> It would have been smarter of Something Awful (since that's the site we're talking about) to charge $4/month or something. The innovative thing off that mode

> It would have been smarter of Something Awful (since that's the site we're talking about) to charge $4/month or something. The innovative thing off that model is driving the revenue off the misbehavers instead of good citizens. You don't want to have the shitters around even if they are paying $4/month, and you don't want to drive off good-faith users even if they're mediocre/hapless/etc. So run the site off the backs of the people you don't want to have around. People don't like paying monthly (this is even true of, say, app store revenue today) and if you apply recurring charges then when people don't think they're getting enough value they'll leave. You have a hard enough time on the user-acquisition side, why make it worse on the retention side by driving away the users who you're actually trying to keep? Billing good citizens works in some situations where you have some specific value that you provide to them - providing sales listings on classifieds boards inside interest-specific forums is a good example, since you are providing access to interested buyers, which is a value-add, same as ebay taking their fee - but just in terms of operating a forum, you aren't a big enough value-add that people are going to pay Netflix-level subscriptions to the Parrot-Ass Discussion Club. You need the users more than they need you at that point. But a one-time fee is viewed much differently by people. People will pay $5 for an app, they aren't going to pay you $5 a month for it though, or at least far fewer.