I've Had Enough & Today Everyone Has The Phoronix Premium Experience

[boffo]

Ok, I subscribed for a year. A web site without ads would not survive I hope you will find an alternative ad company.

[uid313]

Using untrusty advertising networks can be a security risk to the users. They inject broken HTML and might inject browser exploit vulnerabilities and Flash exploits and such.

If you're going to use ads, then please use a reliable, trusty advertising provider. Consider using Google's AdWords program. Or some program that is on the whitelist of Adblock Plus.

[ResponseWriter]

Just went from daily lurker to 100-year subscriber. Keep up the good work, Michael!

I'm hoping the game I'm working on, Skyfire, which will release simultaneously on Linux (every prototype already has a Linux version) will rate a news article someday! :-) I find it inexcusable to not release on Linux when you're using a tool like UnrealEngine or Unity that makes it so easy.

Thanks for making the effort to support Linux! Will certainly pay some attention when I see the announcement here or r/linux_gaming.

[Oguz286]

Just signed up and subscribed for a year. You really need to take a break and go on a vacation with your wife, you have both earned it!

[Luke]

Definately take time off, a significant part of the site (at least to me) is user discussions concerning things like security. While you take a break, those can continue. Your users will continue to contribute content even while you recover. Also, some of those big benchmark tests could be transferred from your basement to users running the Phoronix test suite, then posting results which could be aggregated into featured stories, Possibly that could be partially automated, so only a description would have to be written.

In short, you could save a hell of a lot of work and also hardware purchase expense by going to a distributed testing model. Just running the core site would surely be a lot less work. It would be like the early days at the activist site I am part of, when instead of me having to shoot, then edit all that video the people putting on the protests wrote their own stories and the website only had to deal with keeping a local physical server running and holding an occcasional "movie night" fundraiser. Now its ten times the work for 5% of the audience with Facebook and Twitter as direct competitors. Why do I bother? Because I don't want the people I work with going to jail because of Facebook. We do survive with neither ads nor subscribers, but that's because we exist for other reasons-and deliberately limit our time and effort so the site cannot consume our lives.

Currrent industry statistics are that sites that go subscription-only lose 95% or so of their readers. If you are concerned with Google rankings that could be a real killer. I read somewhere Phoronix is currently one of the biggest websites in terms of traffic, certainly that would change. If Phoronix does go behind a paywall, it will effecively no longer exist to those of us who do not use money online and/or are not employed. It would be sort of equivalent to turning the activist site I work with into a .onion site and refusing connections from Microsoft Windows and iOS. Great security from my perspective, but useless if the audience goes elsewhere. One good thing is this: if you do NOT want those of us who cannot subscribe to anything (no money) and cannot permit ads to not use your forums, this is more difficult now because the sheer size of Phoronix pulls these discussions to itself and out of other forums. A paywalled model will kill the gravity well and make these discussions available elsewhere.

I recognize that I might not be very representative of your users, having walked away from most accounts with the big ad-supported commerical services. Walked away from Hotmail, Youtube, Twitter and never was on Facebook or Myspace at all. I accepted quite some time back that all remaining accounts with servers that ever use ads could disappear or be locked out without notice. Learned that lesson years ago when I had to hack into my own Hotmail account to close it after they tried to demand a phone number.

[sheldonl]

I hear you getting burned out. I subscribed so that can help somewhat, however, I'd really prefer to be able to browse premium w/o having to login to the forums, which is cumbersome. I check this site about 3-4 times a day so if you can make this process easier that would be appreciated. Oh, and as a premium subscriber I'd like to request more KDE articles

[schmidtbag]

Michael,

I think you could make a deal with some people, where you could offer free monthly subscriptions for writing X amount of articles per month (assuming people like them enough). There might be more people interested in writing for free for you than you think. Maybe if there are any volunteers you could give them some sort of "assignment", where they look for interested things in sources you specify.

Another thing to consider is quality vs quantity. Right now you seem to prioritize quantity, and some people seem to get a bit irritated by that (personally, I don't really care). Some articles are also a little redundant or unnecessary, such as the ones saying "here's a sample of some benchmarks. More results coming soon". Sometimes that may bring in more ad revenue due to more clicks, but at the same time it deters people from visiting when there are so many teasers or obsoleted content. I've also found this makes searching for articles difficult. Anyway, you'd feel less burnt-out if you wrote fewer articles.

I personally would be a lot more considerate of a premium membership if there were less but more refined articles. You do good work, but there are other websites with owners in a very similar situation to yours who are doing fine and have really polished content.

[usta]

I'm not sure if it is just for me or not but phoronix still have ads in my browser.

[Luke]

I'm not sure if it is just for me or not but phoronix still have ads in my browser.

Check your browser for ad-supported extensions. remove any you find-and anything you don't recognize. If you are using Windows make sure you are not using any ad-supported software and are free of malware, some of which is designed to inject ads. Also test with all history cleared and no other windows open, just in case some other site has tracked you to Phoronix and is using (illegal) attack code to inject ads on sites other than their own. That last scenario is unlikely, but I assume the worst about trackers.

[bridgman]

I hear you getting burned out. I subscribed so that can help somewhat, however, I'd really prefer to be able to browse premium w/o having to login to the forums, which is cumbersome.

Can't you just go to the forums first and get remembered via cookie ? I only have to log into the forums once every 3-6 months...