Transparency On The Future of ATS

originally posted by: SkepticOverlord

originally posted by: yuppa
Hey.how much cash do you need to make ATS safe for the next year? Im gonna start a Go fund me,under business for ATS if i can.

You'd be better off forming a collective entity of members and raising money to purchase and manage the site on your own.

Am I picking up what you're putting down? Basically, you would rather new owners come along because you want to be done with running the site?

You are loud!
Loud and clear!

Exhibit A+++++

For added measure.... more pluses+++

Sum...

Sum sum..
We a$$holes have beaten this site to death.

Any complaints, please don't take it out on the establishment as for several years people you don't know put this all together for everyone.


Domain is for sale.


Thank you so much to every person here👍🤙👏👏👏I never get to give a cookie..

please note, at no point am I being snarky. this is a big deal.

Could always go the opposite direction and find someone like the Koch's who will continue supporting free speech and the like

I think it's safe to say Xing political discussion would cut a huge overhead off the site. Look at the post count alone, topics trending, mostly political

originally posted by: PapagiorgioCZ

originally posted by: face23785

originally posted by: hawkguy
I would commit to a membership. I believe many of the contributing members in Aircraft Projects would feel similarly. There's a quite interesting and eclectic mix of voices here and I feel that the quality contributors would be retained in a transition to a membership based model.

Toxicity would almost certainly decrease as well.

That's what I'm most wondering is where are all of those folks gonna go, since that's my favorite forum. Wherever they wind up, I'd like to follow.

SmAshomAsh forum it is.

Let's go. He will be happy
smashomash.com...

We could start a group on Reddit. It's not ideal but it would certainly give people a place to go. Nothing will ever touch this place in its prime though, nothing. Sadly, places like these are few and far between.

a reply to: Bigburgh

What would such a venture even look like? I have about $75,000 in disposable income and could probably get financing for double that amount. Say $200 even on the safe side. Not nearly enough alone. I'd be willing to enter such a venture

Down the rabbit hole

*Sites like ATS matter and are crucial to maintain meaningful ways to express free apeech

originally posted by: continuousThunder
just spitballing here, but maybe the prevalence of hateful, violent rhetoric could be contributing to the decline in traffic?
in the last week alone i've seen innumberable vile thing said about trans people, claims that black people are predisposed to crime, of lower intelligence, deserve their treatment by the police, and should "only live among their own kind", and i've seen multiple calls by separate posters for a nuclear weapon to be dropped on an american city (!!!).

like, on one hand there's free speech, and on the other there's people using their own free speech and discretion to go elsewhere when the climate is so foul.

Absolutely agree. Mud pit threads should have never appeared in the recent threads forum, ever. All those people just want to talk to their own kind anyway.

So many posters for years have been saying, "I miss the old ATS."

I made my account after having a UFO encounter and grey alien encounter the same summer in 2008. Before that I just read the website.

It's sad that stories like mine, all the amazing debunking work on a variety of subjects, and much more will be lost because of basically fox news.

I don't think there is one thread about fox photoshopping CHAZ pictures. That is massive, old ATS would have a 100+ page conspiracy thread on it.

originally posted by: Hypntick
a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Yeah ballpark estimates on an instance that would support (my best guess) is in the 4.5k per month range. Not accounting for dev time, security services, etc. Even at a rock bottom price of $5 a month for a subscription model you'd need 50k folks on that.

I hope if nothing else a buyer can be found, however if not some sort of archive would be nice. Then again, we're talking expenses as well, which a donation campaign may in fact fund.

As I said, it's a damn shame.

It would require 5k users@ $5/month, not 50k. 50k would generate $250,000 per month.
Like many others have said, most of us probably have multiple cloud services that we pay for each month without thinking twice. Netflix or Sling or Hulu. $5 coffee's at Starbucks, etc. I think the majority of users who enjoy the site would have no issue paying $10 per month.

