TR Forums

Waco wrote:

ludi wrote:

Remember the previous TR-is-tanking thread where people were discussing that TR's only hope of remaining a Going Concern would need to include better social media presence, more video experiences, and probably some kind of angel investor? Well, this is what that looks like. Take it, or take the 404.

Oh, I understand, I just have a distinct distaste for modern-day snake oil salesman.

"modern day snake oil salesman" hmmm, I think I'll use that as my definition for "influencer"

barich wrote:

Surely there's some room on the web for a niche property that doesn't slavishly adhere to current fads.

If that were true, pre-sale TR had the best shot. And what they found was that not enough people would pay for it.

tanker27 wrote:

Waco wrote:

He embodies everything I hate about the current events.

YES!

Gyromancer wrote:

Just to be clear, us writers were told to carry on operations as normal and not reveal any details of the new situation until this week, when new management decided to spring the new design on us.

No one is blaming the writers we know! (at least not me) Most of the writers have had a presence for a very long time and we "know".

The new owners should have introduced themselves in a better way.

I recently put an offer in on an investment property (renter already there) and in my conditions, I stipulated that I wanted to meet the tenant (I'd take them out for coffee) and introduce myself so that we both had a good foundation going forward. (As it turns out, the seller went with another offer). But there is a correct way of introducting yourself and then there is this way. Books will be written about how bad this introduction was.

ludi wrote:

barich wrote:

Surely there's some room on the web for a niche property that doesn't slavishly adhere to current fads.

If that were true, pre-sale TR had the best shot. And what they found was that not enough people would pay for it.

You nailed it, unfortunately. Even with half our "staff" volunteering, we couldn't afford to keep the lights on and continue to pay writers the little we paid.

Let's assume that they're going to turn the site into this fabled clickbait-infested, pushy, low-information-density rabbit hole where the only visitors are those who don't know what they want.

How will that help differentiate the site from 40 others that already do this? Best case scenario, they're going to get the same results TR's been getting for years, except now from a group of random nobodies as opposed to actual fans of the site.

You need those fans though. Fans are the people who convert random nobodies. But to gain and keep fans, you need to cater to their specific brand of soul. And this week's revelation has been utterly soulless. It's bad enough to make me post again.

Meadows wrote:

Let's assume that they're going to turn the site into this fabled clickbait-infested, pushy, low-information-density rabbit hole where the only visitors are those who don't know what they want.

How will that help differentiate the site from 40 others that already do this? Best case scenario, they're going to get the same results TR's been getting for years, except now from a group of random nobodies as opposed to actual fans of the site.

You need those fans though. Fans are the people who convert random nobodies. But to gain and keep fans, you need to cater to their specific brand of soul. And this week's revelation has been utterly soulless. It's bad enough to make me post again.

You're preaching to the choir here, but what they initially claimed their plan to be wasn't so bleak as the picture you paint. It was more a broadening of horizons to attract new writers in different fields to attract a wider audience, while keeping the same content that has been here. I can't promise you that said plan will live up to our high standards or be carried out at all, but they have begun reaching out to us now to ensure that the same quality content is here to stay. I'm going to stick around for a few months, continue to write, do what I can to change things for the better, and see how things pan out.

This is the only constructive thing I have to add to this discussion for now...

To the new management: A little bit of transparency would go a long way. Right now would be a good time for it

As a very long time lurker I was very saddened to find the new layout when I came to read the Zen review (which was a great review). I suspect the reaction the owners wanted was "oh wow look at how great the site looks now!". My reaction was "what the holy hell happened here!?! The site was fine yesterday and now it's broken and has a garbage default wordpress blog layout". Way to make a first impression as the owners which broke everything and thought the site would be fine with a default WP blog layout.

As a subscriber I can't remember if the subscriptions automatically renew? (since the subscription page and status are broken and devoid of any info). If it does have an auto renew where can we cancel?

Will the new owners offer refunds as some of the perks which were advertised for subscriptions no longer work?

The new owners should have been considerate to these things - the fact that the dev didn't even know there was a subscription page shows that they really didn't care about what the site was, and were only focused on their vision of what they want it to be. I hope the staff and volunteers can get things back in order but I seriously question if the new owners are of the same mindset. If I wanted to read a clickbait, SEO optimized tech blog then I'd click the first thing on Google (of which there are a lot). I came here for the well written articles and the community who discusses them - there are a few other sites that fit that description so I'll stay with those and remove TR from the permanent tab location in my browser if things don't get fixed very quickly.

