Our Noble ARR

[mindlessflight]

DISCLAIMER: This is not an actual stab at SMR. It's a lighthearted meme.

Rules
Positivity Post
No Dumb Questions Post
Report a Thread
RESKIN
FR Calendar

Flatview
Latest Page
Wanker Thread
Dom Thread
OT Thread
Festival Thread
 

Comments

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

SA

I think I remembered what I wanted to say!

I really do think that a lot of people don't realize what goes into making a site. A lot of people think it is going to be their 'hobby' project, or it will make some money to cover its costs, or that it is going to be fun, and when they open the site to the public, it is nothing like they imagined.

Once you have to be there for other people, it stops becoming a hobby, and it becomes a job. You can no longer really work on your time, because the longer it takes to do something, the longer between updates, the better the chances of people leaving your site and giving it bad publicity. it also means that if something in the site breaks badly, you have to fix it as soon as possible.

When that site becomes a job, it often stops being fun. As said above, you are now no longer working on your time, but rather have deadlines and have to do certain things at certain times.

Pet sites are also, to my understanding, money pits. Especially smaller ones. This means they can get expensive, especially as the userbase grows, because you now have to worry about space and servers and outages.

As the site grows, it might also mean either branching out, which puts more work on your shoulders (such as an artist becoming a coder), being dedicated to having the site remain small (so it can be done with the minimum of people), or you have to hire more people, which now means you have to coordinate with them.

There is also dealing with the public. Look at how Aeq handles the userbase, and look at how many complaints she gets, even for the most innocuous of things. Think about all the complaints you see on FR and on the various salt blogs about FR and the staff, and how they handle the business.

I would say that a lot of people who want to start petsites, don't have the temperment required to actually *deal* with those people and not alienate them. I know I certainly don't.

Basically, I think a lot of people underestimate how much work actually goes into a petsite, even the smallest of ones. They aren't prepared for it, and so when they start running into hurdles, especially with regards to money, it can become easier to just abandon the site rather than try to stick with it. Which is fair, not a lot of people are prepared to keep throwing money at a site hoping that one day it will start making money.