Making ends meet (TLDR: Remember that joke about listnook gold? Well...)

Alright. I'm at about comment #1000+ and I doubt anyone shall read this, but.. who knows. I'll put a bit of time into it.. because I care. Seriously. Very quickly: I came from Digg.com to Listnook not too long ago. This place is amazing. The variety and the community *make* this place. So here's a few thoughts that deserve feedback, if you have the time. I am interested in keeping this place alive. 1. You are open source. Have you reached out to the talented thousands that could help you out? They are there, they are willing. Have you requested? The community here helps each other, why not Mother Listnook? 2. You have a limited staff, you say you fall behind your promising fixes because of maintenance... This is odd for me. It connects a little with #1, laterally. I think that if you said hold on, shut the site down for a month to investigate, repair, and so on and had a separate location for things such as donating, then you could gain your footing again. Check this out: You have that decoy page, if you will, filled with ads, and equipped with a donate button. Guess how many people would either set that as their homepage, donate a few bucks, or both? I would. I just got here and I can appreciate this place. 3. I'm sure we've all seen it, but what is this? [digg vs. listnook google search graph](http://www.google.com/trends?q=listnook,+digg) ... Listnook is on the rise. Digg is doing it wrong. Can't you, seriously, put together an incredible proposal to those with money and spell out your problem? This is the future of the internet. This type of aggregation-behemoth... which brings me to 4 -- 4. If you're 'on the rise' and you can manage a few additional ads, a subscriber system, an easily accessible donation system, (or even a subscription system that is simply a monthly donation, where no additional privileges are given [example: 50 cents a month]) and become more efficient with use of the power of open source... I don't see where you couldn't turn a profit without ruining your site. Just my input.... Dear 3 people that will read this. Where do you agree? Where am I wrong? a/s/l?

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Listnook has provided me at least $20 worth of entertainment over the past 2 years. I would happily pay a few $. I would prefer to pay a "one off" fee - having to pay monthly would be a huge turn-off. Also, no PayPal or any system that requires me to make an account, please.

Why don't you try removing ads for Gold Members? I'd bet 99% of the people tech-savvy enough to want to pay for Listnook already have ad-block, so it's mostly symbolic, but it's a nice symbol, and should still be cash-flow positive.

I don't get why Listnook doesn't just run Google Adsense. Seriously, it would do all of the targeting for you, and with Listnook's traffic it would easily bring in tens of thousands of dollars a month if not more. Sponsored search could also rake in millions if you were to sign a several year contract with either Google or Microsoft's Bing. Your search sucks anyways. I currently help run a network of websites that traffic 64 million page-views a month and our demographics and content suck compared to Listnook and we make bank (it's mainly video so we go through more bandwidth then Listnook probably even does). Between Adsense, TribalFusion, and a few other ad networks and perhaps AdultFriendFinder on the adult sublistnooks you could easily make $4,000 a day, if not more. Asking for donations from your users when you're a part of a company who has a network of websites that constantly have ads running on them seems completely illogical. Ask them for an advertising / sales person so you can increase revenue, I'm sure they will gladly assist you in making them more money.

If I ever meet you, I'm going to buy you multiple beers. This goes for the rest of the admins, as well. Thanks! Oh, and is that question monthly? I used to pay $5/month for TotalFark, I'd give that here. Just give me an option other than GayPal.

What is your financial target? Or, if you prefer: What is the salary of a listnook admin?

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It seems weird to be asking about a price point without any features offered. Why not just set up a donate button if listnook is really strapped for cash and is expecting to feed itself merely on the kindness of strangers?

