It's been a long while since I've posted in the forums. Lately I've been thinking a lot about GC & the site's future. There are so many possibilities and so much potential with GC. For the most part I've operated GC on a shoestring budget, which hasn't made things easier. Mostly my fault, because I tend to not want to see so many ads on the web... so I keep the advertising very light on GC (even had zero ads for the first 5 years or so of running the site). Result is less revenue & that means less gets done.
Almost hard to believe that this coming July will be the 15 year anniversary of when I typed in "greekchat.com" to register the domain name then launched the first version of the website. GC is long past the point in time when I was first amazed at how the site has grown into such a large & vibrant online community. Things have stagnated a bit development wise, though, which is disappointing. It's just how things turned out. I envision so many possibilities for GC, have so many ideas, but things need to be working in certain ways for any of that to ever happen.
Maybe this is the year that things start happening again on GC in a big way. Or, as the saying goes, this is the year we take it to the next level.
GC should have avatars, significantly increased message storage, threaded PMs, photo albums, video albums, mobile apps, a mobile version of the site, forums for each college & university that have Greeks on campus, forums for each chapter that wants one, other services for chapters, a member & alumni directory (for those who want to be listed), improved hosting infrastructure and other ideas that I do not want to mention publicly.
But none of it happens unless I'm able to turn GC's shoestring budget into a reasonable budget.
So I have a few ideas in mind:
- More advertising on GC
- Optional paid subscriptions with the ability to turn off the ads for an ad-free experience on GC. Pricing I think would be $5/month, $29/year or $99/5 years, which works out to $2.42/month for the 1 year and $1.65/month for the 5 year. (Not sure who might be interested in what, so probably best to have a few options.) (Should there be a lifetime paid subscription level?) Subscriber accounts would have some extra features not available to free membership accounts and maybe also first access to general site new features.
- Business paid subscriptions. Not sure on price. This would include a variety of site features which are useful to businesses that provide products or services to Greeks.
Please let me know what you think about all this by posting your comments here. You can also send me a
private message or use the
website contact form.
