Chess Cafe Has Gone Rogue

@Bronco: I thought he meant articles from Oct 14' onward you have to pay and the earlier issues are free.

what are you talking about, you got sharks at the chesscafe ! 

How long you guys reckon erik will love the idea to get this pages to be pay to read ?

He *could* make Articles premium only, but I think that would be counterproductive. 

how do you mean  "counterproductive" ?

forcing free members to sign up if they want to read the articles, not a bad idea. 

So if they're paying, say, $5000 or $10000 per month to keep the website up, they should be obligated to keep paying that no matter what, even if they are losing lots of money? Somehow I doubt that any of you complainers would continue to pay thousands of dollars just so everyone could keep on downloading content for free, forever. Really strange how all of the complainers in this thread choose to use zero logic.

I think a site like this really needs a lot of members whether paying or not.  Articles attract members. Limiting articles would just antagonize non paying members and give them a reason to go elsewhere.

Looks like a bit of a black-and-white "straw man" argument to me.  There are two sides to the situation- in general, the more sites provide freely, the more free spread of knowledge and information we get, but the harder it is for sites to fund themselves.  Some consumers will download as much for free as they can get away with, and complain at any sort of paywall, but similarly, some site owners will charge as much as they can get away with, prioritising profit margins over their fanbases (and in the long run, if they lose their fanbase and don't get enough subscribers, that can result in the site being lost altogether).

None of us know exactly how tight-up ChessCafe were financially, and for as long as we don't know, it is wrong to suggest that we should all assume that their measures were necessary.  Or not, for that matter.  And there's also the question of how you monetise the site- if some monetisation was necessary (which is probably the case), it doesn't necessarily mean that it was necessary to monetise articles that were previously freely available.

If we see too much of a trend towards chess sites giving away less for free, it could hurt the amateur chess communities, so I think it is important that some people do complain- in these situations we often get whatever we're prepared to put up with.  But unfortunately, some complain at any sort of paywall and don't consider the other side's point of view, and the more considered comments get tarred with the same brush.

As a former writer for ChessCafe, the problem with the pay wall is that it is not fair to the writers. They're not getting royalties on the current income. (This is why I asked CC to take down my stuff.) In theory, every former writer for the site could ask that his stuff get taken down, and then the site would be left with zero archive. In practice this doesn't happen, because writers don't care about the principle as much as I do.

CC's problem is that they employ an old business model. Back in the "old" days (the late 90s, early 00s), Hanon Russell, the site's original owner, would post content in an effort to draw buyers to the shop. At that time, the shop was also the USCF's official equipment store. He paid his writers; there was a certina prestige to writing there. The model worked well. Then Russell sold the domain name and inventory for a nice 6-figure sum, sometime in the late 00s, I believe. When Russell sold CC to Mark Donlan, Donlan stopped paying for content (and this is when I stopped writing for them). CC's whole business model of charging for the archives is now based on essentially stealing royalties from the site's original writers. My guess is that Donlan still pays his main columnists, writers like Dvoretsky, because if he didn't then the site would offer close to nothing.

CC is in a tight spot. Their main revenue comes from books and equipment sales, and there is a ton of competition in this area. Only recently has CC started to lower their book prices. How they compete with Amazon is anyone's guess. CC does not provide anything interactive or remotely close to what random chess-loving Internet surfers could find here at chess.com. They pack their books well, they offer some variety of inventory, and they try hard, but they have downside too: their prices aren't that low (compared to Amazon or even Chess Books From Europe), they have a high threshold for free shipping, and they don't get books into inventory as quickly as, say, Chess4Less. 

I doubt it costs even $1k per month to keep CC going. More likely it is in the hundreds of dollars range, plus the token stipends paid to the regular columnists. I bet that the trickle of revenue generated from sales is enough to pay Donlan's rent and keep him warm at night, and that this is enough for him. Without a radical change of business plans, CC is not returning to the glorious chess site it once was, as the go-to place for chess content on the Web.   

Actually I wouldn't mind, because I read at most 2 articles per month. ;)

I can see your point.  Thanks for expressing it here.

kco wrote:

How long you guys reckon erik will love the idea to get this pages to be pay to read ?

Who do we have to pay to get pete to stop posting "articles".

What, not interested in chess couples?

Then again, no one forces you to read them, so....

So if CC is following a tough model, what is a better approach? I guess all approaches are to create value in some way, then use that to either sell another product, or get paying members.

I have had slow service from here unfortunately.  I guess their equipment and book business comes second to their school they run.  They should hire someone to turn around orders in 24 hours and knows how to ship books and equipment efficiently and speedy.  No one I know uses Zone A boxes free from the usps.com site to ship packages. I use them everyday in my business. it is a Priority box with a free $50 insurance. In fact many books are 6x9xabout an inch.  ID of the box is 10x7x4.75.  Amazing that when I email them and tell them can you ship my 4 book order in this box ( and I look up the price of $7.55 sometimes less) they say they are the experts and never heard of such a box. It has been available to businesses for OVER 2 years now.

I don't read them, but sometimes I see the headlines and cringe.

A lot of the "articles" that make it to the first page should never see the light of day.

All Articles make it to the first page, I believe.

• 3 days ago · Quote · #47

  kco  

  forcing free members to sign up if they want to read the articles, not a bad idea.                 Let me tweek that a little.  Erik should have a pay policy on starting threads. Not much, say, $1.00 for chess, $2.00 for off-topic, and you wouldn't have to be a pay member to start a thread. But you would need pay-pal, or Mastr Charge, or debit pay to START a thread.   More people would police the're threads more, and less people would take up bandwidth with nonsense.