**I want to buy Listnook** I've tried to contact someone before but I suppose my message wasn't taken seriously. I am interested in understanding who I can talk to over at Conde Nast about buying Listnook. The fact that your team has remained exactly the same size for the past two years seems fairly indicative that the parent company isn't seeing the future returns for which to invest now. I have the necessary funds to invest in Listnook to ensure that you can ride your growth to success. Sites with far less presence are very profitable, there is no reason why Listnook can't be the same. But you can't do it with just 4 guys constantly firefighting code. You need a few million dollars of upfront investment in a bigger team and better resources. I can provide this. Who do I contact at Conde Nast to see if they are interested? EDIT: I'm just a listnook lurker in my mid-twenties with access to funds. I am only posting this to see a) if there is a specific person or team to initiate contact with privately than for me to just reach out with a message to the generic contact info that Conde Nast has (which I will try eventually) and b) if there are others that would also be interested in joining a bid. Discussing if I'm legit or not is really pointless since I'm not asking anything from any of you.

I think you should hire a better marketing director. If listnooks revenues are low, but your visits are up, then you are doing something wrong. You can't expect folks to pour out their resources to you while you aren't actively soliciting companies that you feel would serve us well. Penny-Arcade found a market for themselves with the help of Mr Robert Khoo. Listnook needs it's own Robert Khoo. Put some resources towards that. Engineers are horrible salesman. **** edit **** I'm not the first to say it (so go through upvote those who did say it), but listnook has some very marketable sublistnooks that advertisers would love. Selling ads for Valve, Blizzard, Bethesda Softworks, etc via r/gaming, r/wow, r/XBOX360, etc. Sell ads for hulu, Netflix, Amazon on r/entertainment, r/scifi, r/Fringe, r/LOST, etc. Sell adds for Bangbros, RealityKings, Daredorm, etc on r/NSFW, r/GONEWILD, etc... this seems really obvious to me. Find ways to categorize sublistnooks so they can be sold in bulk and give advertisers the option to stay out of listnooks that aren't in their demographic or go against their corporate philosophy. You have the markets. You just don't have the marketing.

I really suspect this will get downvoted into infinity (that's assuming anyone even gets down this far to read this comment), but ... Good grief, **_NO_**! Are you **_HIGH_**? ABSOLUTELY categorically **_NOT_**! **You sold the site to Conde Nast, for God's sake.** As users, we're supposed to deal with all the negatives of corporate ownership (such as the attempted Sears censorship, for example) **without the one possibly singular positive (adequate site funding to reach the heights you aspire to)**? And how the **_hell_** are you guys as a team putting **up** with the idiocy of having a corporate owner that gives you no pros but already has given you a ton of cons? I mean, seriously! You guys need to grow a set of cojones, walk up to whomever your next step in the ownership chain with Conde Nast is, and tell them to cough up the dough or else what the hell did they buy the site _for_? No, sorry. Half of America is unemployed at this point, and the other half that _have_ jobs are holding onto them for dear life. Your request that we suddenly start funding the site when you guys are already monetizing this thing out the wazoo with advertisements and corporate ownership is an insane request to make at this point in the world's current economic climate. Were this a boom time when people would be flush with more money, it'd be **slightly** less stupid. To make this nowadays is an idiotic request to make, and if you have anyone who you're paying money to give you marketing or development advice, and they signed off on this idea, you need to seriously consider laying them off. You made your educated-guess bets on funding when you sold the entire site kit and kaboodle to Conde Nast. If you're having problems with it now, you **don't** get to have your cake and eat it, too. You want to grow a pair and give us something **_PROACTIVE_** to get behind, then, yes, damn it, you have a loyal userbase which will rally behind you, because there is a community of people here who like it here. And yes, you deserve the credit for that. But not this weak-sister c*** you've dished out with this very poorly thought-out request. Listen, you want to come to the userbase with a plan to buy Listnook back from Conde Nast and have it be a user-owned website? That's something users will get behind. Or even to a lesser degree, you want to offer Listnook Gold memberships that have solid, concrete membership benefits **now** as a product? Well, that kind of sucks and I agree with those who say it'd f*** up the existing egalitarianism of the site, but at least it's a f****** _plan_: here, folks, we will give you _this_ in exchange for _this_. You want to say, "Errrrrrr, um, give us whatever you'd like to give us and you'll have ... uh ... well, for now, our appreciation and a nice PNG to display in your web browser!" Yeah, sorry, that's a _reaaaaaaaaalllly_ half-assed idea to go public with. But when you have a corporate owner, no, you don't get to do the "hat in hand" begging thing with your users. It's an insult to your users, and it's a stupid-as-all-hell and culturally insensitive move to make, to boot. **tl;dr** Listnook Userbase to You: NO. If your corporate owners are being skinflints, it's **your** job to handle funding problems and it's asinine to ask us to make up for that shortcoming, especially when we have to deal with a heavy corporate hand poking into site policies.

