Ramblings of a Geek...

Curse Premium, My 2 Cents or is it 8 Cents?

Posted Apr 29, 2009 by farlin

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I posted this on the forums, but figured this might be a better place to post my opinion.  Not looking for flames, arguments, or anything of that nature.  I am simply laying out what I have observed being said.  Take it as you will, but please be constructive with your comments!

Honestly doesn't bother me one bit that Curse went ahead and added a premium portion to their service.  Not surprised the decline in advertising has come and I would imagine as time goes on it may continue to decline as a revenue base for Internet services.  More and more people ignore the ads to begin with, so marketing companies have less reason to use advertising to get out their message, especially if it is not targetted to a specific audience.  Hence the reason for having a team to go out and get contracts with marketing agencies related to your web content.  Despite all that effort, out of all the impressions an ad may generate, only about 2% at best turns into potential business.  And of that 2% only 75% results in actual business in the best of circumstances.  That is simple economics and you can probably find more accurate statistics using Google, but I suspect what you may find will be lower as those are best case estimates.

To operate a large network like Curse, all the bandwidth and software development costs have to get paid for somehow.  Being that I am a project manager and web/software developer by trade, I know that stuff isn't cheap.  Web hosting and Internet bandwidth providers are in the business to make money.

So is it worth $29.40/year for the premium service?  Mind you I am not defining what a "premium service" is just what is being offered.  Well, it comes down to what you feel $29.40/year is worth (or $2.45/mo or ~61 cents per week or ~8 cents per day).  And if you calculate minimum wage of $6.55/hr, that is ~11 cents per minute, accounting for taxes you pay for that in about 2 minutes of work.  So, now that we see the math, is it worth 2 minutes of work to pay for the service?  For me, yes, I got better things to do, like playing games! :)

And for a side note, nowadays, you can't buy a gallon of gas for $2.45. :)

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  • farlin said 
    Wed, May 6 2009 5:45 PM ()

    Yea! Glad to see some people recognize the benefit of supporting a site you actively use. :)

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  • wrooom said 
    Wed, May 6 2009 1:53 AM ()

    I totally agree and $2.45 is really worth nothing nowa days. I like the service Curse team provides and I think it's one small thing I could do to help.

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  • tyister said 
    Tue, May 5 2009 10:44 PM ()

    @calotherm

    It's bullying to ask people to pay for a service that is provided or to try and subsidise it with ads while providing it for free? Interesting.

    I for one am more than happy to pay 30 bucks a year to support these guys regardless.

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  • farlin said 
    Sat, May 2 2009 4:02 PM ()

    While I can agree, how do you expect a service to be free without some sort of revenue to sustain it?  Its purely economics and since the ads are not generating the revenue, they have to do something to keep their doors open.  Besides that, its their website and content and they have every right to force whatever ads they want on their web page. :)

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  • calotherm said 
    Sat, May 2 2009 4:39 AM ()

    all i have to say is, just because wow is a massive game with lots of people playing it - its not an excuse to push adverts onto people if they dont pay up.... that bullying

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  • farlin said 
    Thu, Apr 30 2009 3:51 PM ()

    Flisher, exactly. Realistically it boils down to Curse being able to operate its web sites.  Without revenue, there are no "free" web sites as bandwidth and hosting services cost money.  Therefore companies have to make revenue some how to support those basic necessities for a web site.  Curse tried ads, it work for some time, but now the cost of maintaining the service is higher and the capital generated from ads has declined.  Ultimately something has to give, either the services declines or you look for another revenue source.  Curse has few options, so to maintain a primarily free service, they have opted to restrict performance and some minor features to encourage others to support the service they are providing in a monetary form.  They could have just as easily made the client premium only and forced users to use the web site to download, but they didn't.  They only took away the "Update All" button, which in itself is very minor, but is an attempt at getting more monetary support to the site through "premium" services.  Nothing is ever 100% free, everything comes at a price, its just a matter of what the "price" may be.

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  • Flisher said 
    Thu, Apr 30 2009 6:16 AM ()

    I know someone that have a website reaching the similar ammount of users per month than Curse.com, and with a specialized niche.  Is income revenu from ads dropped by 3 or 4 over the last 9 month.  Fortunatly, can operate with a team alot smaller than the Curse one and require less bandwidth.

    However, at this rate, is websit may die after being run for alot of years as the number 1.

    Considering the inzane cost of bandwith when it come to hosting service able (and willing) to handle traffic like Curse.com generate, I'm happy to see Curse aiming for alternative revenu source because it ensure myself (as an ex-addon author and a player), that the wetbsite will be there in the future for us.

    Considering the client already do an excellent job in normal mode, I'll be more than happy to get the other goodies with the premium service :)

    I didn't do the math, but in my case it's less than 2 hours per years to get premium beta access :) (wich I consider very interesting)

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