Blue’s WordPress Blog

Or should that read “Moron Yuku Pricing”? I wonder…

Since my recent posting about the pricing for an ad-free Yuku message board, there have been some updates to the pricing pages because their customers and indeed their own staff don’t really understand the pricing model for Yuku or how it will be calculated(and understandably so).

The latest version of the Yuku pricing is set out here: http://www.yuku.com/home/goldpricing/

“Large Yuku communities that generate over 50,000 page views a month can participate in the Gold Ad-Free Community offering using easy credit card or PayPal payments. Advertising can be removed from community pages that serve Yuku ads at a rate of $0.20 per 1,000 pages served. Yuku serves ads on only half of all the pages in a community, and the Gold Ad-Free Community contributions are applied only to those pages. Pages that do not carry Yuku ads do not count against the contributions. The minimum contribution is US $1.00.”

So for your dollar, you’d get something between 5,000 and 10,000 page views per month, depending upon how exactly ezboard/Yuku are going to deliver those
ads to which visitors at which frequency. And if I understand the pricing correctly - though even Yuku staff don’t understand it - that would be over and above your $6 a month.

So how much would a board cost? Well we abandoned our ezboard after they lost a year’s messages but still have it on ezboard because they refused to refund our community chest. We now have a self-hosted vBulletin board. It’s not a huge board by any means, but the stats. are useful: in December 2007, we saw successful requests for pages at 541,147.

So on Yuku’s pricing formula - if I understand it correctly - the equivalent Yuku board would cost us:

Basic monthly cost: $6
Ads. served: (541,147-50,000)/2/1,000x$0.20=$49.12

Total monthly cost= $55.12

Total annual cost = $661.44

How much do we pay? $120…

Now like I said, our message board is not a heavy traffic board - it caters for a one make motorcycle model that’s been discontinued and which wasn’t a massive seller when it was being built. And yet the equivalent board on Yuku would cost us five times as much! And still no sign of the promised $3-$5,000 in revenue sharing for board owners - I wonder where that’s gone?

Leaving Yuku really is the only sensible option.

All you have to do is pay…

I kid you not: there is apparently a one month free trial period for Yuku Supporter - basically a way to hide adverts from Yuku message boards if you pay $7 for six months:

“Become a Yuku Supporter!

Welcome to the Yuku Supporter purchase screen. Here you can upgrade to or renew your Yuku Supporter account for your username, giving your username premium status including no ads and special features.
As a new Yuku Supporter subscriber, you are qualified for a one month free trial period.”

Great! So where’s the option to select the free one month trial? You can only select $7 for six months or $12 for 12 months.

It must be on the next screen. Check the box that says you agree to the Yuku T&Cs and on we go.

“Selected Subscription Options

You have selected:

Six months subscription for $7 USD without Automatic Renewal.

You are qualified for a one month free trial period.”

Woohoo! On we go. We’re now taken to PayPal and for some reason they want to charge me $7 still.

Where’s my one month free trial period?

Oh and you know the bit where it says “giving your username premium status including no ads”? Well that’s not strictly accurate either:

http://support.yuku.com/topic/4922/t/Gold-community-and-yuku-supporter.html?page=-1

“Yuku supporters will not see yuku placed ads, but they will see any ads placed by board admins.”

So “no ads” means “ads”. Ah I see.

So then. Back to the question of the supposed one month free trial. How do we sign up for free?

http://support.yuku.com/topic/4904/t/One-month-yuku-supporter-free-trial.html

“if you pay for it, you get a month free thrown in. You don’t get a free month to try it first. The free month is a reward for paying.”

Oh I see! So the one month free trial isn’t a one month free trial after all. It’s a one month subscription extension once you’ve paid.

More creative use of language or misleading information depending on whether you’re ezboard, Inc. or the rest of the world…

Well it’s still not entirely clear if yuku is in beta or not: the home page says nothing about the beta status but the yuku help wiki still has beta references and graphics and as anyone who’s using it can see, the software is still full of bugs and the promised features are not all present.

But they’ve revealed prices at last!
http://www.yuku.com/home/goldstory/

$72 for 12 months up to 50,000 page views per month, though how they’ll be working out what page views are with AJAX architecture is anyone’s guess. $72 for 12 months now instead of $54 on ezboard which means a one-third price increase!

Over 50,000 page views?

http://www.yuku.com/home/goldpricing/

“Advertising can be removed from community pages at a rate of $0.20 per 1,000 ads served. The minimum contribution is US $1.00.”

So if ezboard decide to litter the site with ads, that cash will go in a moment…

What about Yuku Supporter?

http://www.yuku.com/home/supporterstory/

“Supporters receive 100 MB of image hosting space. Non-Supporters receive only 30 MB”

Oh I’m sorry, didn’t users get offered 1TB of storage for free?

So, if your “enterprise-quality hosting and software” falls over or you’re fed up with paying someone else to have access to your account - as they do on Yuku - then try another option.

If you go to DreamHost and enter the promo code EZSAVE50, you’ll even get $50 off the first year’s hosting price of $119.40 (you pay $69.40 if you use the promo code) and that includes domain name, e-mail, 500GB of storage (increases @2GB a week) and 5TB of bandwidth, PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, CGI, “real” web statistics, one-click installs of blogging, message board and other software, etc.

It’s a no-brainer…