Hi there, First, thank you for the amazing work that you do for all of us. I well understand your point about Conde Nast. You're right, that the way corporate work. What bothers me it's that, if one day, listnook start to make benefits, Conde Nast will be here to heard it. Trust me, I will be glad to give some bucks to keep you guys working on this great place. If it were a non-profit, you will already have receive something from me. BUT. this is a for-profit. So, if us, the users, start to put some money in this business (let's call a cat a cat), what will guarantee us that our money will be well use, in the long term? My point is that, in some countries like my (france. yep, I sure you already got it from my bad english), there is something we call "society of readers" (and sometimes "society of writters"). If we, by putting money on the table, will allow listnook to continues running, why can't we, as a group, also have a kind of power in exchange of our investment? It could be shares, or anything else. Just something that guarentee us to have a voice about the futur of listnook.

While listnook is admittedly short on engineers, it also seems to be short on business-savvy leaders. I [already mentioned](http://www.listnook.com/r/AskListnook/comments/cne7c/anyone_else_think_listnooks_job_board_needs_to_be/) the job board needs revamping and could be a source of revenue for the site. There's a bunch of other opportunities as well- ie) starting a specialized market research group and conducting polls/running surveys, adding to the community feel by integrating a gifts model (à la Facebook), or even recruiting Listnookors to help with the work in exchange a snazzy orange username title. All these are ideas off the top of my head- I'm sure you'd be able to think up some much better ones... It doesn't seem like Listnook has a real business plan and that's why Conde Nast is content keeping you guys on the back burner. Personally, I'm not willing to pay for online content and no matter how cool the donation benefit is, I'll always pass. On that note, I also won't be happy if I learn that Listnook is offering improved service to members who donated. Listnook should consistently help its community rather than have the community help the company. P.S. If you downvote, please leave a comment :P **TL;DR** Donations are for suckers. You lot need to think of new revenue streams.

I've scattered a few replies here and there, but I want to address my biggest concern with this. Slashdot implemented a subscriber feature many years ago, and I became a subscriber right off the bat. I could disable ads, add one point to my post score that didn't add to my karma (a good idea for listnook, potentially), and had a few more features I don't remember. This was great for about a year until Slashdot realized not enough money was coming in from subscriptions. Thus marketing-friendly Slashdot was born. "Fake" news stories that were merely advertising in disguise, disruptive advertising, and more all came to the site. Now I rarely visit, and I haven't paid my subscription since the first ad-based story hit the front page. Please don't let listnook become another Slashdot by putting all of your hopes on a subscription model and realizing too late that it isn't working. I love this community, and I don't want to see it wither.

Here ill post a sad story about me trying to support listnook: I tried to advertise my game on listnook 2 times. I would pay $20 and have listnook display my ad. The first time I tried it I couldn't really count the amount of sales I got because of another promotion. The second time I was really excited to see what kind of a difference listnook makes. It turns out I had -1 sales that day. Apparently, users didn't like me advertising the game so they bought one and returned it so I would loose 30% of the sale. That was the first time I lost a sale. Ooh well...

Ahhh, the freemium model. The very reason I lost an elevator pitch competition. I'm not even kidding, you should make the names of subscribers a different color, or a different font, or something. ** People pay for even the slightest inkling of *extra* individuality ** You should be asking yourselves what you can do so some listnookors feel more special than others, then sell them on that. EDIT: Or, there could be trophies for donations. Listnookors seem to love donating to good causes, so it doesn't seem like too much to ask for them to donate to the place that allows them to make all those donations to good causes.

