Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
Well, it looks like the main problem is that the adverts became so intrusive that most users installed an ad blocker out of necessity.
Something is putting people off as the site gets 17.30m visitors a month, but they only stay on average for 1 minute 41 seconds.
69% of visitors bounce straight back off again, of those that stay, they only read 2.22 pages before leaving.
Some members are thinking of setting up their own forum, but I think that they think it to be a lot easier than it will be.
I'm sure there's more to running a forum that getting some free hosting and appointing a few mods as they appear to think!
If it's true that bandwidth is eaten up by people retrieving threads, I think that they should focus on cutting costs by closing pointless/childish threads such as the count to a million thread!!!
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As Paul says, extra threads (no matter how pointless) don't add much to the cost of running the site.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with the statement about advertising. I don't mind advertising on a site (I understand they have costs, and they have every right to make a profit), but the advertising on DS has gone from a mild diversion to a massive pain. For a long time, I couldn't even access the site from my iPad as the full screen ad they insisted on displaying on the main page frequently crashed safari.
I think they can survive, but they need to make the advertising less intrusive. They also need to drop the animated gifs, which make the site look a little like a flashy geocities site from the 90s.
I'd like to see the comments on the articles come back, but they disappeared around the time of the Tulisa court case, and while they were apparently disabled for maintenance, I don't think they will come back.