Rumor that ClubCobra is going bye-bye.

[eschaider]

I think the "New Site" would need to be funded by advertising dollars which means the site needs to be able to demonstrate an adequate number of eyeballs looking around for a manufacturer to be willing to pony up advertising dollars. I agree the fee based sites while good sounding in concept, consistently fall short of the mark in practice bringing us back to the advertising sponsored alternative.

Club Cobra has the advertising presence, a purchase or similar acquisition that carried the membership and advertisers over to the new venue would be the more likely to succeed model.


Ed

[Blas]

Being totally ignorant of the costs to operate a site like this, can someone put some numbers to the discussion? How many companies Advertising are needed to make the site self- sufficient? What does software cost on average? Someone mentioned “spiders” to convert information already in the archives. Web- hosting? Etc....
Blas

[twobjshelbys]

Originally Posted by Blas

Being totally ignorant of the costs to operate a site like this, can someone put some numbers to the discussion? How many companies Advertising are needed to make the site self- sufficient? What does software cost on average? Someone mentioned “spiders” to convert information already in the archives. Web- hosting? Etc....
Blas

Finding advertisers to be here is going to be difficult. For example, right now there is a "Gas-n" ad sitting on the top banner. How many of you have ever or ever will buy something from them? (not picking on them it's just the one that's here) Advertising on a forum requires that there be many visitors over long periods of time. This is a captive audience. Advertisers target their audience but the audience here is captive and static. And decreasing.

[twobjshelbys]

Originally Posted by Blas

Being totally ignorant of the costs to operate a site like this, can someone put some numbers to the discussion? How many companies Advertising are needed to make the site self- sufficient? What does software cost on average? Someone mentioned “spiders” to convert information already in the archives. Web- hosting? Etc....
Blas

Finding advertisers to be here is going to be difficult. For example, right now there is a "Gas-n" ad sitting on the top banner. How many of you have ever or ever will buy something from them? (not picking on them it's just the one that's here) Advertising on a forum requires that there be many visitors over long periods of time. This is a captive audience. Advertisers target their audience but the audience here is captive and static. And decreasing.

This place is similar to the worst of the Bar Rescue places. Before agreeing to anything get the books. Think about what it will take given your current clientele to turn that profitable. It starts with the fixed costs of bring it up to standards and then how much time, effort and cost to keep it running and expanding your audience.

I'm not trying to talk someone out of doing something, but I am trying to prepare you for the fact that the reality of the situation is that someone will pump a lot of money and time into this and in a year we'll be having exactly the same discussion.

[spdbrake]

Alfa02,

The Clubcobra forums have been mapped and backed up many times over the last few years. 8 times this year. If the site closes the data is still viewable by the public.

https://web.archive.org/web/sitemap/clubcobra.com


If you take over the site all previous data can be pulled into a new VBulletin site.

Their charges to host and maintain the site.
https://www.vbulletin.com/en/vbulletin-cloud

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by spdbrake

Alfa02,

The Clubcobra forums have been mapped and backed up many times over the last few years. 8 times this year. If the site closes the data is still viewable by the public.

https://web.archive.org/web/sitemap/clubcobra.com

No, the wayback machine is terribly unreliable as an archive. For example, this thread of mine on pusher fans was started in 2010, and had postings as late as 2017. Just try and find it on the wayback machine. Cool Modification - For Pusher Fans Only, Though If a subsequent owner of this site does not "buy the database files," it's likely the majority of the information on here that does not bounce up readily in the Google cache will be pretty much gone forever.

EDIT -- and, if you're smart enough to figure out how to archive your favorite forums on vBulletin, such as the ERA forum that contains a wealth of information, you'll find that the Sucuri firewall that this site bounces through forces you to do it at a snail's pace because a fast archive is detected as a DOS and your IP gets banned until you slow it down.