Why MA forum or mag die?

[SPJ]

I subscribed to several forums and mags over the years.

They all started like a thunder or the tropical rains with a big splash.

However, after 6 months or sometime down the road, they went bust.

The Mag stopped such as Pa Kua Journal.

The forums became ghost towns with no readers except moi keep posting and reply to my own posts. Or a few posts for an entire month.---

What happened?

Do people need images or videos?

What happened to the initial flames?

This forum and several other forums do have visits consistently and very successful, however.

What happened to the others?

:confused: :eek:

[David Jamieson]

Kungfu magazine despite several recreations of themselves have consistently been a mainstay in the information outlets for chinese martial arts and the people have a dedication to it unlike many others. They stay on topic consistently and cater to their niche like no other.

In other words, for the most part, KFM is the embodiment of the last word on chinese martial art for a few reasons. They have access to reknowned sifu, they have the support of the kungfu community and they don't drift off into other topics so far as to overshadow their primary agenda like so many other mags do.

Other aspects are dead simple lack of interest and lack of commitment.
Some things peter out, some things remain strong despite the odds.

KFM is a good example of how to propogate the popularity of chinese martial arts and they don't drift from that.

[GeneChing]

As for magazines, the market of print magazines is one of the most challenging markets in America right now. Frankly, it's dying. Rising printing, paper and distribution costs, coupled with centralized buying from the megastores and pressures from e-zines, have crippled all the nitche mags like martial arts mags. Even some of the big pop mags are suffering. Porn mags are collasping. Only the celebrity gossip mags and the men's and women's mags are doing well. Go figure. You have no idea how hard it is to keep a martial arts magazine in print nowadays. I certainly had no idea before I got in the business (but arguably, I got in at precisely the wrong time - that's my lot I suppose).

As for forums, I'm not sure what to tell you there. One thing is that large forums do cost money. Quite a tidy sum, in fact. For many of the sites that host forums, there is no icnome, so it's just a community service. We've had the advantage that our forum is supported by direct marketing of our sponsor MartialArtsMart (http://www.martialartsmart.com), and the forum members have been very supportive here. Of course, we take care of you all too, not just by keeping this monster of a forum up and running, but also by giving the occasional 10% discount offers here and such. So for our forum, we enjoy a symbiotic relationship with our forum members that actually supports the cost of the forum.

Of course, this is all the business end, the end tha few people see and most people choose to ignore. In my heart of hearts, I hope that David is right - it's all about our loyalty to CMA. :cool:

[WanderingMonk]

I subscribed to several forums and mags over the years.

They all started like a thunder or the tropical rains with a big splash.

However, after 6 months or sometime down the road, they went bust.

The Mag stopped such as Pa Kua Journal.

The forums became ghost towns with no readers except moi keep posting and reply to my own posts. Or a few posts for an entire month.---

What happened?

Do people need images or videos?

What happened to the initial flames?

This forum and several other forums do have visits consistently and very successful, however.

What happened to the others?

:confused: :eek:


1. people start off being generous and felt being taken advantage of and pull back. i.e., Mr. Ling's forum died b/c it became political, etc. now a ghost town. you still pop in once in a while.

a guy in china who ran one of the most widely visited forum, wushuweb, went into heavy debts because of hosting cost, etc. costed him his girl, and job. he finally shut it down because too many people tried to help him out, he ended up feeling indebted to too many people, but still couldn't get out of the jam.


2. after a while, exp people generally get insulted and leave. they don't get enough reward to return or they sit on the fense observing but not participating. sometimes, too many noobs, or just inconsiderate people.

3. people discover there is life outside the internet, and that it is actually more important than the friendship you formed on the web. life calls, it wants you back to fulfill some duty, ........


running forum is a pain in the xxxxx, sometimes the work outweights the reward.

oh, I always need video, so if you got some, send it my way. :)

[Judge Pen]

For many of the sites that host forums, there is no icnome, so it's just a community service.

Well I subscribed to KFM after subscribing to KFO.

[WanderingMonk]

Well I subscribed to KFM after subscribing to KFO.

what you subscribe to kung-fu online? :D

I guess KFM is forever known as KFO despite being transferred over to new management many snows ago.

[GeneChing]

The KFO/KFM transfer is a classic example. This forum was founded by Steve Creel as KFO, but he handed it off to us because it got so big that he could afford to keep it going and he didn't want to see it die. The forum has grown exponentially since then, which means it costs a lot more to keep running. So I hope you can all follow Judge Pen's fine example and subscribe (http://www.martialartsmart.net/19341.html).

[WanderingMonk]

The KFO/KFM transfer is a classic example. This forum was founded by Steve Creel as KFO, but he handed it off to us because it got so big that he could afford to keep it going and he didn't want to see it die. The forum has grown exponentially since then, which means it costs a lot more to keep running. So I hope you can all follow Judge Pen's fine example and subscribe (http://www.martialartsmart.net/19341.html).

As inconsiderate as it might sound, about how much does it cost to run a forum like this for a month? how much is the server cost? bandwidth? software/technician?

just ball park figure to give us an idea. no need to audit the entire spreadsheet.

[Vajramusti]

The KFO/KFM forum and Gene provides a diverse set of opportunities of discussing king fu as is reasonably viable and possible. THANKS.
Of course there are problems- Key ones include anonymity and trolling. Discussions get dragged down to the lowest common denominatoes of conversation.Then there are tradeoffs between quantity of posts and quality. Very few of the top people in any of the arts participate- so there is a lot of second hand commentary and also ego.But a purist approach very likely would dry up a forum. So this one zig zags along and survives. You get a gem ever so often-if you ignore the noise.

