Blonde Stats Page

[tikay]

There are no standalone UK facing poker forums which are profitable, or none that I am aware of. Poker forums are near dead in the UK.

2+2 must make money, ditto Poker Strategy, though Poker Strategy is not standalone, it is part of something much wider (Affiliates), & I doubt much if any income arises from the forum. Dave Shoelace may be able to enlighten us on that.

Bear in mind a part of the cost of running a forum is labour resource - someone has to seed & run the thing, & it takes up a lot of time. In discussing how much blonde loses, it takes no account of the cost of time it takes to run it. That goes in for free, & no complaints about that. 

The blonde Moderators don't get paid a bean, & never have, either in money, or kind.

Almost all forums, (by volume) sponsored or otherwise, lose money. As an estimate, (I have no hard evidence) I'd put the proportion losing money at 95%.

I'm not sure I "claimed" blonde is losing money, I just stated it as a fact. The losses on blonde are not huge, probably, including server costs, incidentals, accountancy & Company House Annual Report costs & fees, around £5,000 per year. It's not an easy site to monetise without destroying what remains of the community ethos here. We have a lot of regulars (a lot, but nowhere near enough) who have been here a long time, & we are all now friends & kindred spirits. It's a bit like the Snug Bar down the local pub I suppose. Think I'd rather keep that ethos than alienate many by monetising blonde.

The losses - as long as I am working, & in a position to fund them - don't bother me overly.  What DOES bother me is the falling post count. There could come a point when it's just not worthwhile or cost effective to keep it going. If it falls below 5,000 (worthwhile) posts per month, I'll probably step away from it. Flushy may, or may not, be prepared to pay it when I disappear, I have no idea. (He owns 70% of blonde).  It did fall to 4,841 in April, but has improved by 50% since then, largely due to Tighty, Mere, & the wonderful Politics thread.

I could increase the post count by seeding the forum with new threads every day if I had the time, but I don't, I have a job to do, & have to give priority to that. When my working life ends - which will probably be very soon - that'll be it for me, as I won't have the funds to pay for blonde. That's not a moan or a complaint, its a fact.

As a complete aside, "Fred" has, in effect, paid for most of the losses in the last 3 years.

Yes your correct, I really should have used more qualifiers in my original post. I'm very surprised by this tbh, its the complete opposite to my own experience. I wonder if it is the willingness to advertise or the lack of an option to pay much beyond a very small start up cost originally that have made so many of the forums in my experience profitable. They also wouldn't have had to face any of the accounting/companies houses expenses. This amount might even account for the difference in our opinions( i guess experience is a better answer?) I certainly didn't mean "claimed" as in I didn't believe you, I absolutely did. I'm amazed to find out NPF shutdown. The forum itself is still being hosted as is the website? Do people hosting forums need to register a business in this manner? I guess if the goal is to monetise instead of make a community like the gaming forums it isn't needed. I hope my nativity didn't cause offence and I'm surprised by how different our experiences are.

Absolutely no offence taken, I was just extremely surprised (I often am....), & then when you backed it up with the NPF thing, I wondered if I was dreaming the whole thing. Truly.

It is odd that NPF can still be found via google, but as you can see, it closed in May 2014.

Accounting costs & Company House - well if it derives income as a Business, I'd say they were obligatory & unavoidable. To be fair, I expect a lot of Forums are not street legal as to accounting & Company House stuff. blonde is 100% street legal, & files it's Annual Accounts on time, every year.  I'm not 100% sure, but I think Tighty paid this year's Accountants bill.

Flushy owns 70%, we get along just fine, but we almost never speak or communicate, in writing or orally. By chance, last week, I ended up sat next to him in an O8 Tourney in Vegas, so we held an impromptu AGM. It was the first time I had seen or spoken to him in a year.

I'd rather like Flushy to post more, he's a genuine face & character, & that would help a lot, as he knows so many poker people, & he paid an arm & a leg to buy his blonde shares. (Around £70,000 I seem to recall).  I can't force him to though, & it's his train set, so he can do - or not - as he likes. I do feel an obligation to try to protect his investment as much as I can though. Bit of a fail, there...

[Tractor]

I think most other forums like gaming etc use google adsense, adsense can not be used on Gambling sites as its against their t&cs.

I think that is why Adam thinks it should be profitable as most gaming forums use these to generate a large chunk of their income.

[tikay]

I think most other forums like gaming etc use google adsense, adsense can not be used on Gambling sites as its against their t&cs.

I think that is why Adam thinks it should be profitable as most gaming forums use these to generate a large chunk of their income.

Gotcha, & that makes sense, yes.