I would definitely pay for more vanity features like sorting my own comments/submissions by karma, a graph of karma over time, richer API access, assigning colors to friends, custom side-wide CSS, automated message on my birthday, ability to vote on new features, protection against Candlejack, etc. However, in the course of writing this comment, I had a sudden flashback to the dot com days. "I'd definitely buy your service if you added XYZ." And then the customer doesn't even

I'm a bit torn. I love listnook, and would gladly pay a bit now and then for it (and probably will). But you're not a couple of college guys anymore. You *are* owned by a corporate entity, and a big one at that. If people donate, it's win-win for CN: hey, look, we don't have to put any money into listnook, the users are doing it for us.

I work 3 jobs. One of my jobs that I do in my spare time is create websites. My websites, using nothing more than Adsense, pull in almost enough every month to pay my rent, this is after costs. My websites combined pull in less than half a million page views a month. I don't even have hard working contributors writing my content for me, I do it all alone. I'm not sure what you guys are doing wrong, but I have never asked for a cent from a single visitor or had to beg them for money. I figure one of three things, either I am doing something right, you guys are doing something terrible wrong, or you guys are actually pretty well off and trying to capitalize on a bunch of suckers who already write 99% of your content for you.

I have only one suggestion: Please do not incentivize payments. ie, only Gold members can view this post OR a Gold member thread can only be viewed by other Gold members kinda thing. It just does not work. Instead have a targeted funding drive of some kind. Start a one month drive for raising money by selling listnook alien shirts or mugs OR sell @listnook.com email accounts for $25 a year. I wish I had any constructive ideas except selling one product a day(woot style) or selling a listnook alien lollipop for $25. But in any case, please do not give special benefits to Gold members, that in my opinion is a destructive tactic. So then, from a commercial standpoint, why would someone want to be a Gold Member........ Oh! and removing ads for Gold members is a good idea, but if I was a Gold member I would feel cheated, cos listnooks one of the very few sites where ads are this unobstructive.

Recurring payments, despite maybe not being hugely popular, are the way to do this. One off payments, or a "pledge drive" style system to raise money aren't going to be predictable, will take a lot of your time to organise, and will generally piss people off every time they happen. On the other hand, if you give people the option to pitch in, say, $2/mo, automatically charged, you get some significant benefits: * Predictable stream of revenue each month. * Small amount, so most people won't even think about it * Once it's set up, it's almost completely automated Personally I'd be happy to sign up to something like this. $2-$3/mo is not a big deal to me, but if you can get 20,000 people doing it, you'll really be onto something.

Here's a thought for a Listnook Gold feature: How about the ability to monitor all your novelty/throwaway accounts from one page? Seems like people who've been here a while are A) more likely to have a couple of accounts, and B) more likely to want to join Listnook Gold. Also: Listnook Gold. How about "Listnook Unobtainium" or "Listnook Jedi" or something?

As long as the gold members don't have access to certain 'gold-only' posts, or you're at a great disadvantage being a basic member, I'm fine with this. I fear that it'll come to a point where you *have* to donate to get anything out of listnook, though -- or it'll turn into a bragging contest. I would happily donate -- I just don't have the funds right now, nor will I in the foreseeable future, unfortunately.

Your sponsored links have grown my business substantially in the last year, and seriously changed my life for the better. So it is with sincere gratitude that I donated to listnook gold. Thanks guys, keep up the excellent work!

A website that gets 280 million hits per month needs the people that helped make it popular to pay money to continue operating? As Raldi said, Conde Nast is a business, one that wants to make money. They don't see anything in Listnook that tells them it is a good investment, why would I argue otherwise? Honestly if Listnook cannot continue as-is then it needs to be made a public company and money can be raised through stocks. Again, if Conde Nast does not see the benefit in this then what is the benefit in giving money directly? I love Listnook, but as someone who posts often for the last 3 years or so it is a little troublesome to be asked to pay money so all the new users don't crash the system. To me this would be like taking private donations to clean the BP oil off a beach when there is already someone responsible for that money, BP.

