What would happen if..

What would happen if..

Chess.com made this a pay or you cannot do anything site? ($2 a month just to have what basic members have)

I think 1/3rd of people would stay and pay and the rest leave..

what do you think?

"So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, goodnight."

Since I only post and I won't pay for the privilege. I consider what I do a little service to the site anyway, at least when I'm not posting silly jokes. They should pay me $2 a month or year.

I think you've over estimated the value of your service by a few orders of magnitude.

I think a lot of people would leave and the site overall would suffer. The large community of users -- in the forums and in playing games -- makes the site more valuable. I bet even some paying members would leave once the forums became less active and it became harder to find games. I doubt this "service" the non-paying members are providing is worth more than a few pennies a month or year.

Naw, I'm worth the $2.

P.S. TheGrobe quoted a figure of $0.003 per page view ad revenue. Figure out your worth to the site by how many page views you generate?

It would be an unwise move that would probably doom this site.

The content provided for free by the non-paying members and the ease of finding a game that also results from their presense is no doubt what attracks a lot of the paying members here.  I think that very few would pay the $2 for the basic privileges and that the impact of their absense (aside from the lost ad revenue) would be that many paying members also leave.

consider me gone.

me too

..this will lead to leaving of most of the basic members here ..there is no doubt regarding that..

I think site would continue working but it would be a bad move

I think Erik sees this too - he is an astute businessman. I don't think he will implement such a move. Non-paying members are valuable to chess.com in many ways. They provide the numbers needed for games, group membership and advertising revenue, as has been pointed out. They contribute to forum contents. Losing them would be a disaster.

But it's also true they put a strain on the site's resources and infrastructure through their many activities. The sheer weight of their presence alone is a big load on site servers.

A happy solution is to grow a big enough paying segment from the chess.com population to support everybody so chess.com can continue being a viable business. Any sign-ups?

They would loose many members 

True .. prhaps chess.com would tell us the composition of paying vs non-paying membership. That would give a clearer picture.

Man, Lenny didn't pay, where would we be without him?

I would leave, I can play chess elsewhere for free

I'd be interested to know how many paying and non-paying members there are?

At least 2/3 of non-paying members would leave, and look around for updated chess software

Isn't ICC that way, where they make everyone pay?

I wouldn't be opposed to the idea of having everyone pay a small fee like $2/month if they would do away with the tiered membership. Someone would have to crunch the numbers, but how would they come out if everyone paid $2 vs. some ppl. paying $5-10/month for memberships?

ICC, Playchess, World live chess (something like that, which is a site like chess.com), all make people pay.

So, you want to ask for less than some people are willing to pay, while charging everyone who doesn't want to pay?