Congrats to FragileDeal for winning the FWF Poll!

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If you haven’t seen the poll on FWF, check it out here: FatWallet - Thank you!

It looks like the majority of FW/FWF votes that Fragiledeal.com is their preferred destination to move from fatwallet.com. Let’s make it great!

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Poll results don’t matter. There are almost 700 users on PW, and FD hasn’t cracked 500 yet (although it reached this number much faster).

What some (including myself) want to know is the plan for keeping this site running. I don’t imagine @thefdadmin or @SIS are gonna pay for it out of pocket for too long.

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Actually, that’s precisely what I intend on doing for the time being (paying out of pocket).

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. We need to see whether there’s a demand for this place. If there is, we’ll get the money together. I’ve had several people approach me offering to toss money into the hat to cover costs and whatnot. As long as there is an active community here, I will make sure the lights stay on, even if that means coming out of pocket.

Also, I look at those forum numbers through a different lens. PW has been running for more than a week and has just shy of 700. We’ve been running for fewer than 3 days and are about to crack 500, despite not having that first-mover advantage. And more and more quality content is going up every hour. The FD future is bright!

As always, thanks to everyone for being here and taking part.

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I don’t care if advertising is needed to subsidize the site. I’ll even turn off Ad Block. You shouldn’t have to subsidize this when we all get the benefit. My $0.02.

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I wish this site makes a lot of $$$, after all, that’s the life-blood that will keep it going in the long term.

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The cost in $$$ might not be much but the cost in time for the admins is big. I want to thank you guys for that hard work somehow. If that means ads I too would turn off adblocker.

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I appreciate the offer and the sentiment from others. The hosting costs aren’t too bad (admins at other sites are making this an issue to justify monetization, in my opinion).

But I’m not worried about having to come out of pocket some ridiculous amount precisely because so many people have stepped up and offered to help (which I appreciate). The time may come when I have to take people up on that offer, but for the time being, we’re good.

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Also, a congrats to everyone here for helping to build the site into what it is. We’re up over 730 users now. And not that this is a direct competition (although, it sort of is) PhatWallet has just over 800. Keep the great content coming–that’s the real life blood of this place.

ETA: Growth continues to be steady. Thanks to everyone who’s participating.

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Thanks for stepping up FDAdmin.

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You could install Skimlinks, CJ, Ebay and other code into the site to monetize the links. I wouldn’t be opposed to that.

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You don’t need ads to keep the lights on. You can monetize like other deal sites with software that auto generates an affiliate link for every link posted. Then every link posted on fragile deals will automatically become an affiliate link that the site can receive commission for.

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The reason I hate SD is because they do this. I want my CB/Points for my purchases. IMHO it is much better to be pulling in money that we can’t get ourselves like ads, or just put a patreon acct up and let us chip in $2 a month.

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I dont see why you wouldn’t still be getting CB and points?

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If it doesn’t interfere with CB I’m fine with it.

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Here’s one neutral-to-positive monetization idea: exclusive(-ish) credit card signup links. I’m pretty sure there are no sites that share commissions on these anymore. I recall there were some sites many years ago, but they seldom paid (I never got paid). Amazon has a few cards that they’ll give you a little something for applying, but they’re just common cards with tiny signup bonuses. I’ve seen lots of links for cards that offered something extra via affiliates. The site would be doing us a favor by providing those links here so we don’t have to go fishing for them.

ETA: unless, of course, you run into the same issues as DoC did.

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Any reason why fragile and fwf don’t merge? There is strength in numbers. There are other smaller deals sites out there that would be a better match for these two forums to join up with. Esp if they don’t have a forum.

The site handles daily deals and monetization, and the forum admins manage the forum and the community on a rev-share basis. The community of FW expats gets a new home and everyone continues to be happy.

In 3 months down the road the enthusiasm will wear out and there will be two very quiet forums left behind.

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I presume you mean PW. There are a few issues off the top of my head:

  1. They’ve been a bit aggressive/negative towards us. If they want to come over here, they’re free to. But a merger suggests that their leadership would take on some type of leadership role here. We don’t want that negativity in leadership here.
  2. They’ve accused us of coordinating troll raids over at their site. See point 1.
  3. They are more interested in monetization right away, and less on community (just my opinion). The fact that some of their earliest talk was about running ads, monetization, ad blockers, etc, demonstrates to me that our values probably aren’t in alignment.

We’re going to run FD as a community-first forum. And part of that (based on community feedback) is trying to really preserve the FW experience (recruiting the same mods, etc). If that’s not the philosophy a new user is looking for, that’s fine.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of the conciliatory opinions and the idea of a merger. But it’s a lot easier to say “you guys should just merge” than to actually figure out how it looks.

To be clear, @passwird.com , this isn’t directed at you. You asked for the reason, and I wanted to take a second to write this up for all of the people who (here and at FW) have asked this same question. Welcome to FD.

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I’ve had this thought as well. It’s a very simple monetization tool, but would probably cover the bulk of our costs without much hassle. As I understand it, you wouldn’t lose portal payouts (and obviously not CC points). Amazon doesn’t offer portal cashback generally. If we do nothing other than make those affiliate links, we won’t be interfering with portal cashback, and would probably make a decent bit towards funding this place.

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Yeah i get that it isn’t directed at me. I see that there is some bad blood. I’ve been lurking in both forums and not noticed this behaviour, but like i said i’m lurking.

As background, PW is one of the OG deals sites. It was founded in 01 and had huge following over the years. The original owner knew nothing about how to scale the site, so over the last number of years its stagnated. We bought it about a year ago and are in a constant state of re-invigoration. One of the pieces we’re hoping to add is a forum and looking to partner up. I’m reaching out to both sides as my background is in website management and online marketing. I wouldn’t want either forum to waste this opportunity to give all of the FW people a new home that brings them together as one big active community vs two which are split and eventually fizzle out. Feel free to reach out directly to me.

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I can only speak for myself, but there’s no real bad blood from my direction (except for disappointment at their baseless accusations). And, as I understand it, their bad blood seems to be that we interfered with their FWF 2.0 experiment, which they inexplicably should have a monopoly on for creating first (despite the fact that others made other destinations before them).