I have been a member for Ten years and lurked before that.

This is a very sad state of affairs.

I have so much more left to say, so many epic threads I haven't gotten too....

I would pay $10 to $15 a month for the security of knowing I would still have that chance.

So many of us have so much left to say.....

a reply to: peter_kandra

The point is though that the owners don't seem to have enough time to set up a subscription service and I think you would honestly struggle to get more than 100 paying subs

Call Ellon Musk

a reply to: JBurns

I edited...

See above.


Also,

You and Seeker are close.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Looks in the mirror....
I don't like what I see.
I...AM...RESPONSIBLE...

Someone needs to get an ATS version of that video going NOW!

Sad to hear, but maybe people wouldn’t have been forced to use ad blockers if ATS staff would have listened when we told them over and over that certain ads were making the site unusable.

Instead they ignored us and often deleted the threads discussing the problem.

Well, is it a problem you can ignore now?

It makes me feel so sad to read this. I don't write much but I read a lot; ATS is practically open permanently in my browser.

A lot of things are being taken from us lately, what with the corona and all the political correctness era, but nothing says "a sign of the times" as this site disappearing into the night.
Of course I would be ready to pay a monthly fee to save ATS but from what I read it will not help much.
I love this site with all my heart and the people in it; I feel that losing it has a much greater significance than just losing a forum on the internet.

I wish it could be something we could do; I wish I would be rich enough to buy it and keep it just as it is.
Instead I can only say thank you, all of you for being a home for so many years.
I'm orphan now.

a reply to: Bigburgh

Thanks Tim

Need a group of interested parties then, but personally I'll go all in for ATS

originally posted by: FauxMulder
Am I picking up what you're putting down?

Nope. You're not reading what I'm saying.

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

So let's be totally realistic here, a monthly subscription is clearly not going to work and I think Skeptic would have went down that road if it was viable.

The next suggestion seems to be around crowd funding of some sort. At $25,000 per month thats going to cost $300K to keep us going for a year and again, that is not going to happen. There is no point in donating say $100 to a site that is quite clearly not going to last to the end of the year. What happens to my donation if this site closes down anyway. Again it's not a realistic option to crowd fund and its been tried before and it never worked.

Bill has also set out why the advertising model is no longer viable so simply removing add blockers is not an option.

Selling then seems like the only viable option and honestly I think you would struggle to give a site like ATS away. According to bills numbers the running cost is 25K per month to make the site viable and thats just not going to happen.

If all of the above is true, who would want to buy it?

There are viable options. GoFundMe for an initial injection of capital and then separate sections for monthly paying members and non-paying members.

Who gives a rat's ass if non-paying members bitch? Where are they gonna bitch and to whom if they can't even post?

a reply to: Riffrafter

Thats my point I don't think anyone will buy it, we might get a wealthy member who might be tempted to give it a shot but ultimately based on what Bill has said so far I personally can't see how it's viable.

The point about subscription is simply that I can't see how you would ever make enough money to make it viable based on the current number of active members.

originally posted by: SkepticOverlord

originally posted by: rhynouk
I think everyone who uses this site needs to be told that if you keep blocking ads, it's the end.

We did that, almost 3 years ago.

For people using ad blockers, we injected alternate images into the space where an ad would go. The images contained the message to stop using ad blockers.

Membership freaked out.

It was one of the most wide-spread drama episodes in the history of the site.

Aggressive entitlement was rampant.

Just so you know, I kept the adds coming. I never turned them off, truth be known, more than once I punched on those sites and roamed around before I returned to Above Top Secret and participated in earnest

Attempting to sell it without making at least nominal attempts at lowering that 25k figure will likely not yield a buyer.

If I can think of a way to make ATS profitable, and assuming that the asking price is reasonably considerate of the fact that it's a business that's currently bleeding money, I'd likely consider putting in a bid. I'll definitely be giving it some thought in the coming days.