Ad-blockers, subscriptions and money? ATS is worth $2 million and makes $466,920 a year

a reply to: Tiamat384

We are literally their business and provide them with their product. They simply setup a market (ok not simply) and are now asking for us to be monetary investors.

we may be their "business" and provide their product but we are NOT investors, put another way

If you grow corn (something that you get paid for) and sell it to a food manufacturer, do you get to dictate how many different ways the manufacturer can sell it, what size packaging, what flavours, what markets to sell it in. I don't see whats hard to understand.

Using your logic what harm is there in providing your personal financials on-line to justify a case where you would theoretically seek an exemption or reduced subscription fee for all to see? They are

a reply to: NihilistSanta

he comparisons being used are completely wrong. ATS is like a bar with nothing but a BYOB (bring your own booze) policy. They tried to sell their own booze (Above Network,NLBS, this disinfo endeavor) but no one is buying.

Fair comment

a reply to: imthegoat

The thing about giving money to any website is that you're not an employee of that website; you essentially become a silent partner (without the benefits), and deserve to have that financial transparency.

In real life even the emplyees dont get to see the books, why should you

a reply to: TheScale

I keep following these various threads as they pop up and i never hear anyone ask why they decided to start this ad block assualt on the very same day as dozens of other websites across the web. id like to know who is pushing this agenda behind the scenes and why ATS is willing to go along with it. i know it means more money for them but it cant just be a coincidence that this came down the pipe at the same time.

I noticed that as well - maybe the cycles are speeding up and the financial meltdown is coming, theres a thread about financial Armageddon happening in April 2016 - hmmm. If that happens only the strong companies will survive. Or maybe some new legislation in the works to do with censorship...who knows

I only read through about page 5 before I got a head ache. First off I have no problem with the ads here. I used to but apparently that got fixed. I got my only ad blocker on my I phone because of ads that constantly redirect to the App Store and make the page in reachable. Now the iOS ad blocker works differnt in that it uses a Vpn that blocks the ads server side. Turning it off and on is t super hard but pain enough that I'm not going to disable a Vpn just to come here when I am looking at several web pages while on my phone. I hope the people running this site get filthy rich I like the site. They handled this entirely wrong from a business perspective. I have owned car lots for years and finally closed my last one down because of money issues. The internet about 10 years ago destroyed a good chunk of the car business now you're seeing larger dealers eating smaller ones every day. You couldn't tell the people you were trying to sell a car too that though. They didn't care that because they can go online and look up the exact amount you paid for the car and demand to only pay that it would kill your business. They wanted the best deal for them and were completely convinced that you got some sort of magic money on those cars and wouldn't sell it if you realy lost money on that deal. I wanted to tell them how ignorant they are but just couldn't and keep people coming in. You try to sell service relationships ect. In the end though the people only think of them selfs until you are gone then go dang can't believe so and so didn't make it. I suggest the owners of this site read who moved my cheese. Try to find your new cheese from this site or stop fighting a losing battle. Technology is great until it isn't.
www.amazon.com...=nav_upnav_mobile_T1_DetailAW

a reply to: daaskapital

As a fellow webmaster and someone who understands how ad block has crippled websites and ruined many peoples lives because of freeloading self entitled ignorant bottom feeders I totally 100% am behind whatever ATS does.

I've never used ad block and never would use it because I think stealing is wrong, but even when it's "not stealing" preventing people from earning an income while using their work and creations is completely disgusting and immoral.

Tiny nit to pick:

As I see it, donation is not investment, except perhaps figuratively. (Though true investment is something I actually favor for crowdfunding, it's simply not the case right now with very few exceptions.) I see this a lot with crowd funding, such as Kickstarters. "I invested in this product, so I should have the right to expect X." Imho, you voluntarily donated to a creative endeavor and are not even guaranteed that it will ever see the light of day necessarily.

On the other hand, a subscription is something different. A subscription usually confers certain readily spelled out benefits (exclusive content, maybe certain licensed privileges on a temporary basis for the duration or part of the subscription period, ad free browsing, etc.) Then I feel we would have more of a leg to stand on in terms of feeling somehow maltreated if ATS didn't live up to its subscription benefits. But even there, there are usually clauses which specify the express right of the service or its owners to change the terms of service without notice.

At the end of the day, we do not own this website. That is, whether one likes it or not, the be-all end-all in terms of practical impact we might or might not have on the form it takes, its function, its features, or any changes it might make going forward. We are privileged to be on a site that does actually at least try to take our feedback and requests into consideration to the extent it can. We are not entitled to transparency with respect to its finances. If that information should be revealed, it is through the discretion and graciousness of its owners.

I'm not trying to brown nose here but... seriously... this is one of the few internet communities of its size that does at least genuinely try to maintain a level of ethical responsibility for itself and its users. I don't think some appreciate how rare and special that really is today.

