Has ATS considered charging for membership?

I once thought about charging for the right to post in threads that I have posted in. The charge would come if you post just previous to or directly after my post because of the fantastic exposure it would bring you.

I opened a paypal account.

Devised a tiered payment plan.

Hired an accountant.

Emailed Skeptic.

Then things went to hell for me.

My paypal account was hacked and I lost $32.50 to some guy in Romania.

My tiered system was actually a registered trademark of Amway - I am now in litigation.

The accountant discovered I was 3 years late on my taxes to uncle sam - I am now in litigation.

Skeptic threatened to ban me if I EVER spammed his email account again.

And then I discovered my posts just aren't that interesting.

So I beg of you before you come up with a pay for play system - read my story and hear my words. If I can stop one kid from making the same mistake I did - it will be worth it.

Dorian Soran

reply to post by RiotComing


you believe my idea is elitist. does that equate to you believing i am an elitist?

just wondering.

Has ATS ever considered paying its contributors?

I've seen and read some amazing, thought provoking, inspirational, well thought out, researched, referenced high quality contributions from many of the members of this site. Maybe at some point in time the advertising revenues will provide you with enough capital to pay cash rewards for exceptional high quality ORIGINAL member contributions?

Of course none of my contributions would EVER be worthy, but I have seen some that are. So would ATS pay for these exceptional contributions?

reply to post by ll__raine__ll

No, not at all. The idea however promotes an ethos that some members are more worthy than others because they are prepared to spend $$$. On a personal level, you could well be a very inclusive open warm person, I don't know you lol

Originally posted by ll__raine__ll
i'm just not convinced they don't need it. i haven't noticed any rockefellas or rothchilds among the ATS elite.

Well let me try to convince you...

www.dnscoop.com...

Site Value Report
The estimated value of abovetopsecret.com... is: $347,300

This value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web.

Hmmmm down a tad from last month

Charging for membership would be a bad idea and would lose a lot of members.

But how about a donation system? Similar to Wikipedia – look how much that’s making now.

Mikey

reply to post by Walkswithfish

To answer your question, yes. We offer a minimum of $50.00 USD for premium articles the staff feel are good enough for the newsletter. We are also looking into ways of doing advertising revenue splits with members who create excellent content.

It's not an easy thing to do in a completely fair and logical way and with only three of us running the whole operation on a full time basis it's even harder to manage day in and day out on top of all the other things we are managing all ready.

That being said, we will have something above and beyond the existing "premium article stipend" put together by summer hopefully.

Springer...

Charging? No way...

However, I think that "subscribed membership" threads should be introduced , allowing "research" threads to develop without the mass of posts that detract from the main point.

This isn't elitism, just a method of refining the posts that want to achieve a specific objective and based on the input of individuals. If people post "#e" on these threads then they are much more likely to get banned from posting to it, by agreement between multiple moderators.

I can see this type of thread being useful for the investigation of specific cases.