Personally, $6/m is a reasonable amount. Also the ability to access a persons full comments with subscription (it should pass over to the API too) would be awesome. So yeah, while I'll get listnook gold regardless of the features offered, I would *love* if it would give more extensive access to user information via the API. oh and a **super important** feature would be gifting listnook gold to other users. Enter their username and gift it, optional anonymity. oh oh oh and I don't think you'd ever do this, but please don't make it so we can make posts or sublistnooks only accessible to gold members! oh oh oh oh oh and how about the ability for gold members to subscribe to domains? I'd love notifications when one of my sites gets submitted, that'd be pretty damn awesome!

do a kind of a early roll out/beta program for new features. regular users will be mad if power users start flaunting screen shots, but everyone likes to have the inside scoop on stuff. i know there is some of this already based (somewhat, I think) on seniority, but maybe making it an official roll out scheme for new features would be kind of cool

> a button you could press to smack someone in the face over the Internet Glad to see you guys have been reading my emails. I will certainly pay $20 for this button. Listnook Gold, b****! *smack*

Unfortunately, I think the problem comes down to adult content, and your tolerance of it. Let's do some math to see why this is the case. You guys have 280M page views. That's 280,000 CPM units, the unit advertising is purchased in. You have 4 engineers. Engineers fully loaded cost about $100-125K, so at top end we're looking at $500K + another $150K for server expense (10K/month seems pretty reasonable for outsourced hosting). So we're looking at $650K per year, or less than $60K/month. You have 280K units to sell every month to make a little more than $60K, so you have to just sell your ads for .22 cent CPM and you'd be profitable! This seems incredibly doable. Better yet, you currently only have ONE ad s*** per page... most publisher sites have at least 3, and often 5. Add another 300x250 below the fold, then add a 728x90 at the footer. No one will notice or complain, and even if you make abysmal CPMs, you will make it to profitability. But you guys aren't doing that... and you're smart guys. Here's what I think is really happening, and what you're really struggling with-- most of the growth, and the bulk of the new PVs, must not be monetizable. You're drawing an enormous amount of adult traffic (jailbait, NSFW, gonewild, FUUUUUUU, etc) you don't really want, that can't have ads on it without resorting to friend finder/p*** ads (which Conde probably doesn't want). Not to mention top tier advertisers are afraid of a site whose number one search term is 'jailbait'. So these adult listnooks are now a core part of the community, and you can't kill them off without tanking traffic and severely undermining the community... but businesswise, they are only a cost center that makes your traffic look good, but doesn't let you scale revenue with growth. Beyond that, your audience disproportionately uses AdBlock, so your PVs and your ad impressions are wildly disproportionate. And finally, each user must probably churn 20-30PVs/day, which from an ad perspective is actually a really bad thing-- much better to have 20 people see an ad once per day, then one person see the same ad 20x. This is a tough situation guys-- you either kill off the adult stuff (or split it off to another entity) and increase your ad units, or you make a pay-as-you-go+subscription model that actually works. If you keep the adult stuff, you MUST find a way to make them pay disproportionately more for their upkeep. The final recommendation I'd have is that Conde + Listnook has never been a logical match. Conde should spin you guys back out to a Silicon Valley based investor that wants a top tier website with radical growth in its portfolio. See StumbleUpon for reference.

I don't have a lot to spare, but I'm about to send $3.14 your way, cause well, I only spend money in increments of pi. Makes getting gas a b****. EDIT: [oooh yeah.](http://i.imgur.com/qhONb.jpg)

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So basically, the multi- billion dollar media conglomerate, Conde Nast will own a social media site where the users generate all the content AND pay to view it as well as view banner ads? F****** A, dude. For all you suckers thinking of donating, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in too.

