Quote:
Originally Posted by Malt
I don't know what they charge but it can't be that much if @ jamesm can justify paying for a vendor license here when he doesn't even charge for his services. Running a business has costs and these costs can either be chalked up associated operating expenses and eaten or passed on to the consumer. Either way these forums most likely wouldn't exist for all of us to enjoy if vendors were simply able to pass on a fairly significant portion of an advertising budget onto someone else with no cost, thereby running up bandwidth and hosting charges to the forum operators.
That being said I'm sure @ Hachiroku and @ FT-MH appreciate all their vendors doing their part to support the site. Maybe they should also consider a value added membership for members with a small donation.  |
correction: i do charge for services... i just don't advertise them on here because doing so is pretty useless (i use facebook to target local customers... advertising to someone in wyoming doesn't do much for me). i pay because i was forced into paying regardless of whether or not i use it as a paying customer normally would. i was half way through helping some folks out (for free) and they were left hanging while i was banned.. so i had to do what i had to do to finish getting them set up.
me getting banned had absolutely nothing to do with me advertising services... i never did before and to this day still haven't. it was purely personal between myself and a favored vendor that didn't like his own words being used against him. this is obvious as since then i've seen many people 'breaking the rules' without getting banned. we have entire threads for products with company reps answering questions that aren't paying vendors.
that said even though i don't advertise i still get enough business off of here just from word-of-mouth and people pm'ing me that it pays for itself many times over every month, so it's not a net loss. if it were a losing proposition from a business standpoint i wouldn't do it.