I get annoyed at publishers and business owners when they call their customers "entitled." (For one thing - the Aspergian anal retentiveness of me simply dislikes "self-entitled" being shortened to "entitled" in recent years lmao. But that's another story.) However, as time goes on, I'm starting to at least appreciate their point of view given some things I've seen asserted online by people who - frankly - have zero direct insight into the specific realities of any given business in question... ATS included. (Not that I do either... nor do I have a right to, and that's the point.)

Anyway, this is just my opinion of course. The final word on the issue as always of course comes from the owners and for my money, these two statements...

originally posted by: SkepticOverlord

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
No worries, SO was not going to share with you peasants anyway.

It's a zero-sum proposition.

With the kind of false assumptions in the opening post of this thread, our actuals would not be believed anyway... leading to more drama and the gnashing of teeth.

originally posted by: SkepticOverlord

originally posted by: theySeeme
40 million hits per day on a website like this could be hosted on a $10 VPS (virtual private server) with like 1gb of RAM

Since cutting costs a while back, and moving to a lower-cost metered CDN provider for all the image assets, the cost of serving our images alone is several dozen times more than your estimate. Just for our images. The outbound bandwidth of our images exceeds the typical bandwidth allotments of dedicated servers by several times.


A bit more than a year ago, we engaged a professional IT management firm to review our full stack and recommend the most cost-effective hosting option, as well as optimization strategies for the stack. Most of the code optimizations have been either tested and discarded (trying to cache mysql queries was a disaster) or deployed. And we are running on robust but relatively inexpensive dedicated server. I have a low threshold for logging slow db queries, and check it regularly... there hasn't been any for months, so the code is well-optimized.

When people say, this site could be hosted for X, they typically don't consider some of the unexpected items for sites with more than four million distinct pages. One such item is search engine bots. On some days, more than half our overall total traffic can be non-human indexing agents, and it's never less than 30%. Looking at the live log right now, of the last 100 lines of access (which represents less than the last 5 seconds of activity), 70 are indexing agents. Each of those lines of the log from indexing agents is accessing a different thread page... that alone is 70 different queries against a database of 1+ million threads and 20+ million posts in less than 5 seconds.

Using our stats, we approached AWS, The Planet, and SoftLayer for quotes on a VPS solution. No one came in under $3,000/month. Google App Engine may have been a possible alternative, but looking at the datastore and processing cost estimates, it was going to be well over $2,000 a month. So it was more cost-effective to hire a professional IT firm to customize a high-performance dedicated server specific to our needs.

Some details on the iron (we use two of these, master/slave db):
Dual E5-2670v3 processors.
32 GB RAM
Two RAID-0 arrays: one 4x 15k RPM SATA for boot/content, another 4x SSD for the database.

In front of that is a hardware load balancer (the only thing that provides the performance we need) and DDoS mitigation.

Slow query threshold is .4 seconds, we've had none in the logs for 90+ days.

Both servers typically run at a 2.0 CPU load average. During spikes, they can hit 8.0 without performance issues.

... more than sufficiently address the situation.

To date, there have been no less than three active topics about this now, with additional topics about it closed on top of that. Don't get me wrong. It's clearly of great relevance to many members, which means it should be discussed. And I hope feedback that is translatable into actions which will better please those members will arise from those discussions (including this one.)

But in my humble yet emphatic opinion, we really don't need to see their financial data, and we don't have any right to. Nor is it unethical or overly defensive for them to withhold it. Especially since, for the most part, we either already trust them enough that we don't need to, or we don't trust them period, in which case seeing their finances won't satisfy anyway, as SO said. This is a conspiracy site of course, so this is to be expected to some degree. In a sense, it's almost like the site is eating itself. It would be funny if it weren't sad, because of how much I have - grudgingly, oddly - come to love this place.

It took me twelve years to truly, fully appreciate it. I regret that now. ATS doesn't owe me anything. If anything, I owe ATS some solidarity in what appears to be a less than smooth moment in its operating history. For what it's worth, consider said solidarity given (barring some horribly unethical conspiracy to milk us all of money, line the pockets of the owners, squash dissent, and encourage nothing but mainstream thought and opinion here coming to light... :p)

Peace.

a reply to: buddha

You get banned for posting that information. Another example of the freedoms you will soon be paying for.

If you value this site but aren't willing to support it, how important can it be to you?

Not running an Adblocker is literally the least you can do to support this website. If you aren't willing to do that, what are you even doing here?

I would fully support a pay site for ATS. Perhaps only having people who feel invested will improve the level of discourse and the quality of debate.

originally posted by: Leonidas
If you value this site but aren't willing to support it, how important can it be to you?

