Read here:
It’s sad news.
i don’t see any news there… just a request for money.
if they gave us some “facts” on the CGtalk financial balances then it would be news.
i don’t think that the site is losing money. and they certainly never stated that it was.
Alltaken
Blender Foundation needs help, Blenderartists.org needs help, I need help! CGTalk makes a LOT of money just off advertisements, then theres’s sponsors, CGTalk doesn’t need help.
Wiggie wrote
Blender Foundation needs help, Blenderartists.org needs help, I need help! CGTalk makes a LOT of money just off advertisements, then theres’s sponsors, CGTalk doesn’t need help.
HOw can be so you sure?
I know CGTalk has a great deal of sponsers but these are often just used to provide prizes for the CG challenges. I don’t think that there’s much direct funding from these sponsers.
One doesn’t get as much from advertising as one use to. Most advertising require the user to actually click on banners, links etc…if you’re just their to chat and show artwork, it’s not hard to see that they’re not getting that much from this either.
It would appear that most of their funding comes from book sales so if their books aren’t selling, it’s not hard to believe that they might be short on money. They’ve probably just projected that if they stay on their current financial course, they could be out of business in a few years time. I think it’s quite smart to try and deal with the issue now.
You are right in that the Blender foundation and Blenderartists.org need help also, but I think it’s important to remember the huge gap in member ratio. 160,000 members is a very large community of people downloading, uploading, watching streaming video, etc. This is all very demanding website activity and does cost money.
I hope they can keep the website up and running.
Yeah, I’m somewhat sceptical of their business practises if they’re that dependent on book sales, given how much advertising they carry.
160,000 members is a very large community of people downloading,
3/4’s of who probably don’t visit their site more than once a month. if anythign at all. but that is probably counter balanced by the millions who look at the site without signing up.
Alltaken
The only community that will get a cent from me is this one right here, I have seen so many Cgtalkers regularly ridicule blender, so Im inclined to say f*k em.
Think about it, all CGtalk gives are forums, the foundation gives us a fully fledged 3d application – So that’s where my money would go.
Ditto.
BgDM
They’re telling people that they survive based on book revenue and encourage users to purchase the books. How’s that sad?
They’re just saying “If you like our community, please buy a nice book to support it’s continued existence.” It’s not even begging, really.
If CGTalk cannot find a way to survive, given its central position in the graphics community, at least in terms of multiplatform discussions, print publications, and contests, then that would be surprising, especially with all the sponsors and advertising they do/could/should be getting. I wonder if this might be an early prelude to an eventual premium (i.e. paid) membership. That would be a step in the wrong direction in my opinion, although it would be understandable on some level given that “free service” does costs money and energy-- something I know all too well from libraryland 
Be that as it may, long live free access.
RobertT
Alltaken wrote:
3/4’s of who probably don’t visit their site more than once a month.
I think that’s a very big assumption to make. CGTalk always has something new to look at whether it be artwork, WIPs, news etc…
I don’t think many people sign up to such a popular, active forum just so they can visit once a month. What’s the point in signing up at all. Their only reason to sign up is so they can participate in the forum discussions, challenges, watch streaming video etc…
It’s a fact that some people are more active than others in such forums, but it’s a bit of a risk paying for a lower bandwidth/webspace in the hope that 3/4s of their member won’t be all that active. The more members they get, the more upgrades a site needs. It’s their job to assume that the majority of their users will be in fact - active users, contributors & participants.
not news, not sad, just business reality.
The CG talk books are pretty nice - I may get one myself at some point.
However: I do think the site is over-ambitious: the site was already dog-slow at the point where they decided to host the finished works forums. That’s gotta be a heavy load in terms of serverspace/bandwidth and ultimately money.
The only “sad” thing about cgtalk is that it has become the “one forum”. It used to be that other online forums were as popular (cgchat, 3dark, etc.) and none of them were overburdened. Now it seems like cgtalk is the only “hip” place- the other forums are fairly dead, or have less good work posted, and cgtalk is clogged.
dunno what the solution is - but in some way cgtalk is victem of it’s own success. I definetly would hate to see the site die, but I wouldn’t mind them being forced to scale back , and lose some trafic to the other sites. Let the market decide! 
%|
It’s pretty much what the BF does.
And as I understand from Timothy it’s not Elysiun that gives us blender; it’s suppost to be an independant site. (uhu).
The page views give an indication on how many members visit a threat.
On the other hand it’s not obvious how many view multiple threats.
But a sticky as “The CG SCHOOLS and DEMO REELS thread” has 37,549 views so that’s indeed only 1/4 of the total members. (and thats a thread with alot of views)
A CGgallery image is viewed by about 1000 members. (well it has 1000 views) and at elysiun that’s a respectable 500!
I don’t see that as a sad, we are in the verge of bankruptcy kind of anouncement. All they want, is that more users would buy their books.
All tough I don’t know what theit fininacial situation is I really doubt they are doing poorly, they just want to rise their profit margin a bit.
CGNetworks, CGTalk, Ballistic Publishing, the CG Galleries, CG Challenges, Q&A Sessions and everything that this community offers is free and is funded by the proceeds of book sales.
At the moment, only a very small portion of our community has bought our books – about 1-5%.
I’m not sure I follow the reasoning here:
They need money to survive. The only way they get money is through books. Therefore (they conclude), the solution is to sell more books.
That’s ONE possible solution. Another would be to create more ways to get money. Apparently 95-99% of people have decided that they don’t want one of the books they sell … maybe CGtalk needs to find other things they can sell that would be of more appeal. I’m not sure what that is, but you won’t get far by asking people to purchase the same stuff they’ve already decided not to buy.
I think it’s perfectly normal for them to ask people to buy their books to keep the site going. Their site has a ton of people visiting the site, and I know how much that bandwidth costs. I know that most people frown on paid memberships, but the reality is that the money has to come from somewhere.
They are making the right decision by tryng to be self sufficient. That notice got me to look at their books and I want to get that D’artiste – Digital Painting book now. I don’t really care too much if their site goes down just because I don’t visit it, however CGTalk successfully got me to seriously consider buying a good book.
Agent 86.5 made a good point. CGTalk should also try other ways to get people to buy their stuff. Texture librarys, tutorial DVDs, etc. There’s quite a few ways to get CG artists to buy stuff. Just find out what they want.
Well, in this year and last year, a lot of people have had or still have financinal problems. In oure family we have the same, things get expensiver and more expensiver. A lot of stores, companies and else had to tell they went bankrupt, I’v seen this happening and such. So I don’t know, I think it’s in same way a warning to become close to bankrupt. It would be sad to see a community like that going down. I’m not a member there, but if the same happened to Blender, well yeah I had bought something.
Imagine this happening to the Blender Foundation and ELysiun, it would be badass. 
Except you must pay for a book if you want to be a member? Funny idea of free imho.
Nuff said.
Sonix.
Well said. This is exactly what 3dtotal/threedy.com do, and they are not crying out for support in the same manner.
Sonix.