Kelsey Media buys Mortons titles

[Mark RandParticipant @markrand96270]

I would offer a counter argument:- Once set up, the cost of the forum is mainly hosting cost and advertising management overheads (paid for by the advertising!), unless you pay for decent forum software (WordPress not included). The hosting cost is trivial for a forum of this size and traffic and can be paid for by the advertising. On the other hand there are a proportion of us, who are subscribers, who get more value from the forum than from the magazine.

I, for one, would be less likely to subscribe without the forum. I don’t know if I am a tiny minority (as well as being short, short sighted, short memoried and short tempered 😀 ), but I suspect that there are a few of the same mindset.

[SillyOldDuffer]

On SillyOldDuffer Said:

On Pete. Said:

Do moderators get paid?

…

I can answer that one!  No, unless maybe a moderator also happens to be an employee, which most moderators past and present aren’t.   I’m a pure volunteer, no pay, freebies, jollies, or medals. I buy the magazine, tools and materials just like everyone else.

Dave

That’s what I thought,  I don’t think we’ll get an answer as to the cost of running the site and advertising gains, but I’d put money on it making more than than it costs.

As said before,  there literally nothing posted here that gives anyone “free” magazine benefits.

It’s mainly questions about workshop tasks and tools etc.

I can’t help feel the decision to shut the forum down is one of spite that people might be getting something “free” .

If the forum shuts down I’d consider the magazine dead, absolutely no point buying it whatsoever.

[Pete.]

On Pete. Said:

[…] I don’t think we’ll get an answer as to the cost of running the site and advertising gains, but I’d put money on it making more than than it costs

I’m with you there, Pete !

I think it was back when the new forum software was being developed, that I used the elegant French expression Raison d’être … which says it all.

Magazine, forum, whatever … The whole business-model is ultimately about making money from advertising.

MichaelG.

[Andrew CrowParticipant @andrewcrow91475]

After a lapse of a couple of years I have recently taken up a new subscription. This was a direct result of being involved with this forum.

If the forum were to be closed down there is nothing that would persuade me to use Facebook as an alternative and would be most unlikely to renew my subscription.

Andy.

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

It would be interesting to know how big the forum membership is.

[Mark Rand]

On Mark Rand Said:

I would offer a counter argument:- Once set up, the cost of the forum is mainly hosting cost and advertising management overheads (paid for by the advertising!), unless you pay for decent forum software (WordPress not included). The hosting cost is trivial for a forum of this size and traffic and can be paid for by the advertising…

Mark explains exactly how a website should fund itself in theory, and many achieve this in practice.   But we all know that theory and practice have a nasty habit of parting company!

There’s bad history behind where we are at the moment.   Briefly, the original MyTimeMedia forum was bespoke, and although it had done a good job inexpensively for several years, many thought it looked old-fashioned, it didn’t support small screen devices, was very difficult to maintain, and was impossible to change.

Mortons inherited the old forum as it approached end-of-life.  MyTimeMedia had already decided it had to be replaced, but I don’t know how complete their plan was;  Mortons may have started afresh, or they may have implemented MyTimeMedia’s plan.

Whatever, most of the work was contracted out, not cheap!   Two third-parties, one paid to migrate the old-forum’s posts to a WordPress compliant database, the other paid to convert the old forums look and feel into WordPress templates.   I suspect that the look and feel part was considerably harder than expected, and the job was never completed satisfactorily.   There was some kind of commercial dispute, like as not costly lawyers involved, but it ended with a parting of the ways.  Mortons were left holding the baby on a money-pit project.   Huge delays, lots of sunk money, and salaried staff diverted to fixing the new forum – many man-months.

Having finally got the look-and-feel working in-house (with many small defects), very serious performance problems were encountered.  Not sure of the exact root cause, probably several overlapping problems, but Mortons paid to increase network and server capacity, and I think paid to change database, and paid consultants to look at the WordPress configuration.  Caused another long delay involving several pricey people.  When a month at minimum wage costs £1600 plus tax, NI, accommodation and a long list of other overheads, this soon adds up to big money.   I hesitate to guess the total cost of the new forum, could be well over £100,000 before go-live.  And the forum is still costing money – the recent performance problem has soaked up time and money.  My guess is the forum is deep into the red, and not paying its way.

Although moderators are free, the webmaster and IT support team are paid.  In return Mortons get advertising revenue and a forum that attracts newcomers to buy the magazine.  We have no idea what the value of this is.

Colin identifies another risk.  It is that many firms, believing fora to be unprofitable or old-fashioned, simply point folk at a social media site like Facebook or GroupIO etc.    These are dirt cheap!   They also have many disadvantages. Unfortunately the switch to social  media is often done on principle, not after rational consideration.  ‘Dirt cheap’ is much easier to comprehend than customers, public footprint, growth opportunities, futures and other slippery benefits.  Colin says Kelsey’s existing sites are all social-media.  Whether or not Kelsey management understand the pros and cons of that is moot.   They could easily shut us down by mistake.

