Recently it seems like the Memrise team has simply been removing features for free users and not adding many of the user-suggested features that we’ve all been wanting. Why not support your platform with advertising, instead of breaking things? I can’t see what would be wrong with a simple banner ad across the top of the website / bottom of the app, as long as it’s not animated / otherwise distracting.
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there are certainly possibikities with ads which aren’t annoying
What feature removements are you specifically talking about and on what plattform?
Eg: I never see any adveriisements on top of this page we are on now. Or at the bottom, or on the left side. I think the left side would be good. I think that’s an opportunity they could use.
But video’s wold indeed be very annoying. I really draw a line there. It’s a huge waste of bandwith, it costs time, it slows down other processes. And I don’t believe video adds have a better result thatn pictures.
I’ve noticed that I seldomly visit branch websites, because they’re so overladen with all kinds of features (usually video’s and slide shows), that they’re frutstrating to visit.
Apperantly nobody ever notices that people don’t like those sites, because the brands keep on wasting tons of money on it.
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ads don’t pay wages…
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Do you mean adds don’t pay good enough to earn enough with it to pay wages?
On the web I haven’t noticed lots of stuff they’ve changed, but people on the mobile apps are complaining since Memrise has been experimenting with a 4 hour cooldown period between each 10 minutes of learning (i.e. you can only learn/review 10 minutes for each 4 hours), which is thought to be removable with Pro if they decide to keep this experiment. Also a while ago (6-12 months?) they removed offline mode for free users on mobile, and made it a pro feature.
Instead they should just add requested features and make some of them pro, instead of removing stuff people like. But since they aren’t doing this, they are perhaps not making enough money from pro users and so I wouldn’t mind seeing ads if necessary to make money - I like Memrise’s platform, but I worry that they will mess it up too much, and for some users the “too much” boundary has already been crossed.
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Ads? No thanks. That model works when you create content the users wouldn’t pay for, so you sell your users instead.
It’s like saying Memrise is not a good product on its own, but Memrise is a good product.
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that’s an exageration
there are quite a lot of magazines with adds which are top notch
also: adds don’t necesarily have to pay for everything, but they can be part of the income
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So are you saying the ad model on cable tv doesn’t work because users already pay money to access those channels? Because your logic is flawed. Advertisers pay to get their ads seen, they dont care where, they just care of the impression value their ad will have on the eyes seeing it because the reason they even made the ad is to sell a product. Also, most of the content on Memrise is user generated and even the official language courses they have been rolling out are sadly not the best quality. So yeah, right now Memrise is a product that most people dont want to pay for. Maybe that’s why they keep removing features and putting them behind a pay wall, because so many people haven’t paid to use the service. But the company’s pockets are bleeding so they are slowly forcing more and more users to pay. I think implementing a few ads on the sides is a perfectly fine way to remedy this and works well for most if not all websites that are comprised of mainly user generated content.
That would be suicidal. You need massive traffic for advertising to work, particularly now with the constant growth of ad blockers.
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Monetizing service sites like Memrise is always difficult. Ads, for example, are ignorable. Yahoo, for example, has ads with its email service. I’ve never once clicked on an ad in a decade.
Free-to-play games learned a long time ago that frustration is profitable. People will pay to achieve a goal faster, or to gain greater capability. There will always be some who withstand the frustration and always play for free, but many will give that small amount (and sometimes very large amounts) for that extra play experience.
To further support the matter, Internet ads are notoriously valueless. A great many people have paid for Google Adwords or services through Doubleclick only to discover it’s wasted money. As @lordofthedeities mentions, advertising can work when your traffic is massive. But even that’s not a guarantee. I’ve personally paid for Facebook advertising with millions of hits, dozens of clicks, and not a single product sold. What is it worth to me? Nothing.
Memrise’s current model is good. The “I don’t want to pay” user is capable of enjoying a profitable experience with enough frustration to tempt them to pay for that extra experience. So long as the extra experience is worth the requested remuneration, it will work well. I wouldn’t change a thing.
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