As you can probably tell from AD sales, Hyip and AS is dying/dead. People treat hyip as fun not as a serious way of making money.

I feel that to stop mmg from dying or loosing its active members, it should start adding forums that involve other ways of making money.

Moneymakergroup.com isn't a domain dedicated to hyip or e-gold like talkgold and goldentalk and others... which is great!

I personally feel exanding your affiliate/webmaster section would have a positive effect.. and maybe people some users here might actually make some money instead of getting scammed all the time lol..

Sure keep the investment discussion stuff.. but ur slogan also says 'online money making' and online investing (hyips and stuff) is like 1% of what e-commerce is.

If you need ideas check out other major ecommerce/webmaster forums i.e. webmasterworld, digitalpoint etc

I can agree with that. Affiliate Marketing is definitely the better of the earning strategies that isn't really well known here. I tend to recommend it to people on a personal level, instead of directing them to a place here on MMG.

I most certainly have to agree with you there. I'm a bit sad seeing that MMG isn't as crowded as it used to be, some nice members have left, more and more paid posters sign up everyday and flood the forum, more and more members that only post " I got paid" and "scam" and MORE AND MORE NON-RELATED ADS...those are so annoying...for god's sake this is a money making forum, not a smilies site, I consider that a person that surfs MMG is not interested in seeing smilies plus the forum is so hard to load nowadays with SO MANY ADS. I once wanted to have an avatar that had a bit over 100 kb and the mods removed it because they said it would make the site hard to load and now all those bright coloured smilies annoy people...I'm not saying that MMG doesn't need a revenue source, it sure does and the admins also need to get profits from this as MMG is a business first of all for them but they need to keep the ads related to the scope we all come here and make them not that darn annoying ( like the side ads ).

This is my opinion but I'm sure I'm right if the admins won't come with a solution to keep the revenue streams in good shape and still allow us to come here with pleasure I'm afraid lots of the good members will leave, the very members that make MMG what it is and that is a great community and place where we can exchange opinions and infos in a nice environment.

MMG admins please do not feel offended but I'm sure I speak for a lot of people and that you should take this as a helping help

Ella

Re: more and more non-related ads
We need to fill the site with something and these happen to pay the highest CPM. Hosting alone costs thousands of dollars per month. We also have several full time staff members that help keep MMG running and rely on revenues to pay their bills. We aren't trying to get rich off incorporating some of these ad networks, but we all do have bills to pay. Until the egold situation clears up and advertisers start purchasing more of our available inventory, you better get used to it.

In terms of relevancy, do you come here to make money or do you come here to read every single ad on MMG? Most people come here to read content. Seriously, MMG provides people with a ton of information, all for free. Is it too much to ask to view a couple of ads? If it is, you can go to TG which has far more ads than us or you can visit a smaller, much less active forum, that may have less ads, but non up-to-date information.

Re: so many ads
There are actually less ads to load than their used to be. We got rid of the top and bottom 468x60's as well as the ad in the stats on the homepage and replaced them with 2 sidebar ads which don't show up on MMG where people spend the bulk of their time (inside the threads). You may not be happy with the volume of ads, but your point is inconsistent with the fact that we have less ads on MMG than we have had for some time now.

Secondly, we asked you to reduce the size of your avatar to a reasonable level, just as we do for banners. If everyone had a 100kb++ avatar, you are looking at 1.5mb per page load alone, just for avatars alone. Add in signature banners, template graphics, and MMG ads, and I don't think it is unreasonable to ask you to reduce the size of your avatar (no warning given). This site obviously isn't for people with dial-up, but without putting at least some moderate limits on image sizes, load times would be much slower.

Sorry if this comes off a bit hostile, but I'm fully aware of everything you are saying. Of course people would like to see less ads. Of the ads that they have to see, of course people would like to see more ads that interest them. Despite that, we have bills to pay, and those don't magically go away. So instead of just pointing out problems, why not offer workable solutions? Getting rid of ads is not a workable solution right now unless it is paired with a way to replace that revenue. Suggestions like ChrisMono has been making (ex: text-link-ads.com) that can help us replace some of our backfill revenue with less obtrusive ads are what we are interested in hearing from you guys.



