Off the Top of My Head

Forums Inflating Online Guests and Membership To Advertisers

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote on the Fall of SEOChat and talked about the fact that many hours of the day, there would be no one even online with the exception of a few guests. Then over the last month since I wrote that article it seemed like there were more and more members logging in. It reminded me of a mail that I received shortly after my article on some of the practices within Devshed. I am tempted to reveal the contents of that letter but honestly, unless I can prove something myself, I don’t feel comfortable. Instead I will talk in General terms being sure to specify if something is only rumour.

Everything I say from now on is said more from an advertisers viewpoint as some things don’t matter to the end user. I will use the first tactic that Devshed now employs at SEOChat as an example. Basically it is inflating the actual users that are online at any moment. This is a common tactic with new forums to enable the option in vB where if a user logs out, they still show up for 15 minutes after the fact. Sometimes new forums even specify users who have logged in that day. The issue here though is that SEOChat counts active users for 15 minutes after they leave or log out without revealing this fact. This makes the board look more active then it is in reality to advertisers. That to me is where the issue is as it skews the amount of people on the board (guests and visitors) quite a bit. Now I can already hear the “so whats”.

You have to actually combine this with the fact that they have taken on a more devious deception. It is at this point that I will switch to forums in general rather then specifics as I have no proveable evidence against any forum in particular. Generally, forums have a responsibility to advertisers to hit certain numbers for pageviews, unique visitors, etc. It actually isn’t that difficult to recode certain parts of forums to misrepresent these numbers. Now I am not talking about a 15 minute lag time here but instead an actual doubling (or tripling if necessary) of things like visitors and pageviews. To me this is basically a real scumbag move and I would just say to any forum in general that these kinds of things tend to come back to you.

Basically, there are a lot of successful forums out there that don’t stoop to these levels and they are the ones that continue to grow. You need to be honest with both your membership and your advertisers, otherwise it isn’t long until you find your self with an empty forum and no money.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 7:25 am and is filed under Forums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.