Not running an Adblocker is literally the least you can do to support this website. If you aren't willing to do that, what are you even doing here?

I would fully support a pay site for ATS. Perhaps only having people who feel invested will improve the level of discourse and the quality of debate.

I don't know about that. I belong to a college football pay message board. 90% of threads break down to why they are entitled to X because they pay 10 bucks a month.

What difference does any of this make? The owners will do what they want and the members will either comply or move on. There are many more conspiracy forums than this my friends!

a reply to: Siddharta
Eh?
What?
Pass it on dude you've had enough....you're seeing things

originally posted by: GeauxHomeYoureDrunk
What difference does any of this make? The owners will do what they want and the members will either comply or move on. There are many more conspiracy forums than this my friends!

Yeah but it's more than that though, as jaded as people become there is a braintrust involved with ATS. This site has broken news, contributed to news, is frequented by newsmakers, celebrities such as Jesse Ventura and Nick Pope and others who lurk around here anonymously, not to mention the academics and industry thought leaders who contribute as well. (We've also had crazies who sadly became news makers as well). ATS will bounce back of that I'm sure (actually I'm not even really sure is down and out) but now it appears time for its members to pony up, and I have no problem with that considering I've really enjoyed this site for almost a decade as a member and non member.

originally posted by: DumpMaster
a reply to: daaskapital

As a fellow webmaster and someone who understands how ad block has crippled websites and ruined many peoples lives because of freeloading self entitled ignorant bottom feeders I totally 100% am behind whatever ATS does.

I've never used ad block and never would use it because I think stealing is wrong, but even when it's "not stealing" preventing people from earning an income while using their work and creations is completely disgusting and immoral.

Spoken like a true Adman and someone who's swam that pool of sh@t many times. You're indoctrinated and biased and quite frankly, in the way. Adblockers didn't kill websites, Tivo didn't kill television, and blank tapes and discs didn't kill movies and music. To call me a thief because I don't enjoy ads is preposterous. I don't come to ATS to do any shopping, so why should I see ads? It is my choice as a consumer on the internet. The same kind of choice ATS has about their future.

The internet has changed a great many things, and will keep changing everyone's lives. It started small. Musicians have been forced to find new ways for income. I should know. The ball rolls and rolls downhill. Music studios are adapting or dying. This we can agree on. Adapt and remain viable; don't and risk becoming another .com on the wayback machine. Don't worry about a thing...that ball will roll your way eventually.

Adapt or die. To be calling those with adblockers thieves is fitting for a fat cat, rich on his schemes, smoking a cigar and sipping brandy by a fire, all while lamenting about how much better the good ol days were. You're already a .com has been when that happens now.

IMHO,we as members have zero right to know the Bottom Line of this business.( and trust it's a business) Regardless if it's user driven content or not. Stuff like this drives said users away. It's either free or it's not. Bad decisions, mis- management of what profit is made or just greed. It's one or all of the above.

a reply to: TheScale

I keep following these various threads as they pop up and i never hear anyone ask why they decided to start this ad block assualt on the very same day as dozens of other websites across the web. id like to know who is pushing this agenda behind the scenes and why ATS is willing to go along with it. i know it means more money for them but it cant just be a coincidence that this came down the pipe at the same time.

You know, the problem when doing investigative work is that eventually we find "things".

You shall watch your steps if you intent to go this deep inside this rabbit hole...

Just a friendly advise.

I learn something everyday, I suspect ATS is suffering trickle down expenses from companies that may be paying Adblockers to whitelisted certain ads thereby losing profits on that revenue platform (just guessing).

Adblock Plus doesn’t block all ads, but rather operates what it calls an “acceptable ads” program, where ads that meet its criteria for things like placement, size, and distinction, are “whitelisted”—that is, if the company displaying the ads is willing to split the revenue gained by whitelisting with Adblock Plus. Companies can apply to have their sites whitelisted, but Adblock Plus has also reached out to some to solicit their business

www.wired.com...

There are too many Web sites out there that do what ATS does. In fact I'm pretty sure most of the content that gets posted to this site appears days earlier on Reddit. None of those sites charge a "subscription fee." Most of those don't even run ads (like Unexplained Mysteries). If ATS becomes a pay site, it will stifle membership and drive it away.

If ATS is losing money then maybe it should trim the payroll before resorting to a paywall, that's a death knell.

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

Unexplained most certainly does run ads... It's also a clustered mess...

If ATS is losing money then maybe it should trim the payroll before resorting to a paywall, that's a death knell.

Pretty sure all they're doing is asking if you're interested in paying a small fee to not see ads. Rather than be a complete freeloading POS who uses adblock.

Just sayin

a reply to: TheAmazingYeti

Except not everyone has a choice over their browser functions - Our company does not allow downloads, scripts or ads to run. That is how company servers potentially get infected with malware.