I disagree that HYIPs and Autosurfs are dying, but that is something for another thread.

I definitely agree with you suggestions and we will be working to expand into alternative ways to make money from home. Not all that long ago, we significantly expanded the "Conventional Investing" sections and we are definitely looking at the possibility of adding an affiliate marketing section. That said, High-Risk opportunities will continue to be our bread and butter for some time. I don't think it is our interest to compete directly with the sitepoint/digitalpoints out there. Not to say that we won't work to expand and improve content in those areas, but those niches are already pretty saturated as it is and have already have the established content and expert posters. Spending all of our time and resources to compete with them head-to-head would probably not be in our best interest.

I see your point and I don't consider you hostile. I understand that you have huge bills with this forum and that a lot of people depend on it to pay their bills ( admins, moderator ). But I still think you need to come up with some solutions. And when I say this I'm not criticizing you but I only share my fear of not getting this forum in a poor situation.

And I think you need to open a topic where people can come and suggest you new ways to improve the site's revenues without getting people upset.

I'm not very good at money making, I'm just a designer and I prefer to stick to my job but here are some ideas:

- put some banners from hosting sites: a lot of admins come here from surfs, hyips etc or just simple webmasters and I'm sure they are interested in good hosting services as they are hard to find. For example hostgator.com has a terrific affiliate program or I'm sure godaddy.com must have a similar program an with your alexa rank they should be more than happy to do business with you.

- try finding some ideas to exploit your alexa rank better. You have a huge public and moreover you have a target, try using it

- try affiliate with templatemonster.com, they are the best templates site and I'm sure there are a lot of people here that need designs for their surfs or for other businesses they might have

I know these are not many ideas but it's a start and that there are people here on MMG that are way better than me at making money and at coming up with ingenious ideas. Anyone should be more than glad to help this forum because as everyone must know you, the staff have to get paid for the work you provide and for the expenses you have with maintaining the site so that we ca enjoy MMG in the future also.

This is my last post in this thread and I'm sure you got the idea. I didn't want to repeat the same thing you heard over and over from other people or to annoy you. Roger out

There are tons of opportunities out there, but the new need to be open to spot something that's just under your nose!

Sylyia

Here's an idea I am sure has already been considered a lot, but I'll throw it out anyway.

MMG used to have(?) a newsletter didn't it? It came out irregularly? It seems like if MMG "activated" that again and sold perhaps a top ad and a bottom ad in the newsletter it would bring in some decent revenue. With all the threads and the various sections here, sometimes things can go unnoticed rather easily and I would think an advertiser would relish the chance to reach the eyeballs of thousands. Yeah, I'm sure there are a lot of dead email addresses on file, but once those are culled(or forced to be updated), the tedious bounce-backs and mailing list management gets easier.

As far as what to put in a weekly newsletter content-wise so it's not just a couple of ads, there's plenty of material. Anything that is posted in the announcement section obviously. A poll or two. Someone's post that MMG staff happened to notice because it was insightful or covered a topic that hasn't been discussed heavily. Lots of options here and I don't think filling weekly content would be a problem AND it would be meaningful enough to where people would read it.

There's no doubt that email marketing is still very effective and still demands a pretty decent price if it is going to a targeted list. MMG is VERY targeted.

NUK

The newsletter is something we have kicked around for a while, but we want to make sure we do it right. The MMG database is untapped and a very valuable resource, its just a matter of figuring out how to use it most effectively. We also need to get some advice from our lawyer since the feds seem to be really cracking down on bulk emailing lately. Our list is all double opt-in, but even then we might still run into some issues.


Chicago: Thanks for the suggestions. Templates and hosting don't really convert very well on MMG and as a result the current ads pay a higher CPM.