Would Bing or Google give you any money for using a branded search? The existing search isn't very useful and MS is trying to drum up business.

So what are you going to do when power-tripping moderators (like neoronin on /r/india) ban paying customers as part of personal grudges? Do you refund our money for failing to provide the service we pay for? Listnook clearly doesn't care about abusive moderators now.

I'd happily buy a gold subscription if it meant that you'd guarantee that I wouldn't have my IP logged or the like. As I see it, if I'm willing to cover any costs I incur, Listnook doesn't need to cover them by selling IP addresses or other privacy-related things now or in the future. Also, I'd rather have a hard guarantee that my name/financial information isn't going to be linked to my Listnook account and used for anything other than billing if I *do* buy this. Also, I'd rather buy a yearly account, and would rather have the option to make it non-recurring. I know that sales guys love forcing recurring payment, but I cancelled my (otherwise quite good) Consumer Reports subscription just because they disallow non-recurring payment. Here's a couple of other things you could sell me: * Some sort of computer-parseable protocol access. For example, Google provides POP3 access to gmail. I'd much rather use Listnook via emacs or another native client (the hell with these tiny little text fields, etc), but nobody wants to make something if they have to rely on screen-scraping. Yeah, this kills the ability to sell ads, but if people are *paying* for their access anyway... * The ability to create a personal profile (link to website, etc). I wouldn't use it, but I'll bet a lot of people would. * Select an icon to show up by the username? Granted, I would expect to see gobs of penises, but showing icons could also be an option... I know that this is not likely to provide an immediate return, but as a researchy thing -- it'd be nice if Listnook and other subscription sites could provide a signed certificate containing the total amount of money spent and a unique number associated with the account. Why? Because a hell of a lot of sites out there would greatly benefit from "expensive identifiers". That is, if someone can just make up new identities, things like blacklisting don't work. People can create spam. Stuff like that. Today, we try to use IPs (or maybe class C networks) as an expensive identifier -- if a website gets abuse coming from your class C, it gets banned. That's not incredibly reliable, though. What some places have done (like Metafilter, XBoxLive, etc) is to charge an entrance fee, to make the identifier you get "expensive". In many cases, they don't need the money, but what they *do* need is the ability to make sure that you don't just make up new accounts. You can do this by actually charging someone money, but then every single service that wants expensive identifiers has to charge. But if someone can use certs from trusted sites like Listnook saying "this person is associated with this account and spent at least $X here", then I can get expensive identifiers without billing my userbase -- they're just purchasing stuff that they'd have already bought. As a result, blacklisting works. I can only play with people on, say, Quake servers if their client uploads a cert showing that they've spent enough total money on various services (Listnook, WoW, whatever, as long as they issue certs). Those players don't need to spend money on anything that they wouldn't have purchased anyway *and* it means that we can finally ban problematic players without chasing them around IP ranges.

As long as my money goes DIRECTLY to KeyserSosa, jedberg, ketralnis, raldi and for hosting... oh wait... THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. As soon as you start asking readers for cash, the TOILET at the HUMONGOUS Condé Nast Building will need to be 24k. That's how these things go. Sooner or later the corporations that buy sites like listnook will stop. They will realize the readers/users/customers really don't want their money to be used to buy 24k GOLD SHITTERS. Good luck with rattling a tin cup for a company that posted $7.63 BILLION in revenue.

Wow. 280 million page views and you can't keep 4 engineers hired full time (or more)? Yikes. You should be clocking down north of $500K a month just on advertising. I've advertised several times, for various products, and I didn't get any value from it. But I'm sure there are many companies that could get value from your reader's demographic. Just make it c**** enough for companies to not think twice about the money spent. And stop the splitting of views up equally, based on how much someone puts in. Just sell per thousand impressions. Advertisers like to know what they're getting and not have to guess at it. And you could really sell your impressions much cheaper than other outfits (and you'd have to since your viewers do NOT spend money as much as the demographics of other sites.) But even if you charged 10 cents per thousand impressions and sold that to 20 advertisers, you'd be raking it in. Humble opinion.

