State of the BeerLeg: Memberships & Funding

TL;DR

I've been asked a few times in recent months about how the membership thing is going and funding of rpls.com overall via advertising, donations, etc. I think it's pretty obvious that advertising is way down but it's impossible for members and guests to know how many paid memberships there are. So, I figured it was time I provided a "State of the BeerLeg" address.

Ok, now let's write a book.

Let's start with how the site is doing overall

People are signing up like crazy and traffic is surging. That's a good thing. I've attached a couple of graphs showing how many new users are signing up every month and every week. That alone will show you how fast the site is gaining new users. On the monthly graph, you'll see where we were when we did the big switch from surveyorconnect.com to rpls.com and how incredible the increase in sign-ups truly has been since then. The vast majority of those new users are free users.

We're over 15k registered users at this point. Keep in mind that spammers and scammers are reviewed and removed every day and are not included in this total. It used to be that I would see maybe 1 or 2 new sign-ups on a particularly good day -- usually it was 4 or 5 per week. Since moving to rpls.com, you can see these numbers have gone up significantly.

What kind of expenses does RPLS.com have?

I will say that our hosting expenses dropped pretty dramatically when I did the big switchover. Prior to the switch, I had been consulting with various people that are familiar with hosting, IT, servers, etc. from a website management perspective and found that there was a much cheaper hosting alternative from a company with an excellent record. The monthly hosting fee dropped from a few hundred bucks to about $100. Of course, that's just the hosting, not the actual maintenance of the website and the software used to run it. The hosting is essentially just the hardware itself. There's also the control panel that I use, which helps me manage things like PHP versions, caching, security, etc.

For other expenses, we have the cost of annual subscriptions to various software and services that are used to power the website itself. This is somewhere in the vicinity of $4,400 per year. It was slightly less than that prior to the move to the new host, so we've pretty much broken even on all that stuff from what it was before the switch to rpls.com.

And then if we consider the time I spend here, every day, working through spam users, user support, post moderation, software and hardware maintenance/updates, fixing errors, etc. -- and assuming a very modest hourly wage (far under what I would charge in my web design business), we're looking at around $2k per month, except that I'm NOT getting paid for that -- I'm donating it to the betterment of the site.

What does Wendell get paid for working on RPLS.com?

Literally nothing. There was a short period of time where I was indeed getting paid for a small part of my time here and all expenses were covered by donations and advertisers. Those days are gone. We are basically back to the early days when I was lucky if the donations/advertisers covered expenses. The memberships and advertisers currently cover a small portion of our expenses which leaves negative space for me to be paid anything, because it would take a lot of memberships/advertisers to cover the expenses, let alone anything left for my time.

How is advertising going?

We had some pretty big advertisers for a while there. Javad was paying all the expenses every month for years until the Ukraine/Russia war started. They, along with a few other great advertisers, all disappeared within a couple months of the war. We had advertisers that felt like our prices were super cheap when compared to print advertising, plus they were getting more eyeballs. However, even though the number of eyeballs has increased exponentially since then, the advertising has not. To address the issue, I dropped the pricing of our advertising to a fraction of what they once were. We've had a few small companies advertise with us since then, but most of them were short-lived. We do have a few on board right now, so I would invite you to please provide them with some clicks and give them your business, as it definitely helps us, too. I'm lookin' at you, Kudurru Stone and Cyanic!

But a few Vendor Memberships at $50/month really doesn't even come close to covering all the expenses. Granted, I'm not an advertising genius, nor am I a salesy kind of person. Despite the fact that I run my own web design business, I don't get my clients from actively selling -- I get some of them by simply answering questions and attending local events -- the rest come from referrals from my many other happy clients. But that's beside the point and really has nothing to do with rpls.com, other than to explain why I'm not a salesy kind of guy. 😉

How are memberships going?

Not as well as I'd hoped. We don't have many paid memberships. That's not to say I'm blaming you, whether you are a paid or free member -- it might just be that the model doesn't work on a website like this. I hadn't really tried it before and figured it couldn't hurt to take a swing at it.

We have 11 active Premium members and 13 paid Supporter members (some are free because they donated in a non-monetary sort of way, and I wanted to give back for their efforts). We also have 28 donator members, which essentially means they supported us monetarily at some time since 2011, which could have been $5 or $500 during those 13 years. Also keep in mind that there are behind-the-scenes expenses in regard to membership payments (card processing, software, security, etc.), so rpls.com doesn't go home with 100% of the posted membership fees. Then also consider taxes.

Considering all of the above, I'm feeling like the memberships thing might be a bust. However, I'd love to hear what you think about it.

How does Wendell feel about all this?

Well, I'll admit that the monetary side of it is rather depressing. However, my heart is in it, and I have no plans to give up. There was a time when I nearly shut it all down, but the thought of doing that bothered me more than the lack of supportive dollars. I still have a lot of faith in this website, and I plan to keep it going until I'm dead. I have a lot of years left in me (at least that's what I keep telling myself) and I can work on this website from pretty much anywhere. I'll probably be buried with a laptop strapped to my chest so I can keep working on it from the great beyond. Sorry if that is morbid, but hopefully it shines some light on my dedication.

Seriously though -- I'm not done, nor do I expect to be done anytime soon.

Ok, so what does all this mean?

Remember above when I mentioned that people have contacted me in recent months to see how it's going? Yeah, it's really cool that I have actual humans interested in whether or not this website is monetarily supported and how they can help. Some have suggested I have another Wikipedia-style donation extravaganza sort of thing, or perhaps some sort of fundraising contest or what-have-you.

I'm usually adverse to ask for donations. Perhaps it's the non-salesy side of me. But after the last constructive email thread with an RPLS regular and a few similar suggestions at the PLSO conference earlier this year, I think maybe it's worth a shot. Maybe you guys don't give a crap about membership benefits and just want to support the damn website.

I'll probably create some manner of minimally intrusive slide-up banner with some links within the next week or so. But in the meantime, if you'd like to donate, we'd be happy to accommodate you on our official donate page here: https://rpls.com/donate/ -- it's not in the menu system because, well, that's just how I am.

Lastly, thank you!

No, seriously. THANK YOU. Whether you are already making donations, have a membership, or are even a free member -- I appreciate you for bringing traffic to the website, and contributing to the great Land Surveying profession through mentoring, support, education, and maybe even having a little fun. I enjoy working on this website as time permits and being a part of it all myself. We are but a speck on the radar, but we can make a difference (Knight Rider comes to mind, for some reason LOL).

Have a great weekend and be good humans (and surveyors, too). 🤠👍