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 |   Members help other members with technical questions and problems using Writing.Com! |
Probably never. The system is going to stay the way it is for the foreseeable future. Over the years, the site has tried many, many options to try to get the interactives usage to pay for itself, and the current limitations are what is finally working. It's not a hard limit of three, however. Getting a page the first time you ask for it is sort of like a lottery where your odds of winning depend on how many people are asking for an interactive page in the same time frame. Only so many are available at once, and that limited availability is available to free members about 70% of the day. Free members are not restricted in using the non-interactive-story areas, which happen to be the main part of site. You might find these posts informative about the interactives situation: "Re: Server Volume error"  by The StoryMaster  due to the advent and proliferation of ad blockers, we've had to significantly limit the amount of server resources available to free accounts as they produce a whole lot of load on the servers with no revenue to pay for it. "Re: Re: Re: Re: Sustainable, Feasible Interactives" by The StoryMaster Perhaps it's not properly understood that the Interactive side of Writing.Com has always been a non-revenue generating drag on the 'actual' Writing.Com site. Interactives being a niche more 'gaming' aspect with, well, let's just say for many folks with rather 'interesting' reading preferences... compared to the portfolio services and 'writing' community that are actually the main 'revenue' generating side of Writing.Com. I hate to say subsidized, but indeed, the non-interactive side has always subsidized the interactive side. Period, no doubts about it, no questions from our end - it's a fact. "Re: Re: Re: Server Volume error" by The StoryMaster According to our server logs, some 11,000 people a day are logging in and using interactives for free despite the limited server available. At present, we're serving over 600,000 free interactive pages per day. Other folks are certainly deciding they're ok to support the site with $0.06 per day to use our services. "Re: Re: Site is becoming unusable" by The StoryMaster as it stands, we have no plans to increase the spending on our free member resources. To be sure, though, we're still providing a lot of free resources. "Re: Sustainable, Feasible Interactives" by The StoryMaster Our history, of course, goes back to 2000 when Writing.Com was opened as "Stories.Com"... as a completely free interactive story site. Our goal was to be a sustainable free venture, supported by advertising only. *Angelic* The history as it were, we realized that was not feasible or sustainable. We changed to offer memberships and more while plenty of other sites came and went, attempting a free model of some kind or another... With the advent of ad blockers, many content sites are moving to outright paywalls. But there's a variety of models for this which are sustainable. We've adopted a mix of that; free to a limit, then paywall after -- and only for the interactive stories segment of Writing.Com. ... I'm watching all of our statistics and have a long 18 year history to model and chart against. I think, in the longer term, those people who decide to invest their time and creativity into a site where the plan is to just be free or ad supported... Well, I think those people will be disappointed when the owner decides it's just not worth the bills, efforts or aggravation (like the kind brought on by those actual malicious posts). At that point, the site either gets sold to someone who will exploit the content in a nasty way... or it just gets shut down and disappears. In 18 years, we've seen it so many times. Folks are left wondering what happened. Our 18 years of making decisions for sustainability, and demonstrating those in practice, should give us a little extra-credit. Hope that helps.  Northernwrites___ ~~Image #6000 Sharing Restricted~~ ~~Image #603504 Sharing Restricted~~ |
Re: Free members getting full interactive stories · 10-15-18 9:16pm  Log in to Leave Feedback |
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