back over. Of course, it didn't have 80k users or whatever at the time and didn't care about losing all the stuff on the Ezboard in terms of archives so it's not like that is a viable solution for NT.

 

[recognize game]

puts on lotion

 

[futurejordanking]

Thought it be more since its been around since 99

 

[Methodical Management]

With Yuku being so unreliable, btw it has already started doing the time machine deleting posts thing today, why don't they just go back to Ezboard? 
That's like asking Microsoft to go back to DOS because their modern platforms suffer from memory leaks.  It's just not gonna happen.  People forget just how primitive ezboard really was.  You couldn't embed videos, the editor was entirely text based, and there was no on-site image hosting, for starters.  Those types of features are simply taken for granted these days. 
As you've noticed, the server lag is related to traffic.  What type of hardware do you think ezboard was running on?  Your perception of NikeTalk running ezboard is based on a much smaller community.  We didn't have server lag when we started out on Yuku - and for much the same reason we never experienced server lag on ezboard:  NikeTalk was a smaller and simpler site back then.  Ezboard only allowed for 20 pages of topics per forum.  If we did the same thing now, we probably wouldn't have any server lag.  Obviously, that's not a problem that well-equipped forums suffer from on other platforms - but it's not something you can attribute solely to yuku since you honestly don't know how ezboard would've performed under the same circumstances.  NikeTalk is - and by far - the largest community on the Yuku network.  Most of their communities don't have to endure the same problems that we do.  It's probably fair to say that we suffer the most from Yuku's shortcomings.  

This is in no way to excuse Yuku and its failures, as we're more frustrated by it than anyone, but all of this "ezboard > yuku" talk is just plain silly.  It's like a 70 year old man saying that old rotary phones are superior to cellular phones because he got a lot more dates in 1940 than he does now.

When Insidehoops switched from Ezboard/Yuku to Vbulletin, the way they handled username transfers was if you were Sci Method on Ezboard/Yuku and someone jumped and registered it first on the new board, the admins let you send them a msg and gthey reset Sci Method on the new board to a password and gave it to you over PM on Yuku so you could take the name back over. Of course, it didn't have 80k users or whatever at the time and didn't care about losing all the stuff on the Ezboard in terms of archives so it's not like that is a viable solution for NT.

Yeah, that's exactly it.  Moving in 2003 would've been a lot easier than moving in 2012, but we didn't really have the resources to finance a move back then.  Remember, NikeTalk was operating ad free at our expense until 2006 or so.  

I'd rather not speculate on how a move would be handled at this point, but the obvious method (one to one customer service for username transfers) doesn't really work when you have 80,000+ registered forum users.  All of our posts translate into a substantial amount of search traffic.  Starting from scratch on that front would be extremely costly as well.  

At the end of the day, the user experience comes first, so we're willing to take a hit there and rebuild someplace else if absolutely necessary, but this is all far easier said than done.  

Anyone want to go in and create another forum website? PM me I know we can do better than NT (profit wise)

If your only goal is to make "more money," and that's the only reason anyone's interested in participating on the forums or on the staff, then good luck.  If you don't put the end user's interests first, then why should anyone care about your forum site?  You'll just end up with another soulless "me too" site. 

Anyone could squeeze more money out of NikeTalk - but that's not sustainable.  I could churn out an extra thousand plus per month by adding infolinks if I really wanted to.  How much do you think our fellow members would like having advertising URLs inserted into their own posts without their consent?  

Sustainability is FAR more important to us than sheer profit.  Selling out the end user isn't on the agenda here.  I'm not going to spend my time running a site that I wouldn't otherwise visit - let alone enjoy.

 

[scientific method]

We couldn't embed back in the Ezboard days? Damn, must have been longer ago than I remember.

And dude, alternate NT things has been tried 100s of times, assuming you can even get people to stay more than a week, it will just be nt members and castaways going there to flame war, post porn, and other pirated content.

 

[KMante]

Originally Posted by ricky409

Originally Posted by 360waves

Originally Posted by FinallyFamous

Our Cheerleaders leader would be all about DAT MASS 

what about dat milk, too..

 

 

 

 

[yk12]

i love that niketalk isnt about the money. its all about us and what we put into it