I am puzzled by people on these forums who appear to have a problem with GoKunming making money. How is the site supposed to stay afloat in the long term? How are the owners and staff supposed to pay their rent?

I think it is simply wrong to use a service while vocally begrudging its providers fair recompense for their labors, especially when the service is provided free of charge to users.

If you're so enamored of the idea of people doing work for free and you're not satisfied with this website, why not practice what you preach and start your own zero-revenue site? The time, money and technical skills required are minimal these days with WordPress and the like.

Or could it be that the people who were running GoKunming as a "simple, free bulletin board" back in the day realized that it wasn't a sustainable model? And perhaps you will discover the same if you try.

Instead, how about we all make an ongoing effort to patronize GoKunming's advertisers and to tell them we found out about them through their ads on the website? Maybe then there would be more resources for the team to deal with the various issues that I and others have been complaining about on the feedback thread and elsewhere.

(For the record, I do not know any of GoKunming's owners or staff and have no connection to them other than my posts under this account.)

I am all about money too.
Please someone tell me how to make more money.
Thanks in advance.

i know one of them, he dont own a car, not even a xiali

@herenow,

By "people" do you mean one? Other than that one comment by one user in five pages worth of post, I really don't see this sentiment expressed by anyone else.

The issue isn't so much about making money, for me at least. All entities need revenue to offset expenses, any fifth-grader who has handled money can tell you that. And I do not believe there was any complaining about GoKunming making money or the amount of ads served up until that one comment you referenced, so this is really just a straw-man argument. The issue for me is the expectations and attitudes the moderators have of their users and vice versa.

In a traditional business model, the enterprise provides a product / service that the consumer wants and a transaction takes place, neither party owes the other anything beyond the exchange.

In a non-profit relationship, the enterprise and the consumer share a common vision and they work together to realize that vision. The enterprise operate on motives of principle rather than profit, the consumer helps lower the cost of operation and boost the revenue of the enterprise by making donations (money and material), providing free labor, overpaying for products/services that they could otherwise get cheaper elsewhere, etc. The relationship ends when there they no longer share a common cause.

And there is the advertising/social media model where the consumers of a free service becomes the product the enterprise sells to their customers, this is where GoKunming falls under. We, the users of GoKunming, are the cows of a dairy farm and I am quite content with that. The problem I have is when moderators try to pretend it is anything but.

To put the comment into context, I do not believe when he said "simple, free bulletin board" he meant GoKunming should not make money, after all, GoKunming is still free, there are no paid sections....at least not yet. Rather, I take it to mean that there is an over emphasis on making money to the detriment of providing a quality product that users are willing to consume, thus affecting the bottom line. If the objective is to milk the cow, taking the attitude that the cows are eating more hay than they are giving milk won't help. Similarly, you are not helping yourself if you feel the feed has become too expensive and from now on you will feed the cows leaves instead because leaves are cheap.

Again, I say all of this not as a critic of the moderators in general, only of the moderation of GoKunming. I do not have the whole picture of the entire business enterprise, only the Gokunming part of it. Given the context of the big picture, this could very well be the best possible way of managing the website and the proper business decision.

All too obvious for the amount of verbiage expended.

Oh for goodness sake. It was a throwaway remark. No need for a Geneva conference about it. Perhaps I should have said that at a certain point GoKunming started to take itself too seriously. All the stuff about business clubs and the cringeworthy interviews with foreign "entrepreneurs" etc. etc. Lighten up.

Obviously, it wasn't obvious for some.

@cloudtrapezer: So you're saying that by "all about money", you meant the business-oriented drift of the site's content and not making money per se. All right, that seems like a reasonable issue to raise on a feedback thread. (Although I personally find the interviews with entrepreneurs and such to be informative -- and there have also been interviews with artists, reviews of art galleries and museums, etc.).

@ASatiricalBloke: In addition to cloudtrapezer, I thought you had criticized the site's aiming to make money on another thread, but looking back, I see that your points aren't quite as I remembered (and I should have re-checked before posting...). So your "straw-man" characterization is fair.

Still, I find some of the grousing about the site to be excessive. It sounds like one of your main contentions is that GoKM is milking users for monetizable content while speaking in a way that misleadingly suggests we are all a big commune of sorts. I do object to that sort of thing in other settings, which is one reason I don't use Facebook, but I've never noticed it that much on this site, and to the extent that I have, I've written it off as routine puffery.

I suppose I can understand how if you were around for the prior golden age you both reference, then the current regime's tone could rub you the wrong way in comparison. But in the larger scheme of things, GoKM just strikes me as a small online business that says and does the kinds of things such businesses are wont to say and do, all the while providing us a valuable service for free. So how about cutting them some slack?

Fair enough. I agree about cutting them some slack.

If I groused it is only because GoKunming wanted feedback on what I thought, otherwise I tried to keep the grousing to a minimum on other threads, apologies if I was not successful.

Anyway, I've always had the attitude that they are free to do as they see fit, my opinions have no bearing on their decisions. If I may be so conceited as to believe that I have the power to give them slack then unlimited slack is hereby granted.