DONEFollow

bah, aye, I had a few, but the gist of it stays the same.


Your ads are killing off folks, not to mention noone trusts your ads to be safe.

I use AdBlock. But the OP has a point.

As for buying premium:

(History from wikipedia)

Allakhazam.com was started in 1999 by Jeffrey Moyer as a simple guide to the game EverQuest on a free web hosting service. It quickly became known by the EverQuest player base for its extensive quest descriptions. Mr. Moyer then teamed up with programmer Andy Sharp,

In late 2000, the internet experienced a vast reduction of advertising revenue that has been referred to as the Dot-com bubble. Most gaming sites, including Allakhazam, lost the majority of their revenue. Many popular gaming sites went out of business soon thereafter and have not been seen since. Allakhazam weathered this storm by establishing a premium membership service where users paid for certain advanced searches and other features designed to make their game play easier. At its peak, the Allakhazam premium service had over 45,000 subscribers, making it one of the more successful services of its kind ever.

I was a premium member during this time. I enjoyed the site, respected the people running it, and felt good about paying them the fairly trivial buy in fee.

In February 2006, co-owners Moyer and Sharp sold their ownership stake in Allakhazam to Affinity Media Corporation. The amount of the sale has been said to be between 7 and 10 million dollars. Affinity Media created the Zam Network and consolidated Allakhazam with Thottbot and MMO Interface into the Internet's largest MMO Gaming information network. Later Zam also acquired Wowhead. Allakhazam, Thottbot and Wowhead are all ranked within the top 1,000 sites according to Alexa, and the combined traffic of these sites likely puts the Zam Network as one of the internet's top 100 sites in terms of total traffic. Indeed, the Zam Media Kit claims a total of over 700 million page views a month. Both Moyer and Sharp continued to work for the new corporation, and in 2008, Mr. Moyer was named as the president of the entire Zam network.

Some of us remember this sell out. My understanding was that Affinity Media was the parent company of, or affiliated with IGE. (( http://wow.joystiq.com/2007/12/20/legal-files-reveal-ige-and-affinity-connection-once-and-for-all/ )). I know this has been through the ringer here, but not always with completely truthful disclosure. Jeffrey (Alla) claimed that while they were owned by a company associated with RMT, that they retained complete independence. Maybe so. But SOLD was the site, and nothing could take back that taint.

In 2009, Sharp and Moyer were either fired or left Zam, leaving Zam as what can only be described as a souless pawn in "Big MMO ad serving sites".

I can appreciate what premium membership buys you here. This is an extremely useful site. There are still great people working here. But this is a business now and they know they are either serving you $10 worth of ads per quarter or getting your $10 as a subscriber.

Sorry for the rant. I miss the old days of Allakhazam.


For more background, this is a great wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGE

Edited, Mar 13th 2012 1:02am by Samatman

I also subscribed for many years, I miss the times that Alla would post some reply to us making it seem as if we were all part of his grand concept.

I miss his avatar greatly ;-(

Advertisements in general just keep getting worse and worse. One thing that helps if to use Firefox. I made the mistake of trying to use the Terraria wiki website the other day with Internet Explorer and every couple of minutes it starting blaring commericals at the bottom of the page. I mean I know it costs money to run a site but doesn't mean a person should be spammed to death with them either. I don't even go to the main page on Alla anymore.

I miss the old days of the internet where all you had were tiny banner ads...

While i understand the sentiment regarding the zam buyout i think people need to look at the bigger picture. I remember when it all went down and at first i was outraged and ready to boycott ZAM entirely but the more i thought about it the more i realized it really wasnt the end of the world.

Every day i get gas, groceries, cable etc. from companies that make affinity media look like a church run non profit. Yes RMT is bad thats for sure but to my knowledge ZAM still dont allow RMT ads and they still actively fight RMT spammers.

On the topic of ad blocking software there are 2 main issues i have with this.

1) A lot of adblock software just blocks you from seeing the ad and still loads the data from the server. What that means is that if you are vulnerable to infected ads these types of adblockers will do nothing to protect you at all. In order to counter this you need something like noscript. Furthermore this really only affects people with windows XP or older. Vista and 7 have UAC built in and unless you turn it off it WILL prevent any malicious software from executing or installing without you personally clicking yes on a dialog prompt.

2) Adblock software is a growing trend that is going to destroy the web as we know it (Do yourselves a favor and google this one). Ask anyone that has run a free site over the last 10 years and they will tell you. Since the popularity of adblock software has risen their income has tanked. Sites cost money to run, they dont run on fairy dust. When you just block all ads without thinking you are essentially taking money from the sites you go to regularly. And before you even say "I dont ever click ads so no loss from me" thats how ads worked in the 90s, these days the bulk of ad money comes from how many times the ad is loaded click through is just a bonus.