[tongue in cheek]
The new owners are missing a trick here with the big font wide spaced comments section. They need to pack the whole length with more ads. Then when they back up to find the pull down menu you can make them see them all again.
[/tongue in cheek]

layerup wrote:

drfish wrote:

Alright, here we go. TR is now owned by John Rampton and John Hall. It's still an independent site, just with new owners, we're not part of a massive conglomerate or anything. Despite being off to a rough start with the redesign, we're more stable now and the possibility to invest and grow actually exists, instead of just being wishful thinking. But both sides have some learning to do about the other.

Technically, the new guys have owned the site for a few months, but they have left business as usual alone (except for the Twitter and FB bots and the redesign obviously) while the rest of us have continued to do our thing as we saw fit. There's no indication that's going to change. Of course, the existing writers have concerns, we'd be crazy not to. Not looping us in before the redesign launched was very uncool. Hopefully, we'll get better at communicating and avoid missteps like that in the future.

I think anyone who is a regular knew about the backend issues with TR, but I don't know that I remember much of a discussion regarding the site being sold. Was there any discussion of Adam looking for a buyer, and I just somehow completely missed it? Is John Rampton a good friend of Adam's, or how did this new buyer enter the picture?

It's a moot point now, as what's done is done, but how much money were we really talking here? I realize TR wasn't 'profitable', but was it 'losing 30k a month' in the red? What does 'not profitable' really entail? Was it possible that someone like myself could have bought it, and worked on maintaining the forums and legacy TR, with the occasional pet project or review posting?

I'm sure this information is all above our collective pay grade, but I think it still rings at least a bit sour with many of us, that vanilla TR has appeared to have been ripped away from us, without much context provided.

The answers to some of your questions are a combination of things I don't know and things it would be inappropriate for me to share. Here's the best I can offer. The fact that the site was for sale was a private matter. I don't believe Adam knew John before the sale negotiations started but I think he knew of him. There was a bit of a catch 22 going on because resources were stretched as long as possible but in the end there wasn't enough funding to hire a new EIC. That was the nail in the coffin of old TR. Advertising contracts ended and weren't renewed (thanks YouTube), Nvidia never played ball (even with Scott out of the picture), sub money was a small percentage of the total income, the mining craze killed GPU commissions permanently, affiliate links for other items kept declining, and the list of reasons could go on.

You're right, TR as we know it was unceremoniously ripped away from all of us, but it's not dead. It would have died months ago if Adam didn't take this chance and Adam, for all his hard work to keep things afloat, would have nothing to show for it but a significant debt. He had to lookout for his family and no one blames him for that in the slightest. There was no choice and no better options, but there were worse options that would have made Adam more money. Even though this one was a bit of a gamble, it was the only one that left TR independent. The new owners may not be the most personable folks so far (to put it mildly), but there's no indication that the new stuff they want to do to make the site profitable will somehow obviate what TR has been doing at lest since Jeff left and hopefully it will lead to more than that if we can bring on some more writers and attract more hardware to review.

Hope that helps with your perspective.

human_error wrote:

As a subscriber I can't remember if the subscriptions automatically renew? (since the subscription page and status are broken and devoid of any info). If it does have an auto renew where can we cancel?

Will the new owners offer refunds as some of the perks which were advertised for subscriptions no longer work?

I'm working on this, high priority.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

*The comment quantity hotlink was vital to me. I often interacted with stories long after the initial reading. I could see the active one's by monitoring the comment count... Can we bring this back.

A big thanks to the devs for fixing both of these issues. I appreciate it!

drfish wrote:

The answers to some of your questions are a combination of things I don't know and things it would be inappropriate for me to share. Here's the best I can offer. The fact that the site was for sale was a private matter. I don't believe Adam knew John before the sale negotiations started but I think he knew of him. There was a bit of a catch 22 going on because resources were stretched as long as possible but in the end there wasn't enough funding to hire a new EIC. That was the nail in the coffin of old TR. Advertising contracts ended and weren't renewed (thanks YouTube), Nvidia never played ball (even with Scott out of the picture), sub money was a small percentage of the total income, the mining craze killed GPU commissions permanently, affiliate links for other items kept declining, and the list of reasons could go on.