[vegaslover]

Tikay

I thought DTD footed the bill for the forum?, hence no advertising streams from other sources.

I certainly wouldn't mind a more monitised forum, if it meant keeping it, or more precisely you, afloat.

[tikay]

Tikay

I thought DTD footed the bill for the forum?, hence no advertising streams from other sources.

I certainly wouldn't mind a more monitised forum, if it meant keeping it, or more precisely you, afloat.

DTD pay a monthly fee, which precisely equates to what Tighty is paid. 

So no, we can't run adverts from competing sites, & aside from that, the list of those who would be interested must be very small.

Everything is cool for now, so long as we can maintain a reasonable monthly post count. I'd not really want to persevere is the post count fell to negligible levels.

I would add I've become very fond of the place, & most of those who populate it.

[dakky]

stick a donate button on there and have it show the % donated of the costs required for the month (say it's £400 then after £40 in donations it shows 10%). A few places do that and you shouldn't be 5k out of pocket a year

[celtic]

I would guess that very few, if any would donate month in, month out.

[77dave]

its always tough for businesses when outgoings are greater than income

without being too obv either income needs to increase or outgoings need to be reviewed

doing £5k annually doesnt sound like a great business model

[arbboy]

I feel obliged to contribute my 'information' via tft because i know it costs the boss money to keep the place going and i have made plenty from TFT over the last 4 years as well as giving plenty back to other users.  If the bookies can help to pay for the ex's for us all to have a forum to donk around on and have a laugh it is a win/win spot for us all.  They (the bookies) are effectively sponsoring blonde without having their banners displayed via TFT.

Most of us have made plenty personally from TFT (if you haven't then where have you been).  Obviously we have the occasional ruck between 'friends' on blonde but it is a pretty good place for the vast majority who are all way above average intelligence wise based on the politics discussion in the last week and numerous other threads.

With regard to poker forums.   Check out the number of posts on the betfair poker forum in the last year.  It is more dead than Joe Hart as England's goalkeeper.  Betfair used to be one of the busiest poker forums in the UK during the boom.  Obviously it doesn't lose money because it is part of the bigger bf forum across all sports/products.  It might give an idea about how relatively successful blondepoker.com still is as a poker forum in 2016.


http://community.betfair.com/poker/go/forum/view/94146/165794/poker

[hummuspie]

I feel obliged to contribute my 'information' via tft because i know it costs the boss money to keep the place going and i have made plenty from TFT over the last 4 years as well as giving plenty back to other users.  If the bookies can help to pay for the ex's for us all to have a forum to donk around on and have a laugh it is a win/win spot for us all.  They (the bookies) are effectively sponsoring blonde without having their banners displayed via TFT.

Most of us have made plenty personally from TFT (if you haven't then where have you been).  Obviously we have the occasional ruck between 'friends' on blonde but it is a pretty good place for the vast majority who are all way above average intelligence wise based on the politics discussion in the last week and numerous other threads.

With regard to poker forums.   Check out the number of posts on the betfair poker forum in the last year.  It is more dead than Joe Hart as England's goalkeeper.  Betfair used to be one of the busiest poker forums in the UK during the boom.  Obviously it doesn't lose money because it is part of the bigger bf forum across all sports/products.  It might give an idea about how relatively successful blondepoker.com still is as a poker forum in 2016.


http://community.betfair.com/poker/go/forum/view/94146/165794/poker

i think blonde is doing well in comparison to other UK forums specially.  AWOP at one time was awash with new threads everyday; these days it seems to be more of an informative site (dates of poker comps etc) and the majority of new threads are simply C&P from sites like Pokernews.

Would be good if you could somehow capitalise on the increase in traffic and posts over the last couple of months

[arbboy]

I feel obliged to contribute my 'information' via tft because i know it costs the boss money to keep the place going and i have made plenty from TFT over the last 4 years as well as giving plenty back to other users.  If the bookies can help to pay for the ex's for us all to have a forum to donk around on and have a laugh it is a win/win spot for us all.  They (the bookies) are effectively sponsoring blonde without having their banners displayed via TFT.

Most of us have made plenty personally from TFT (if you haven't then where have you been).  Obviously we have the occasional ruck between 'friends' on blonde but it is a pretty good place for the vast majority who are all way above average intelligence wise based on the politics discussion in the last week and numerous other threads.