All speculation:  I have no data.   As explained above, I have reason for believing the forum to be in deep poo financially.  But it also has a large user base (many lurkers) and valuable content provided free by members and moderated by unpaid volunteers.   Thus there is a  strong case for keeping the forum going, but these are difficult times, and I guess the financials are against us.  Neil understands the benefits but he may not be able to sway new owners looking critically at the value they’re getting, and the likely cost of keeping this somewhat unstable beast running, particularly as its feature shortcomings are somewhat off-putting: we lost a lot of regulars!   The old forum bit the dust partly for cost reasons, and I guess the new forum didn’t fix that as intended: the project went pear-shaped!  Therefore the new forum is in danger.

Beware blaming WordPress.  May not be the best but it does cover small, medium and large sites.   Albeit clunky WordPress off-the-shelf does simple stuff fairly easily, but, although it scales up, configuring WordPress rapidly gets into grown-up software engineering.  Many gotchas.  For example, lots of plug-ins available, but these are often feature packed for small users rather than efficient.   The off-the-shelf noddy database that’s good enough to service small content to a tiny user base has to be replaced with a performant database, designed carefully, and maintained by an administrator.  The bigger the load, the more the database needs to be high-end, and this gets very expensive.   As does beefing up the server, first just a bigger box, then maybe a cluster.  Ditto the network, moving from a single network card to multiple redundant connections via an internet accelerator, that being the tip of a tuning iceberg involving cache settings and much else.

Though the forum isn’t massive by internet standards, it’s big enough to require special attention to design and configuration.  May explain why development of the new forum was so difficult: someone assumed it was small enough to be within basic WordPress range and it’s not!  When performance can’t be fixed by patching a few bottlenecks, the whole design has to be reworked, and upgrading everything piecemeal takes forever and costs a fortune.  Free plug-ins that work perfectly with 10 concurrent users slow down exponentially as more users join, so plug-ins have to be replaced, often with paid-for versions.  Nasty difficult to diagnose devil in the detail stuff.   And time is money!

Dave

 

 

 

 

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Well said Dave! Setting up the Mortons forums has been a money pit and is still incurring overheads with manual management. This Forum seems to be working fairly well but the MB one (on a different server) has not been updated to the same standard and still suffers regular glitches.

MyTimeMedia’s answer was to convert the old Forums to Invision software and this was done, with some difficulty, for Model Flying Site (RCME). The database conversion template was then intended to be used for the Model Engineer and Model Boats  forums. Unfortunately Covid intervened which stalled the changeover due to costs and subsequently MTM sold the titles to Mortons.

Mortons decided to use the Model Flying forum as a ‘bolt on’ but instead of following through with the conversion of the other two to Invision, decided to start again from scratch with WordPress which they were already using, presumably on the premise that it could be better integrated with their existing website setup with the results described by Dave above.

It did make a sort of logic as the Model Flying forum was effectively now a standalone system that could be linked to Mortons whereas the old ME/MB forums were integrated into MyTimeMedia and needed to be converted either into Invision or something closer to Mortons existing setup – i.e. WordPress.

So that is where we are now. I guess the Model Flying forum could theoretically disposed of to an independent private organisation if Kelsey were so minded. However, it would probably then need to support itself by donations in the same way as Model Boat Mayhem which was originally set up by Martin Davis to replace the original Model Boats forum which was killed off by a previous owner of the title as being an unwanted overhead before MTM acquired the Magazine.

Lots of history…

Colin

[peak4Participant @peak4]

I’m not sure how big the membership is on here, but an example from a camera forum I frequent, where I chuck in £5 per month to contribute; other members do similar, but no idea how much is raised.
I’m happy to do that as I like the site and it’s non-commercial.
It’s brand specific, but no longer sponsored by a manufacturer, and is maintained by a photo journalist who doesn’t take any payment, but covers excess costs himself, as the site runs at a loss most of the time.
A new server will soon be required, and the software is reaching end of life, with the later version being more expensive.

About 2750 listed members on that forum, currently 20 logged in on line, with another 800ish guests viewing.
Software licencing and server hosting is about £250/month according to the site owner.
No main advertisers, but banner ads bring in about £15/month

Members who sell photo gear through the site often voluntarily contribute a small % to the site’s running costs.

Bill

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

I haven’t heard anything about the future of the Forum.