If, at some point, we could get a rough idea of the scale of the cost of running the site as it was/is, that would be invaluable. If subs carried a few percent, are we talking $50k a year total? $200k?

I understand it probably can't be posted exactly, but I think it's one of the problems with this whole transition (lack of transparency). I wonder if there's some group of well-off gerbils that could have kept the lights on.

Waco wrote:

If, at some point, we could get a rough idea of the scale of the cost of running the site as it was/is, that would be invaluable. If subs carried a few percent, are we talking $50k a year total? $200k?

I understand it probably can't be posted exactly, but I think it's one of the problems with this whole transition (lack of transparency). I wonder if there's some group of well-off gerbils that could have kept the lights on.

Probably a pipe dream, but I would have loved to see the place turn into a kind of community-run co-op, in which people donated their money and/or labor, with no advertising and no "owner" trying to use the place as a source of income.

Waco wrote:

drfish wrote:

The answers to some of your questions are a combination of things I don't know and things it would be inappropriate for me to share. Here's the best I can offer. The fact that the site was for sale was a private matter. I don't believe Adam knew John before the sale negotiations started but I think he knew of him. There was a bit of a catch 22 going on because resources were stretched as long as possible but in the end there wasn't enough funding to hire a new EIC. That was the nail in the coffin of old TR. Advertising contracts ended and weren't renewed (thanks YouTube), Nvidia never played ball (even with Scott out of the picture), sub money was a small percentage of the total income, the mining craze killed GPU commissions permanently, affiliate links for other items kept declining, and the list of reasons could go on.

If, at some point, we could get a rough idea of the scale of the cost of running the site as it was/is, that would be invaluable. If subs carried a few percent, are we talking $50k a year total? $200k?

I understand it probably can't be posted exactly, but I think it's one of the problems with this whole transition (lack of transparency). I wonder if there's some group of well-off gerbils that could have kept the lights on.

I agree 100% here, secrecy and running from the truth is what damaged this website. TR never dealt with the financial problems until it was too late. They hid things and pretended that everything was fine even when it wasn't. The people in charge got so invested in dealing with the problems in the site, they spent every day furiously fighting the alligators and accomplishing little in their goal of draining the swamp. Now the alligators are still here and the swamp has spread over a huge area due to not being taken care of.

No one in charge asked for help until drfish started doing it in a roundabout way, the owners and staff just kept tightening the belt and putting more of their own money and effort into the site until they had nothing left. Just think if they had been honest 5 to 6 years ago about how things really were and made some effort to get help. Now we just get a last minute hail mary and watch everything crash and burn. Honesty could have prevented all this, a front page article laying this all out would have been sure to get people to subscribe sooner and in greater quantity to save the site. Just imagine how bad this would be if drfish wasn't here doing what he has single handedly done, why does it take a volunteer to do all this when the staff seems unable to do so?

So many things could have been done differently, and if things were handled differently I know I would have been sure to put a lot more money in than I have and many other gerbils would have done so also. The problem is no one knew the truth, they hid the cancer until the cancer was terminal for the TR we knew.

Waco wrote:

If, at some point, we could get a rough idea of the scale of the cost of running the site as it was/is, that would be invaluable. If subs carried a few percent, are we talking $50k a year total? $200k?

I understand it probably can't be posted exactly, but I think it's one of the problems with this whole transition (lack of transparency). I wonder if there's some group of well-off gerbils that could have kept the lights on.

It's possible to estimate how much they got from subscriptions. The subscription number I got after renewing went up by about 300 each year, so that's how many subscribers there were, and the average was, I think, around $ 50. So they received about $ 15 000 per year, which isn't a lot.

Even if there were, say, 250 persons ready to pay $ 100 per year, that's still only $ 25 000.

Waco wrote:

I wonder if there's some group of well-off gerbils that could have kept the lights on.

Well, when Powerball and Megamillions get big (to me, that means cash prizes of $200 mil, meaning $100 mil after taxes), I play with the intention of keeping this place as it was. Of course, I have a dazzling -100% return rate on those "investments".

