State of the boards

[Hell Puppy]

Originally Posted by Weg Cory

The term everyone is rather sweeping and can't be said for any board. I mean, you could say it for GFY, but people will say they don't read it.

You can look at advertisers on boards for some clarity on things. I was more talking about program owners and webmasters that tend to follow. They have a lot of advertising and a lot of program owners post there. A lot of very large webmasters post there as well.

In terms of business posters and readers, they have a very good pool. People aren't skinning GFY or throwing all these contest on JBM for no reason IMO.

But I could easily be wrong...

No one can argue that GFY has a ton of eyeballs. The fuel of this entire industry is traffic....or eyeballs. If you have a lot of eyeballs that are looking for whatever it is that you're selling, you're going to have no problem attracting ad dollars.

That said, I dont think advertising on GFY is necessarily an endorsement of the community by the owners of the programs or that they read there themselves. I think most probably use board tracker and thus conveniently show up when needed. Any program large enough to have a dedicated board whore will likely put GFY on their rounds as well due to traffic. I'm not sure I consider that to constitute truly being a part of the community.

I dont think anyone reads all the threads anywhere, I know I dont. I pick and choose what grabs my eye from subject line. And if you have a piss poor subject line that tells me nothing about the subject, you have no chance of me reading it unless thread previews are enabled. This is one thing that dropped my post count here to next to nothing when the software switch was made (hint: turn it back on).

Every board tends to take on it's own personality over time based upon the core participants. I've said it many times, a board becomes a community when it becomes an assembly of like minded individuals with similar interests and goals. There are exceptions to all rules of course, but I see 'em as follows:

GFY -- perhaps the most diverse community due to size, but it's dominated by young 20-somethings.

JBM -- a bit more mature, people who are doing business in much the same way as the GFY crowd, but typically a bit older. JBM was essentially a very successful spin off of GFY in my opinion because it came along at the right time and offered a home to those craving a bit more maturity and better signal to noise ratio than GFY.

Netpond -- attracts a lot of the european crowd.

Amateur Masters -- duh, this one is obvious!

GGJ -- mostly all business talk, not a lot of chit chat, good place to get in and get out with Q&A, etc.

Oprano -- In the past, face it, this was home of the grey beards of the industry. What will it be now? I'm kinda interested to see that myself. Both Joe and GonZo have those polarizing personalities with many people. But I think both have discovered how much business you can get done and what can be grown by working instead of pissing on the boards in the last year.