tribe premium subscriptions

i'm psyched darren (with some help from brian) got this out. pls direct questions to darren@tribe.net or darren.mckeeman@gmail.com. he's done a great job and worked really hard so be nice!

follow up

i just want to say that it's been pleasantly overwhelming to hear the level of response and support for tribe. i'll respond en mass to all the posts, comments and emails i couldnt respond to personally (yet:). feels like jimmy steward in a wonderful life with everyone offering to help save the old savings and loan (replace with old community site).

darren has been working on a plan to offer a monthly paid subscription with a goal of generating enough revenue to pay for a full-time engineer/dba. (anyone want that job? email at@tribe.net). we plan to put out an email to all tribe users and post to the blog too.

someone also suggested a higher paid subscription for accessing the adult sections which is also the content that has been totally non-monetizable and made it harder for us to attract advertisers so that might make sense.

quick informal update on tribe status

as you know, tribe has been experiencing more downtime lately and we're sorry.

a lot of people have been posting and emailing with concerns about tribe. here's the quick status on tribe. tribe has been living off the cash it generates from showing adsense ads for the past 7-8 months. that has generally been enough to pay for bandwidth and two full time employees (darren and wendy) who manage the server uptime and cusomter support. from time to time the site has been lucky enough to get off hrs input from former developers like brian and jenni.

going forward, a lot of people have offered to pay for a premium account or make donations to support the site. if we could generate another $60-70k a year (about $5k per month) we could hire a full-time engineer to work on more serious maintenance and even new features (like a cool newsfeed like facebook has). that might require 1000 subscribers at $5 per month. i love the idea of testing this out.

if you have further thoughts email me (mark@tribe.net) and andrew trader (at@tribe.net). we may not be able to respond to everyone but will try.

tribe really does compete with a sunny day!

i noticed that our total page views were significantly lower yesterday as good weather spread across sf, la and i hear other cities.

Tribe News

hey tribers,

some of you may have noticed a story in yesterday's nytimes (front page biz setion) about cisco buying part of tribe. while i cant provide more detail yet, i can assure everyone that cisco is not buying the tribe.net site, which will continue to run independently.

i'm excited that tribe is one step closer to a sustained future. the next one is to be cashflow breakeven which is close too.

pls email me with any questions or post comments here.

hey tribsters

i would love to hear ideas from everyone on how to expand the tribe community. free marketing? tribe is nearly cashflow break even now on our adsense ads and we'd like to see it start growing at a faster clip again.

Tribe Party - 10/10

come reconnect with the tribe team and each other. like our first party in november 2003, we hope you will all bring something to this - from fire dancers to DJ's, poets to freakets, masseuses to...well you get the idea.

go to reboot.party.tribe.net to RSVP.

so what dya think of newer lesser tribe?

going non-profit?

one thing i've wondered about lately is whether it will ultimately make sense for tribe to become a non-profit entity. (it's already not profitable:) i wonder whether it could be like npr, where the audience gives money every so often to keep it all running.

anyone have thoughts on that?

time for a tribe party?

with the team's upcoming new release (the first set of tools for users in a long time), we're thinking a tribe party is in order, tribe style. that means everyone contributes. remember our early parties?

email us any ideas you have. might be next week.

maybe we could make the party a web 2.0 spoof? come as your favorite web 2.0 company or idea?