Captain Ned wrote:

Well, when Powerball and Megamillions get big (to me, that means cash prizes of $200 mil, meaning $100 mil after taxes)

Move to Canada: no tax on lottery winnings here.

drfish wrote:

There was no choice and no better options, but there were worse options that would have made Adam more money.

Out of everything that's been said here, I may take issue with this the most. Not you, DrFish, just the "no better options" part. There absolutely would have been some options with some transparency. DrFish is the best reader and ambassador any website could have.

Other than the somewhat tongue-in-cheek post I made earlier, I've just been following along. I have actually read ALL the front page comments.

No, I don't like the new layout, for all the reasons people have already posted. But that kind of stuff is easily fixed, and anyone who has been in the real tech world for any length of time knows that mistakes happen, bad launches happen, live demos are a big no no, etc. Things get fixed, people learn, and over time, it becomes something people talk about over a beverage and use as an example to teach the next "generation" what not to do.

What is more problematic is the total lack of communications (as others have pointed out). This is especially true when the new owners are supposedly crack-shot communicators and social media savvy. The front page comments are an excellent example of how not to manage communications in a bad situation -- ** crickets **. People don't like change sure. People will complain, of course. A good communicator engages with those people to allay their concerns. Sometimes, just listening to the complaint and acknowledging it has been heard is all that is needed. A good communicator finds the nugget of concern buried in the rant and can turn around and focus on that concern. Not ** crickets **. If you don't get in front of the complaints it just becomes a dogpile and eventually bad things happen.

One thing that I think was missed was the makeup of the TR readership. This is a tech site that has a very long running readership. Many of the long time readers have been here as long as I have, and longer. For those keeping count, I joined the forums 17 1/2 years ago. Many of us found the site early in our careers and have followed since. We have progressed during this time. Some quite far. I expect there are a number of Sr Managers, VPs, and even C level executives who frequent this site. Those who have read many of my posts know I'm a nerd, an engineer at heart, but in my professional career, I've risen in the ranks as many of us have over time. I haven't hit the executive/C-level yet, but I am part of the senior leadership of my current company. I pay attention to both the business and tech world these days. I can say with certainty that the new owners have gone on my list of people to avoid in the business world. In the end, it probably won't matter but they have hurt not only the TR brand, but their own personal brands with this switch over.

--SS

Starfalcon wrote:

So many things could have been done differently, and if things were handled differently I know I would have been sure to put a lot more money in than I have and many other gerbils would have done so also. The problem is no one knew the truth, they hid the cancer until the cancer was terminal for the TR we knew.

I hear you, but I think there's also a real fear that if you start going around talking about financial problems, you could potentially precipitate the collapse of the site. Some people might be hesitant to pay for a subscription if they think the site is at risk of going out of business or at risk of having a big drop off in content. If you think you can solve the financial problems in secret, better to do it in secret.

In hindsight, that clearly didn't work, and so we can now confidently say they did the wrong thing based on what we know now. But we can't say they did the wrong thing based on what they knew then.... we will just never know.

TR's home page has been my home page for roughly 15 years. That changed today.

I'll keep watching this thread, and the TR forums in general, for now. If things improve - and I hope they do - TR may be my home page again.

SecretSquirrel wrote:

Many of us found the site early in our careers and have followed since. We have progressed during this time. Some quite far.

Hey, speak for yourself.

Waco wrote:

If, at some point, we could get a rough idea of the scale of the cost of running the site as it was/is, that would be invaluable. If subs carried a few percent, are we talking $50k a year total? $200k?

I understand it probably can't be posted exactly, but I think it's one of the problems with this whole transition (lack of transparency). I wonder if there's some group of well-off gerbils that could have kept the lights on.

I have an email from Adam nearly a year ago (September 2018) that put some ballpark numbers on TR's financial situation, but I'm not sure if it's appropriate to share it (he did ask that I keep it confidential). But according to him, at that time, reader subscriptions barely made a dent for the site expenses.

Yan wrote:

Waco wrote:

If, at some point, we could get a rough idea of the scale of the cost of running the site as it was/is, that would be invaluable. If subs carried a few percent, are we talking $50k a year total? $200k?

