SDC Rewards - What is it, and why are you doing it? Get the full scoop here!
Dear Members
We’ve had a couple of questions about our SDC Rewards program lately, so I wanted to clear a couple of things up (and open the floor to comments). This will be a bit of a long read, but please bear with me.
The first—and most important thing—is that
everything that is currently free will remain free. We’re not going to start charging you to use our discount directory, play trivia, read our news articles, or receive the daily newsletters! If you don’t have the means to join SDC Rewards (or just don’t think we’re worth the money), don’t worry because nothing will change. You’ll continue to have access to all the things you already have access to.
Secondly, I’d like to explain why we’ve launched
SDC Rewards. As you can probably imagine, a lot of time, effort, and money goes into running the SDC. Writing the newsletters and articles, building new games, giving out prizes for our competitions, etc…
Just the costs of hosting the website alone costs us thousands of dollars per month.
Up until now, we’ve paid for 100% of this out of advertising revenues. These come in a couple of forms, and you’ll see them dotted around the website and newsletter. However, the simple fact is that
advertising revenues alone aren’t sufficient for us to pay the bills anymore. The online advertising market is highly volatile, and reflects the wider economy. A lot of businesses are tightening their belts at the moment, and, simply put, that means less of them are willing to pay for ads.
To be frank, we also find some of the ads that appear on our site to be a little annoying or obnoxious - also not to mention, occasionally ‘scammy’. We use an external ad agency to source advertisers for us (we don’t have the resources to do this in-house), but
we’ve manually blocked or blacklisted quite a few of them because we don’t like the products they’re selling or they give us a ‘dodgy’ feeling.
Getting a portion of our revenue from member subscriptions will allow us to largely move away from the advertising model.
Currently, SDC Rewards members see about 95% less ads on the site, which makes for a much more pleasurable browsing experience.
Having reliable subscriber revenue will also allow us to continue improving the SDC in other ways. Here are just a few of the things we have planned:
- Paid product testing (where we pay members for the products they test as well as their time)
- Health tips / Q&A from a GP or other health professional every month
- Discounts on travel related activities and products (cruises, travel insurance, etc.)
- Brand new brain training games, like crosswords, code crackers, word searches, etc.
- Video courses on IT skills, like removing malware, avoiding scams, purchasing things online safely, etc.
- Discounts on prepaid gift cards for popular retailers like Coles, Woolies, etc.
- An app/downloadable version of our discount directory that you can use on your phone/tablet
- Ad-free versions of OzWord, Sudoku, Trivia, etc. that you can use on your phone/tablet
Most of these will be open to SDC Rewards members only (at least for the foreseeable future), simply because we’re depending on the revenue they bring in as a way to fund these developments.
Finally, I’d like to mention that
we’re hugely thankful for having you all as members, whether you join SDC Rewards or not. We’ve tried to price our offering so that nobody is excluded (our monthly plan works out to 20 cents per day, and our annual plan works out to 14 cents per day), but we know a lot of people are doing it tough out there and if you’re not in a position to be able to support us financially, we’re still eternally grateful to have you as free members, and there are plenty of ways to help us that involve no monetary cost, like telling your friends about us and engaging in conversations on the forum.
If you have any questions, comments, or requests, please let us know either by posting here, or emailing me privately if you prefer.
Cheers
Jonathan and the SDC Team.
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Ty