With regard to poker forums.   Check out the number of posts on the betfair poker forum in the last year.  It is more dead than Joe Hart as England's goalkeeper.  Betfair used to be one of the busiest poker forums in the UK during the boom.  Obviously it doesn't lose money because it is part of the bigger bf forum across all sports/products.  It might give an idea about how relatively successful blondepoker.com still is as a poker forum in 2016.


http://community.betfair.com/poker/go/forum/view/94146/165794/poker

i think blonde is doing well in comparison to other UK forums specially.  AWOP at one time was awash with new threads everyday; these days it seems to be more of an informative site (dates of poker comps etc) and the majority of new threads are simply C&P from sites like Pokernews.

Would be good if you could somehow capitalise on the increase in traffic and posts over the last couple of months

AWOP keeps getting gambling firms to sponsor their forum.  I have no idea how given how few people post there why any firm would ever pay money to advertise there.  There must have like 25 active posters max and most of them are just posting event information for the NW.

[deeiron]

Does blonde really lose money? It must be one of the only forums in the world to do so.

Yes, it really loses money, and does so every year.

I would disagree strongly with your second sentence. Very few forums make money. In the little world of poker, I would imagine just 2 forums in the entire world make money. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of poker forums globally.

Overall, ( not just poker) the % of forums that make money would be less than 5%.

I'm really curious where you found evidence that most forums make money. Care to enlighten us with your source?

We did experiment with advertisements "in thread" a few years ago, but the members went apeshit, so we abandoned that.

From my experience in online gaming I have seen/used a bunch of the free forum software and all of these were at least breakeven to significantly profitable and varied from smaller than blonde to 5x the size if not bigger. Maybe it is just the change in consumers attitudes to adverts (with the advent of things like Adblock) that have really hampered blonde but I really like you could move to the equivalent of invasionfree (zetaboards now?) forums and it would look the same as here and be hosted for free. You might be right about the 5% figure but I wasn't particularly thinking of sites like THM or something. Maybe I am way underestimating the moderation cost as that is something that would have been done for free, but this is a much more serious environment. I probably did overstep the mark by saying all forums are profitable but they are so easy to set up and so cheap to run. I know 14 year olds that were making $3k a month hosting a free gaming forum. Blonde wastes a bunch of server space on the forum games/front page/blondepedia and all that malarky too.

I guess I overstepped because I know its possible to set up a very cheap forum so it surprised me so much to hear this. The more googling I've done makes it sound that they aren't very profitable, but no way is hemorrhaging money either. Some people have struggled to monetise (like blonde I'd guess) but I didn't see anyone running a sponsored forum claiming to lose money.

Like the NPF http://www.newcastlepoker.com/forum/ Can't really be losing money surely? It can't cost more than £10 a month to run? I guess its less a business than blonde.

people run forums for many other reasons than making money mate and in the NPFs situation it certainly wasnt ran or set up for monetary purposes.

[arbboy]

Blonde is run in order to affect bookmaker share prices first and foremost.    They pay all the expenses for Blonde and in return we agree to affect their share price accordingly.

[deeiron]

NPF closed in May 2014.

They were unable to find a buyer, &, presumably, it was costing too much time & money to run. I'd surmise from that it was costing a good deal more than £10 a month. I doubt they would have closed it if it was profitable, or only costing a tenner a month.

 
[/quote]

The NPF was closed in the main for personal reasons by the owners who then put a for sale price on it but declined a lower offer as felt it best for all concerned it was allowed to close.

The forum was operated in the main at the expense of the owners and profit or financial gain was never the aim and purpose of that forum and it was certainly costing far in excess of £10.00 per month to host and operate. The benefits and returns local North East players received from that forum could never be actually quantified or price put on it IMO. One thing is for sure it would never be replicated or bettered and once again thats my opinion.

[tikay]

NPF closed in May 2014.

They were unable to find a buyer, &, presumably, it was costing too much time & money to run. I'd surmise from that it was costing a good deal more than £10 a month. I doubt they would have closed it if it was profitable, or only costing a tenner a month.

 

The NPF was closed in the main for personal reasons by the owners who then put a for sale price on it but declined a lower offer as felt it best for all concerned it was allowed to close.

The forum was operated in the main at the expense of the owners and profit or financial gain was never the aim and purpose of that forum and it was certainly costing far in excess of £10.00 per month to host and operate. The benefits and returns local North East players received from that forum could never be actually quantified or price put on it IMO. One thing is for sure it would never be replicated or bettered and once again thats my opinion.


[/quote]

Ahh, Lord Dobbs no less.

It was rather a shame it closed in many ways.

You make a fair point though, I don't think, in this day & age, poker forums can be run for profit, & certainly that's not the be all & end all, they just need to be affordable, & do their job by the regulars at an acceptable cost. 2+2 of course, is a different matter entirely.