You're creating a class segregation raldi! Dividing the listnook-silver have-nots with the listnook-gold have-yes...es. I kid. I kid. But it will be interesting to add incentives for people to pay for the site while at the same time making sure that those who don't, don't end up feeling bummed or left out like some second class citizens. The elitist attitude on this site is already something to marvel. One man , one vote must obviously remain. But I love this site. I mean, I *really* love this site much like most of its users and I will support you guys no matter what you do. Just out of curiosity though, what does Digg do differently than listnook that it can manage to hire like 50 people and still like, not resort to some form of Digg Gold? Edit: the like, digg gold members can like be called Gold Diggers (tm) . But thats neither here nor there. Just something I thought up of for my personal amusement.

Listnook is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron.

How much is Listnook worth? I'd pay 100$ for a share :D I know its kinda utopic but it would be awsome if Listnook was owned by its readers ;)

Rupert Murdoch wants users to pay for online content, listnook reacts with "LOL GOOD F****** LUCK, SUCK MY D***" Listnook wants users to pay for online content, listnook reacts with "THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER" What's with you people? I just don't understand the mentality. This isn't some indie company; it's Conde Nast. Some of you are making a point of donating money. Does this not seem strange to you? Listnook's parent company is seeing how far it can stretch listnook's resources and you react by giving Conde Nast money?

Donated. Not sure how I feel about exclusive features for subscribers. I say keep it open with no bonus features for now and see how it goes.

I want to change my username, retain all my activity and karma. I am willing to pay $10 one time charge for that. I am sure there are NovelyAccount holders that would want the same and want to pay you $10 per account per year for linking it to their main account.

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This is a great idea! I like it. Some points: * A subscriber should have nothing over a regular user. No double points, like someone mentioned below, and no privileges when it comes to content. See comments about TotalFark elsewhere in this thread. * Giving subscribers the ability to customize was mentioned, and it's awesome. Custom coloring for friend's, custom CSS options. * Optional Ad blocking with feedback is yay, and worth the subscription price alone. It also increases Listnook's value to advertisers, as they can get feedback about their ads and spend their dollars better. * I don't think a subscriber should 'appear' any different than a regular user, aside from the badge on their profile. This would develop a 'class' system and we've already been to high school, thanks. Also, custom icons is a bad idea. You'd still have to pay for that bandwidth. I know you guys are leveraging CDN, but still. It adds up. * A listnook.com email address would be shiny. Get some google up in here for that, it'd be a nice perk. I'd use it on my resume, maybe. Like a secret handshake. I'd hire a listnookor.. after reading their comments. ;) * Get advertisers to offer discounts to subscribers. Those of us who can afford to donate for a subscription can likely afford other cool shit. You could basically implement this by having ads that only serve to subscribers, and include things like coupon codes.

How about leave it as is, and do a yearly donation drive like NPR?

Give them the ability to search. The rest of us are used to not having this feature.

This blog post would be borderline pathetic, if it wasn't tragic. Somebody in Conde Nest, PLEASE, fire one of the engineers and hire a business developer/ marketer/ PR mogul to end this situation and make my f****** pass time profitable once and for all... they can hire the engineer back in two months. It's ridiculous that they can't turn a hefty profit with this many page views.

I have $239.01 left on an AmEx Gift Card (work gives out bonuses on these cards), so I was going to donate $39.01 to bring the card to an even $200. But alas, Paypal can't authorize it for some reason. :( **Edit**: Was getting denied because there was no contact info associated with the card to validate against (name, address, phone). Had to call AmEx to add this information. [$39.01 donated](http://imgur.com/hX2x3.png).

* Minimum of $5 donation * Allow gold members to select colors for their usernames * Vuvzuela button That's all I can think of for now.

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Making the blog post on a **payday**. Well played admins, well played. You win. I gave money.