I understand it probably can't be posted exactly, but I think it's one of the problems with this whole transition (lack of transparency). I wonder if there's some group of well-off gerbils that could have kept the lights on.

It's possible to estimate how much they got from subscriptions. The subscription number I got after renewing went up by about 300 each year, so that's how many subscribers there were, and the average was, I think, around $ 50. So they received about $ 15 000 per year, which isn't a lot.

Even if there were, say, 250 persons ready to pay $ 100 per year, that's still only $ 25 000.

I don't know the exact number, but it's been implied that the sub income could only cover about 20% of the cost of a full time EIC. Your first estimate is probably a bit high, TBH. ~$10,000 is a decent kitty for hardware purchases, if everything else is already paid for, though.

blastdoor wrote:

Starfalcon wrote:

So many things could have been done differently, and if things were handled differently I know I would have been sure to put a lot more money in than I have and many other gerbils would have done so also. The problem is no one knew the truth, they hid the cancer until the cancer was terminal for the TR we knew.

I hear you, but I think there's also a real fear that if you start going around talking about financial problems, you could potentially precipitate the collapse of the site. Some people might be hesitant to pay for a subscription if they think the site is at risk of going out of business or at risk of having a big drop off in content. If you think you can solve the financial problems in secret, better to do it in secret.

In hindsight, that clearly didn't work, and so we can now confidently say they did the wrong thing based on what we know now. But we can't say they did the wrong thing based on what they knew then.... we will just never know.

In response to MOSFET as well, I believe this was a big factor, it's a tricky balance and TR is far from the only site that couldn't make ends meet. The old model was not sustainable and "pivoting" cost money that didn't exist. You start begging and all of a sudden your ad contracts start drying up even faster than they already were. You start begging and suddenly anyone that might want to buy the business reconsiders. You start begging and if your audience doesn't catch your Hail Mary, you're boned. I'm sure all of that and more was a factor in the decisions that were made.

I wanted to do dramatic front page appeals too and I know a couple were even written but not posted. Knowing what I know now, and as grateful as I am for the sentiments expressed here, I think a sustainable community-driven site that could frequently produce old-school in-depth TR quality content is pretty much a pipe dream. You'd need 10x as many subs each donating twice as much to get anywhere near the revenue that TR used to have when it could pay 3-4 full time staff (and that's when tons of review hardware was coming in for free).

drfish wrote:

I think a sustainable community-driven site that could frequently produce old-school in-depth TR quality content is pretty much a pipe dream. You'd need 10x as many subs each donating twice as much to get anywhere near the revenue that TR used to have when it could pay 3-4 full time staff (and that's when tons of review hardware was coming in for free).

Yeah, I guess that makes sense...

But how big of a pipe dream would it be to have a sustainable community-driven site that changed its content into something still valuable yet much less expensive than those old-school in-depth reviews? I'm thinking of the old Ace's Hardware which, if I recall correctly, had a much lower volume of content than old TR, but a really great community. Johan decided to go work for Anandtech, but I wonder if the old Ace's model, or some tweak of it, might work now? The tweak could be that a larger share of the content could be community-generated.

I guess what I'm trying to say is... in this crazy modern world of YouTubing millennials, maybe the secret value of TR isn't those old big reviews, but rather the old farts in the community? Or is that a pipe dream too?

ludi wrote:

barich wrote:

Surely there's some room on the web for a niche property that doesn't slavishly adhere to current fads.

If that were true, pre-sale TR had the best shot. And what they found was that not enough people would pay for it.

I think that's where I'm at with my grief process, too. It's the final stage: acceptance.

That said, I don't hate the new look. I thought I would based on Hance's screenshot. Maybe it's because I rarely maximize a browser window so I can have multiple things open. That's the best use for a big monitor I can think of, and squeezing my Chrome window down enough to just fit TR isn't so bad.

drfish wrote:

Yan wrote:

Waco wrote:

If, at some point, we could get a rough idea of the scale of the cost of running the site as it was/is, that would be invaluable. If subs carried a few percent, are we talking $50k a year total? $200k?

I understand it probably can't be posted exactly, but I think it's one of the problems with this whole transition (lack of transparency). I wonder if there's some group of well-off gerbils that could have kept the lights on.

