Hi, since I've been mentioned, I'll provide some thoughts here.
First off just to mention that as a general principle, I have no official opinion about other audio websites. It's a buttload of work to keep any site going, honestly, I don't care to criticize others that do the same.
"Bandwidth" is not expensive any more. What
is expensive (should you have to pay for it) is the labour cost of simply managing a site. After that, the cost of developing it and maintaining the codebase. After that comes ancilliary costs, like managing backups and dealing with technical problems. The actual bandwidth cost is a long way down the list.
In contrast to the above, "traffic" is generally perceived as a valuable commodity. That would be by sites that count their worth in terms of advertising dollars returned per visitor or per thousand hits. This is not one of those sites.
The
primary focus of AC is as a discussion board. Threads and posts are what make this site happen. That's the basics, there's no way around it. Things like the AC Marketplace are somewhat secondary but also free and there's been no development cost put into it. So if members find it a benefit, that's good and all part of helping our members. If we can improve the usability of the Marketplace, that would be great! I would love to be able to do it!!
However, I get lost when people imply that classifieds should somehow become the AC mission. If that happened, then AC would inevitably become a different kind of site. You can't be everything, you have to choose. If AC chose to be about making money from ads, then guess what... it would end up being no different from how you guys perceive audiogon...!!
