Curse Premium, My 2 Cents or is it 8 Cents?

farlin — Wed, 06 May 2009 22:45:19 GMT

Yea! Glad to see some people recognize the benefit of supporting a site you actively use. :)

wrooom — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:53:56 GMT

I totally agree and $2.45 is really worth nothing nowa days. I like the service Curse team provides and I think it's one small thing I could do to help.

tyister — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:44:17 GMT

@calotherm

It's bullying to ask people to pay for a service that is provided or to try and subsidise it with ads while providing it for free? Interesting.

I for one am more than happy to pay 30 bucks a year to support these guys regardless.

farlin — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:02:11 GMT

While I can agree, how do you expect a service to be free without some sort of revenue to sustain it? Its purely economics and since the ads are not generating the revenue, they have to do something to keep their doors open. Besides that, its their website and content and they have every right to force whatever ads they want on their web page. :)

calotherm — Sat, 02 May 2009 09:39:10 GMT

all i have to say is, just because wow is a massive game with lots of people playing it - its not an excuse to push adverts onto people if they dont pay up.... that bullying

farlin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:51:52 GMT

Flisher, exactly. Realistically it boils down to Curse being able to operate its web sites. Without revenue, there are no "free" web sites as bandwidth and hosting services cost money. Therefore companies have to make revenue some how to support those basic necessities for a web site. Curse tried ads, it work for some time, but now the cost of maintaining the service is higher and the capital generated from ads has declined. Ultimately something has to give, either the services declines or you look for another revenue source. Curse has few options, so to maintain a primarily free service, they have opted to restrict performance and some minor features to encourage others to support the service they are providing in a monetary form. They could have just as easily made the client premium only and forced users to use the web site to download, but they didn't. They only took away the "Update All" button, which in itself is very minor, but is an attempt at getting more monetary support to the site through "premium" services. Nothing is ever 100% free, everything comes at a price, its just a matter of what the "price" may be.

Flisher — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:16:37 GMT

I know someone that have a website reaching the similar ammount of users per month than Curse.com, and with a specialized niche. Is income revenu from ads dropped by 3 or 4 over the last 9 month. Fortunatly, can operate with a team alot smaller than the Curse one and require less bandwidth.

However, at this rate, is websit may die after being run for alot of years as the number 1.

Considering the inzane cost of bandwith when it come to hosting service able (and willing) to handle traffic like Curse.com generate, I'm happy to see Curse aiming for alternative revenu source because it ensure myself (as an ex-addon author and a player), that the wetbsite will be there in the future for us.

Considering the client already do an excellent job in normal mode, I'll be more than happy to get the other goodies with the premium service :)

I didn't do the math, but in my case it's less than 2 hours per years to get premium beta access :) (wich I consider very interesting)