Okay, I lied (I'm not naked, it's too fucking cold!)... :)

This is actually a serious blog, and as a staff member here I am truly fed up having to read the bitching and moaning about the latest changes. Most of this is coming from free members that have been here at SexyAds for years. How do you people put food on your table? Do you think this is a hobby for Maureen and Jayce, something they do for fun? This is their livelihood, this is how they LIVE, it is how they pay bills, eat, feed their animals, run their vehicle and allow me to work for them. Get a clue people ffs!

Why not pay for one month, just one? If you can't afford or don't want to pay... then stop moaning! There are still so many free features here for you to use, and you get absolute 100% customer service from this site, whether you are a paid member or not.

Below is a cut and paste from a comment Jayce wrote to someone this morning, please read it.

*****


It's not about what every individual aspect of the sites costs us to run, but it's about the balance between what we can offer for free and thus keep enough people who can't pay, or for whatever reason decide not to pay coming back, and what we'll make extras for VIPs so it's attractive enough for at least some people to buy.

Some stuff like video chat just won't work if it's restricted to paying members. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that we simply don't have enough paying members for that to be much fun.  But it's popular and our chat rooms are lively places because it's free. We figure it's an expense that is worth carrying because it keeps people coming back, but we know that not enough people will pay for it to make it VIP only.  We've tried it and it doesn't work, so we wear the expense.

We have a range of services and we need to decide which services we feel are important enough for people to want to pay for and which we need to offer for free so we have enough people coming through the front door every day.  It's a balancing act, but if we give away the stuff that people really want (like "who's viewed me"), why would they ever pay?  And ultimately, someone has to pay.

It may seem arbitrary, but it's a business decision.  Like any other business, we have to decide what we will offer for sale and how much to charge for it, and people can decide for themselves whether they want to pay the asking price for what we offer.  If we have the mix right, we'll make a profit and stay in business. If we get it wrong, we won't be around very long (and you can literally count on one hand the number of similar sites that have been around as long as we have).  You may disagree with what we decide to sell and what we decide to give away, but that's not your decision to make.  If you don't like it, you won't pay.  Simple as that. And I won't bitch and moan that you don't pay, I'll just figure I'm doing it wrong and tweak my offer.

And complaining about what we'll give you free and what we'll charge for is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENT than going to McD's and bitching that you really, really like to have a Diet Coke with your burger, and why the fuck are they mean enough to charge you for it.  It costs near enough to fuck all for McD's to serve up a soda, but do you complain about paying for it??

Let me give you a reality check... this is McD's NZ pricing policy.. I assume it's similar the world over:

McDonald’s New Zealand sets recommended retail pricing for its company-owned restaurants, and all of these restaurants currently have the same menu prices. As with any industry, pricing is determined by considering the cost of a product together with what consumers are prepared to pay.

Notice those last 6 words?  That's called "good business practice". Do you honestly begrudge them the right to set their prices that way? No? Then why the fuck do you do it to us??

And just as an aside, the infrastructure and technical services required to maintain something like the "Viewed me" list is not trivial. Or rather, the infrastructure to maintain those kind of things AND have the site run reliably at anything more than a snail's pace is not trivial.

On average, we get around 3~5 profile views per second and around 10~20 per second at peak times. The data for every one of those views has to be stored and quickly retrievable. Extrapolate that to include things like tickles, comments, blog posts, ads, photos, mail etc etc... I'm sure you get the picture. Without boring you with the details, I can tell you it takes around 20 high end dedicated servers (go look up the monthly  price on one of those) to do that reliably, with inbuilt redundancy so you don't notice a thing when (and I mean when not if) a server shits itself, and to provide hot backup in 3 locations on  two continents so that when there's a data center disaster (like the explosion that last year completely knocked out for over 10 days one of the data centers we use) we can be back online within hours, if not minutes.

And don't get me started on the effort required each day to maintain that sort of network, let alone the regular site support ....

It's just part of our service.  You have the choice to pay for it or not.