This leaves an interesting problem for both sides. People that run sites have to come up with ways to monetize them and pay for operation and users have to make a choice to block or not to block.

People complain that sites are throwing up more and more ads and a lot of that is because one of the only ways to try and recoup the lost money from blockers is to shove more ads on those that dont block. Its a really crappy situation.

Personally i run adblock in chrome and set it to a blank slate and blacklist sites with terrible or questionable ads.

TL:DR whitelist sites you like!

You would think so but such is not the case anymore. With tons of people suggesting it even corporations are installing it on workstations.

You dont like my name? It comes from back when i played a lot of FPS always liked the thought of someone seeing "You where killed by touchin myself".

See this is the mentality i simply dont understand. Why is it these days when someone actually tries to make a buck its called greed? Why is it that people get up in arms when they dont get a flipping hand out? It just makes no sense, just because a video is 15 seconds long dont change the fact that Youtube costs over 350 million a year in just bandwidth. How do you expect them to pay for this? Its ridiculous, unless its completely free people pitch a fit.

This ignorant sense of entitlement is the worst thing about this day and age. Sites should be free and have no ads, videos should be free and have no ads etc. at what point do people wise up and realize things cost money?

10 years ago you want to watch a video you turn on the TV and deal with commercials or pay extra for a commercial free channel, this was understood universally. Today you get an ad on youtube that even lets you skip it after 15 seconds and people throw fits.

Google has yet to even make a profit on youtube but putting ads in videos is just being greedy? Really? It just blows my mind how people make baseless assumptions and call greed every time someone expects something in return for what they offer.

Oh well, cant beat them, join them.

Stupid google! Cant even break even with youtube and the greedy jerks make me watch ads!

I'm, just amazed at the sheer ignorance of the majority of people, whom have yet to figure you can block all ads on the internet.

I know for a fact that a year ago or so, Zam adds had a virus. Old old bud of mine got it from here.

I know for a fact that adds here (up till 6 months ago) would hog bandwiidth, etc.

That said, I've loved this site for years, for the knowledge available here.

When I feel that Allah is trustworthy, I"ll buy a subscription.

I'm not sure how to be more blunt.



P.S. I do appreciate all that allah does.

I'm going to try to be constructive for a moment. RMT mattered back in the day, but now SOE sells in game items for $. If we're still playing EQ, we have either embraced this (and many have, SOE's linking SC to loyalty, to recurring subs, to RL$ is complete), OR we ignore it and don't participate / don't care.

What does matter is the way we pay for the services we receive here at Zam. In my opinion, those old schoolers that feel abused by the sell out will probably never resub to Zam under the current premium strategy. I partly feel like I shouldn't say this again, but you do give ZAM guest users nearly everything they need to play the game while benefiting from all that Zam offers. Oh... I can't look up a vendor list for an item? I go to EQTraders.com. I need a map? I go to mapfiend.com, or the eqatlas mirror (which I suspect you already own).

Now I realize the value of this site, and even though I dislike blocking ads on sites I like, I'm not going to make an exception unless I am forced. Ads are part of the evil of the internet age for these few years. They aren't a sustainable strategy. What you really want is marketable and exchangable information on your users- but here and now, not yet. Not until you can target me to send a Walmart Station Cash coupon right to my smartphone with Sony's blessing when my phone indicates I am at a Walmart; a couple years down the road probably.

Here's my suggestion: Buy EQtraders and the rest of the valid reference sites and integrate them in the Zam model. Work to pull the disparate databases together and present a unified resource. You did this in Warcraft. It's a pretty decent business strategy. You just need to stop giving away so much of "your" work for free. However, you need to realize that when the resources you're presenting are user generated, then we need to become participants and share in what you reap. When your users are building your wikis, does it make sense to charge them access to the data they entered? When people come to look up a quest and the comments freely submitted help them through make all the difference, does it make sense to charge them to post those comments?

While I am suggesting you move to a more restricted free model, I'd like to see incentive for contribution and recognition to the primary contributors. Why don't the top 10 wiki contributors get a 1500SC card each month? I mean even simple, extremely cheap things like that are motivators. Even keeping the forum active generates you revenue. If there were benefit to being a thoughtful, helpful forum poster aside from a "red" name maybe people would post more and try harder. What if "guru" status posters got free premium? Another incentive. Cost? Almost nothing.

There's more you can do, I'm sure of it. Just don't forget where most of the data you sell came from. Us.