It's possible to estimate how much they got from subscriptions. The subscription number I got after renewing went up by about 300 each year, so that's how many subscribers there were, and the average was, I think, around $ 50. So they received about $ 15 000 per year, which isn't a lot.

Even if there were, say, 250 persons ready to pay $ 100 per year, that's still only $ 25 000.

I don't know the exact number, but it's been implied that the sub income could only cover about 20% of the cost of a full time EIC. Your first estimate is probably a bit high, TBH. ~$10,000 is a decent kitty for hardware purchases, if everything else is already paid for, though.

blastdoor wrote:

Starfalcon wrote:

So many things could have been done differently, and if things were handled differently I know I would have been sure to put a lot more money in than I have and many other gerbils would have done so also. The problem is no one knew the truth, they hid the cancer until the cancer was terminal for the TR we knew.

I hear you, but I think there's also a real fear that if you start going around talking about financial problems, you could potentially precipitate the collapse of the site. Some people might be hesitant to pay for a subscription if they think the site is at risk of going out of business or at risk of having a big drop off in content. If you think you can solve the financial problems in secret, better to do it in secret.

In hindsight, that clearly didn't work, and so we can now confidently say they did the wrong thing based on what we know now. But we can't say they did the wrong thing based on what they knew then.... we will just never know.

In response to MOSFET as well, I believe this was a big factor, it's a tricky balance and TR is far from the only site that couldn't make ends meet. The old model was not sustainable and "pivoting" cost money that didn't exist. You start begging and all of a sudden your ad contracts start drying up even faster than they already were. You start begging and suddenly anyone that might want to buy the business reconsiders. You start begging and if your audience doesn't catch your Hail Mary, you're boned. I'm sure all of that and more was a factor in the decisions that were made.

I wanted to do dramatic front page appeals too and I know a couple were even written but not posted. Knowing what I know now, and as grateful as I am for the sentiments expressed here, I think a sustainable community-driven site that could frequently produce old-school in-depth TR quality content is pretty much a pipe dream. You'd need 10x as many subs each donating twice as much to get anywhere near the revenue that TR used to have when it could pay 3-4 full time staff (and that's when tons of review hardware was coming in for free).

That was what I was getting at though, the old way wasn't working and they just kept trying to make it work. That is basically the definition of insanity....doing the same thing and expecting different results. It is like what happened on You Tube when people no longer got the ad revenue they used to get and expecting the heady days of tons of money to come back soon and doing nothing to plan for that even getting worse.

I see where you coming from for not wanting to talk about financial problems, but they were still there even if they hid them. Hiding things from your loyal fanbase, many who didn't even know the site was in trouble, wasn't going to make things much better. Plus the new owners and their mouthpiece don't have much to say to use except a blizzard "SOON". I myself have been here over 18 years and there are very few places on the internet that can keep an audience for that long. I respect Scott, Jeff, and Adam for all the work they have done here, but the lack of trust really hurts. I heard securing an independent future for TR for years, but if this is the best that can be done...I don't know.

@Starfalcon here's the thing about TR's recent financial problems. They're not the community's business. They're not my business, and I write for the site. Everyone knew (well, "knew") there were problems when TR got shut out on RTX review units. The time to address it was then, but nobody did. The community could have stepped up to make sure the site could afford to start buying review hardware in that new reality. Now we're here, and I for one am going to make the best of it.

AMD came through for us (the community) in a big way by sending Zak review hardware that I don't think ANYBODY expected.

derFunkenstein wrote:

@Starfalcon here's the thing about TR's recent financial problems. They're not the community's business. They're not my business, and I write for the site. Everyone knew (well, "knew") there were problems when TR got shut out on RTX review units. The time to address it was then, but nobody did. The community could have stepped up to make sure the site could afford to start buying review hardware in that new reality. Now we're here, and I for one am going to make the best of it.

AMD came through for us (the community) in a big way by sending Zak review hardware that I don't think ANYBODY expected.

True enough, it isn't our business. Well guess Ill sit here and take what the new TR gives me then.

I mean, it's right and good to voice displeasure when you're unhappy with the direction of the site. Please don't take my comments as shutting you down. Everyone has a voice in this, and the people in this thread all have emotional attachment and skin in the game. I'm just trying to be realistic.