What corporates can do when they monetise a forums data

Ad_G Well they have what they really want….the database of posts, not because of it’s technical value to anyone…that’s perishable. It’s because it’s a fantastically fine meshed net of coffee keywords, crawled by the search engine bots/spiders.

As for activity, they really only need a minimum keep alive activity to maintain the search engine rankings and usually get that by attracting new fish who make a few posts. They sometimes manage to convince people to keep posting, but in general that dies away after a while…because a community can only take disinterest for so long.

I looked around at the various forums they run and for the more specialised ones, might still have members posting who run side businesses etc…even that dies away eventually as VS usually stamp on it…..unless those members can become mods.

CFUK is now just an advertisement billboard and cash cow for a corporate that cares nothing about coffee.

MediumRoastSteam But like anything, it’s a change and people don’t like it. Eventually users (old or new) will get used to it.

I hope not 🤣 unless they love loads of advertising everywhere.

Norvin My adbocker reports four blocked ads on every page I have looked at.

I use two adblockers which target different things they show about 7 hits per page, some of those are gifs with rotation. In long threads there are adverts even between the threads, which is fairly awful. It’s also super difficult to navigate on a mobile (even a desktop) as screen space on a smartphone is precious and it’s cluttered with read this and that thread, which is usually complete garbage onlinking.

Obviously it’s not going to be a great experience, because it is not done with that in mind…it’s done to make the most money possible from google and others ad revenue, site referrals (so they own the back and forward links (helps rankings). The recommendation for posts some, over 7 years ago brings those back to the attention of the webcrawlers, raising rankings when people click on them to be greeted with “ooooh that looks fantastic, for something that was obsolete 5 years previous”.

What will be surprising is if any long term members decide to stick with it, especially after public statements about greedy owners, corporate monetisation, freedom of speech, far too many adverts, owners who know nothing about coffee. I guess there are 3 types of people who will stay.

1. Those who want to use the site to make money or promote their businesses, hidden or otherwise
2. Those who want to sit on the BIG forum for whatever reason, even though most of the knowledge has left and those running it don’t care about coffee. Or perhaps it’s just inertia for some
3. Those who join and never realise there is something better and completely non commercial with zero adverts and a completely clean look.