It certainly helps build a community around the magazines, but I’m surprised by the people who say ‘without the forum the magazines would be meaningless’. Are we really that dependent of social media these days 🙁

If people really want the forum to continue, the answer is to not use an ad blocker and make sure that when shopping online for workshop bits and pieces you try and go via the forum ads wherever possible. That will help maximise the effectiveness of the forum for advertisers, and advertising income is the only thing that can make the site viable.

In the (far?) future I can imagine the magazines going 100% digital and the Forum could then be invaluable. Who knows?

Neil

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Forums are definitely very useful as people can ask questions and often get immediate answers without having to use the slow ‘Reader’s Letters and suchlike in the magazine. Also, as someone has pointed out, they greatly expand the space available to share projects and builds.

The immediate issue is that the magazines are going to Kelsey but the ME and MB forums at least are probably now built into the Mortons wesbsite and  it may not be possible to extract them either on cost or technical grounds. Quite how you square that particular circle I really don’t know but I would guess that Mortons would like to be shot of them after all the problems and expense they have generated.

Colin

[Harry WilkesParticipant @harrywilkes58467]

Forum members have the ‘ace up their sleeve’ in that they don’t need Mortons or any other publisher we can at the end of the day set up our own forum

H

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Forum members have the ‘ace up their sleeve’ in that they don’t need Mortons or any other publisher we can at the end of the day set up our own forum

Yes, indeed. As long as you can scrape together the startup costs, maintain a certain level of income to meet expenses and have sufficient technically savvy members to structure and run it. It can be done and I am currently a moderator on a shipping forum which has done exactly that after the owner of an earlier incarnation pulled the plug at short notice.

The drawback in these circumstances is that all the content and accumulated expertise on the original forum is usually lost forever. It happens all the time. The value of paper and ink magazines is that they usually stay around forever in one form or another. Anything stored digitally can disappear at the the flick of a switch and often does.

Colin

 

[Pete.Participant @pete-2]

<p style=”text-align: left;”>I agree the best way of supporting a forum is by supporting their advertisers,  I’ve bought diamond tool holders from the Australian company that advertised on here, a few bits from warco and arc euro also, so it’s definitely worth advertising,  I recently bought the precision tilting and swivelling vice, and sine version from arc, and they’re excellent.</p>
Maybe selling the forum off to someone who wants to run it as just a “workshop forum” not affiliated with any magazines might be an option?

If people continue to buy from advertisers it could be financially viable.

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Maybe selling the forum off to someone who wants to run it as just a “workshop forum” not affiliated with any magazines might be an option?

Nice in theory but the forum is now built into the Mortons website so you can’t just lift it out and take it elsewhere. Converting it to an independent forum would cost thousands of pounds. Who pays for that? Plus it doesn’t have any intrinsic value. It is a financial liability with negligible revenue generating power.

Colin

 

[Charles LamontParticipant @charleslamont71117]

Other model engineering and related forums are available.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Though it would be a shame to dilute their focus with all the tea room talk you get here, keep them for the subject of making models.

[Neil Wyatt]

On Neil Wyatt Said:

 

It certainly helps build a community around the magazines, but I’m surprised by the people who say ‘without the forum the magazines would be meaningless’. Are we really that dependent of social media these days 🙁

It is not so much dependant on social media but what the subject matter is and where to find it. I think I mentioned in one of the ME&W threads that there has hardly been anything in ME over the last three years that I found worth reading and have really only kept up the subscription to support the forum, Never subscribed to MEW as its not what I want.

There is plenty to interest me on other model engineering forums and a few select Facebook groups so if this forum were to fold it would not renew my subscription. And now with what is likely to be even less ME content in the new mag I can’t see me keeping it up.

[JasonB]

On JasonB Said:

On Neil Wyatt Said:

 

It certainly helps build a community around the magazines, but I’m surprised by the people who say ‘without the forum the magazines would be meaningless’. Are we really that dependent of social media these days 🙁

It is not so much dependant on social media but what the subject matter is and where to find it. I think I mentioned in one of the ME&W threads that there has hardly been anything in ME over the last three years that I found worth reading and have really only kept up […]

I accept that my own circumstances are unusual [and I would not wish them upon anyone] but, just let me say that to a large extent I see this as a forum with a magazine attached … The breadth of discussion on the forum is what keeps it alive, and the monthly magazine is an occasional treat, that might prompt further discussion here.

Perhaps it is time for Neil to launch one of his occasional surveys …

MichaelG.

[Andrew TinsleyParticipant @andrewtinsley63637]

For me it is a straight forward choice. No Forum no magazine purchase. Simple as that.

Andrew.,

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, I for one don’t see this forum as social media, I think it’s more like a living library, come help centre. I try to help anyone as best I can, and have gained quite a lot of knowledge that I wouldn’t have got from the magazines. Yes I know there’s a Tea Room topic, but that’s not much different than people talking about things they do outside their workplace. I know I don’t know everyone personally, but there is some kind of togetherness to a certain extent, and I really think it would be a sad thing if this forum was lost.