[rogue]

Wow, I just saw my neighbors hot sister in a thong!

[SPJ]

My aquaintence with KF mag and forum started early last year.

My friends bought me some IKF and KF Tai Chi mag. I looked thru the pictures.

I was really impressed by the articles on Wu Dang mount last year.

So like JP, I subscribed to the mag and registered in the forum.

Initially, I am not really into posting. Because most of the stuff I know are in Chinese.

Then I ran into Omar from Bulshido.

He studied some Hung gar or CLF in San Fran.

He went to Xi An to study Ba Ji.

He posted Chinese words in Pinyin. He checked them with Han Yu Zi Dian.

Then I was inspired to get a Pinyin software and Han Yu Zi Dian.

Slowly but surely, I started to compile my Chinese MA notes into books to introduce CMA. They have to be easy to understand for any level of readers. Most important of all, they are to interest non MA people to learn more.

I really do not want to talk about Chan or religions. I think it is a personal stuff.

After a while, I started to just talk to be social and discuss bits and pieces of CMA.

I started to compile images and videos of me and my brother doing forms and training.

Thanks to the technology. We used to record moves in drawings. Now we got a DVD camcorder to record or "burn".

Most important of all, as pointed out. Forums are really to be social and know some friends more than anything else.

It is a message board.

:D

[TaiChiBob]

Greetings..

First, thanks to Gene and all that keep this monster alive.. Thanks to the members, even the obnoxious (for they teach me patience...).. somehow, we have become a community.. diverse, with good and bad times, differing opinions, but.. ultimately, i think we all hope to rejuvenate CMA.. Sometimes, i think we forget how remarkable this technology is.. we have the unique ability to share ideas, insights, training tips, and frustrations with people all over the world.. and this is a very new concept, it is the first time in history we can be this interactive with our kung fu brothers and sisters.. at times, it is humbling to see ideas and concepts work themselves out to a consensus of agreement, to witness kung fu expressed conceptually and resolutions concurred without bloodshed..

Why do these things die? almost always it is a perception of diminishing returns on an investment.. for the members, when the competition with ill-intended posters exceeds value received.. for the forum owners, when it becomes "baby-sitting" at less than minimum wages.. in both cases, when the perceived value received is less than the value of the time invested.. I have strengthened many of my beliefs and revised some of my beliefs based on information shared in this forum.. and for that i find value and increased returns for my own investment.

I find satisfaction with the sharing of philosophical perspectives, as i see it CMA has a long history of spiritual entwinings.. and, CMA would simply be ritualized violence without its spiritual side..

So, cheers.. and, Be well..

[David Jamieson]

Wow, I just saw my neighbors hot sister in a thong!

sweet. hot chicks in thongs always make my day a little better.
kfm needs more hot chicks in thongs imo.

maybe if some of these other rags got more hot chicks in thongs they wouldn't fail?

[GeneChing]

The thing about anything on the web is that prices are subject to change. When Steve Creel handed off the forum to us, it was costing him about $500 a month and it was just about to jump to $800 a month. This price was based on operating costs of the forum as well as storage (and this forum was about half the size then as it is now). We switched to a different forum operator - vBulletin - which brought the cost down to an annual fee of a few hundred a year for the program. It costs us about $350 a month to store it all on our dedicated server. As for IT, since we manage several sites (KungFuMagazine.com (http://www.KungFuMagazine.com), TigerClaw.com (http://www.tigerclaw.com), MartialArtsMart.com (http://www.martialartsmart.com), TigerClawFoundation.org (http://www.tigerclawfoundation.org)) plus having to keep all the computers running for our graphic department, our video department and sales department, we have full time IT - hella busy IT at that. It would be hard to tease out how much of IT's time is dedicated to the forum. When we have occasionally catastrophies like that crash we had recently, IT has to really jam. Plus we had to retrieve the data from vBulletin, which incurs a few of another $100 each time we do that (and there's a little data loss on top of that). We are reaching capacity for our current storage method (which was partly caused the last crash) so we are exploring possible alternatives now. Of course, moving the forum to a new server will hike up our costs. I'll probably have to do some pruning soon, but that's always a bear because of the sheer size of this forum, and the effect is pretty minimal in terms of storage - it's a short term fix.

In short, that's a lot of subscriptions (http://www.martialartsmart.net/19341.html) ;) Thank all of you for your support!

[David Jamieson]

Gene~

wow, you guys are getting fleeced!

Didn't anyone wanna check out www.phpbb.com or http://www.yabbforum.com/ ?

I mean as an add on to the mag and other business, a discussion forum is cool, but imo you guys are paying far too much for it to vbulletin.

You can get pretty near all the functions of this board from either of teh two i listed at the top. they are free software and hosting services that support them are cheap and abundant.

You should actually be able to run this site (kfm.com + the discussion board) for about 10$ usd a month and of course whateveryou pay to your staff for updating and creation of graphics etc etc. A little ftp skeelz is all you need.

I am astonished when i hear these figures tossed around for the costs of boards.

I was recently talking to someone who was told that a site we both kno that runs a yabb board was costing the owner someone in the area of 600$ a year just for the board maintenance.

I nearly fell off my chair when i heard this. Why? because it shouldn't cost that much. Someone is putting someone through the ringer here.