Regards Nick.

[Nicholas Farr]

On Nicholas Farr Said:

Hi, I for one don’t see this forum as social media, I think it’s more like a living library, come help centre. I try to help anyone as best I can, and have gained quite a lot of knowledge that I wouldn’t have got from the magazines. Yes I know there’s a Tea Room topic, but that’s not much different than people talking about things they do outside their workplace. I know I don’t know everyone personally, but there is some kind of togetherness to a certain extent, and I really think it would be a sad thing if this forum was lost.

Regards Nick.

 

I see it as an example of what social media is when it works well.

It doesn’t have to be all cat videos, car crashes, flat earthers and scams…

Neil

[Andrew Tinsley]

On Andrew Tinsley Said:

For me it is a straight forward choice. No Forum no magazine purchase. Simple as that.

Andrew.,

Can you explain more please Andrew?  I see the forum and magazine as complementary – cousins rather than spouses!

Mags provide structured content, error checked (perhaps imperfectly), and with space to develop articles over many months if necessary.   An article could be a half-page how-to on making T-nuts, or the words and music description of a loco build taking 50 parts to describe.   The editor provides balance with a mix of old and new aimed at beginners, experienced hobbyists, and occasionally full-blown advanced engineering.  Very difficult. No doubt editors are mindful of the need to appeal to their paying audience, whose interests vary wildly.  Beginners like lots of photos, experienced hobbyists only need a few, whilst professional engineers value graphs, diagrams and formula.    Paper is good, not least because we can build libraries, but paper is just a reference source;  apart from the letters page, magazines are read-only, no interaction.  And because the magazine is edited, there may be a long delay between an article being submitted, and it appearing in print.  Much good, not perfect.

The forum is unstructured, moderated to suppress bad behaviour (see Code of Conduct), but not to correct spelling, grammar, or factual errors and topics are conversations – read/write. Lack of structure and a good search engine limits fora as reference material, but the ability to do instant Q&A is powerful.   Posts can ask questions, or pass on information.  Posts can be be challenged, facts and misunderstandings corrected, further advice sought etc.   We can discuss magazine articles, and no doubt some magazine articles are inspired by forum conversations. Members can lurk or contribute as they wish.   All good stuff and free. Also imperfect: rather common for people to misread posts because text cannot express tone; jokes interpreted as attacks etc, when the same comment in a pub would be defused by a wink.

The forum and magazine could both operate in isolation, but doing so loses synergy.   They both have individual value, but their value is multiplied when both are available.

Much depends on us.  The magazine and forum both depend on content and activity provided by Model Engineers!  As criticism in the absence of a positive alternative is always unhelpful, if we don’t like what’s in the mag or on the forum, we should fix it by contributing   Not just by writing articles or posting, but by buying the mags, not ad-blocking, and by supporting advertisers!  Within reason, of course, not compulsory.

I care more about the future of Model Engineering than my personal needs.  I want newcomers to enjoy it as much as I did before I got ill. and don’t want the hobby to die with me.  Therefore, I will still buy ME&W if the forum folds, and I could switch to other Modelling fora.  Have to say though that this one, warts and all, suits me better than the others.

On a personal note, Andrew says “Simple as that”, which my experience of engineering and life flatly contradicts. In my world nothing is simple!  The devil is always in the detail.   “Keep it Simple Stupid” is excellent advice, but Einstein put it better with “Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”   “Look before you leap” and “assume is short for ass of you and me.” also apply.  Means I’m not inclined to knee-jerk.  Another example: early days with ME&W.  Though I reacted badly to the first issue, I read it again a few days later and found it to be on the right track.  I was misled by my expectations and missed the value of the content and change in balance.   Looking forward to the next issue: in addition to the technical content, I’m interested in what Neil and Diane do to bring it together and then sell it to newcomers whilst keeping old-farts like me happy.   Not simple, and will take time to get it right!

Dave

 

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

I don’t think anyone could argue that this forum is not very useful indeed to a lot of people and would be a great loss if it were to be switched off. I would view forums like this to be more akin to a ‘digital’ club rather than classing them as social media. Through the Model Boats and Mayhem forums I have friends and acquaintances all over the world, many of whom I will never meet but very much valued nonetheless.

The question is how is it compatible with the purchase by Kelsey of the magazine? Especially when at the moment it is embedded in the Mortons website with no obvious way of extracting it.

Colin

[Andrew TinsleyParticipant @andrewtinsley63637]

My last post disappeared into the ether, so I will repeat.

If no forum, then no subscription to the magazine. It is as simple as that. I am sure that others may make the same decision.

Andrew.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/forums/topic/kelsey-media-buys-mortons-titles/page/2/#post-787583

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