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If ever there was a company whose senior management’s witterings were to be treated with a pinch of salt, it was Yuku under the leadership of Robert Labatt.

When he made the famous “better than free” launch video at DEMOfall 2005, he claimed that Yuku was better than free because they shared advertising revenue with the community leaders - watch from around 3 minutes 40 seconds in. At 4 minutes 20 seconds, Labatt says:

“…we’ve done modelling on the hundreds of thousands of communities that we have on ezboard and we believe that an average large community should be able to receive somewhere in the neighbourhood of three to five thousand dollars a month if their site is working well and they’ve got lots of people on it.”

So then. Lots of modelling done and a statement that they expect “average large” communities to be making $3-$5,000 a month in shared advertising revenues. Now Yuku was not and is not a charity or not-for-profit organisation, so I would have expected them to take by far the lion’s share of advertising revenues those communities were generating. After all, Yuku would have the infrastructure and bandwidth provision to think of as well as the support and development costs. But even if we suggest that no, they’ll actually do a 50/50 split, that would suggest they were expecting ad. revenues for “average large” communities of $10,000 a month or $120,000 a year.

Wow! That’s a lot of revenue. And that’s just the “average large” boards.

But wait a minute. One of the board owners of one of Yuku’s headline boards, Survivor Sucks, recently posted in the support forum with a pricing query as he was struggling to understand the costings. Yuku Gold pricing is explained here. It says:

“To work out in advance what 1 year of ad-free page views could cost you, use the No Ads/Opted total for 1 month, and apply it to this equation:

(ad-free page views/1000) * .2 * 12 (ad-free page views divided by 1000, then multiplied by .2, then multiplied by 12)”

Right. The board owner’s post quotes a load of stats. but not a whole month’s worth. So I’ll take the middle seven days from his quote (19/2 to 25/2):

02-25 123644 18115 59942
02-24 91601 16377 62084
02-23 91765 14114 57279
02-22 116085 16880 70602
02-21 128017 18510 67227
02-20 129372 17541 67069
02-19 116161 19595 68929

Tally up the last column and the total “No Ads/Opted” is 453,132.

So (453,132/1000) *.2 *52 (for weeks instead of months) = $4,712. In other words, Yuku would be willing to forgo any advertising revenue income from Survivor Sucks in return for receiving $4,712 a year.

Now don’t forget that Survivor Sucks is a favoured/featured board at Yuku: it even appears as one of the three shown on this page and has a special mention on KickApps’ Cameron Shaw’s Yuku profile page. So how is it that Yuku will apparently accept less than $5,000 to refrain from adding adverts on Survivor Sucks when Labatt was saying that they should easily have expected to be sharing revenues 20 to 30 times that large at the very least?

Or maybe all that supposed cost/data modelling and all that bluster at DEMOfall was just to try to get someone to buy Yuku/ezboard for as much as possible?

KickApps must really be kicking themselves…

It’s funny how the staff at Yuku just can’t help but tell bare-faced lies. Presumably this is now part of KickApps’ focus on Customer Service…

The Usual Suspect this time is “Let It Rip” Alison - no surprise - who seems to get her facts completely wrong for some reason.

Someone decides to have a well-written moan in the Support forum. Another disgruntled board Admin. mentions the Wikipedia entry for Yuku:

“…Although yuku administrators (as distinct from board administrators like you and me) say yuku isn’t a social networking site, migrants from ezboard notice the networking features first. Wikipedia’s article on yuku classifies it in the category “Social networking sites.” Make of that what you will….”

Alison Harrison then replies to that point to dismiss it:

“Wikiepedia [sic] is a system that allows anyone to edit it (except those who work with the company), so if the categorisation is incorrect you could easily go and fix it The majority of edits on it have been made by people who don’t actually use yuku.”

Ah OK. Let’s look at each of those points in turn:

“a system that allows anyone to edit it (except those who work with the company)”

When they were both still working at ezboard/Yuku, both Robert Labatt and Brian James (Regimemachine) were regular contributors to the article, although a number of their edits were reverted by other editors to remove the clear advertising slant they sought to apply (especially Labatt), which is against the Wikipedia advertising policy and guidelines. So that statement is untrue.

“if the categorisation is incorrect”

Nicely played, that one: note the use of ‘if’. Long term users will recall that the first element that ezboard concentrated on when working on Yuku was the user profiles and blogs before switching development resources henec the social networking categorisation. This focus was why many people declared Yuku to be a MySpace clone at the time. Of course, the Wikipedia article also categorises Yuku under “Forum hosting”.

“The majority of edits on it have been made by people who don’t actually use yuku”

More untruths. As they well know, I am Admin. of a Yuku board that was migrated over to Yuku recently. As they refuse to refund the community chest funds, I will still be a Yuku user until that board’s Gold Community status expires in a number of years time (or they fold, whichever comes soonest). Also as anyone who has read this blog will know, I have been using Yuku in various guises since it was ‘released’ to an open beta in 2006 and despite Yuku staff banning my accounts there (including the ones they themselves created for me…).

A large number of recent edits have been made by “Askeladden2006″ who has been on Yuku since the early days and is very much a satisfied customer (despite her own board being down for a period last week).

Most of the technical history and feature edits were made by “JamminBen”. Ben was an early adopter too, having being very active in the semi-official ezboard communities before Yuku was released to open beta. Indeed Ben was very regularly posting assistance in the Yuku Support Forum and helping out users on Yuku’s flagship boards like the JJB. With a strong interest in blogging and content management system, Ben was regularly pushing the software to see what it could deliver and actively working with its features. At one point, I was wondering if he’d been taken onto the Yuku staff, he was so ominpresent there!

–ooOOoo–

So there you go: Yuku - never letting the facts get in the way of a good argument…

Well what a surprise!

Our closed ezboard was forcibly migrated to Yuku this weekend. And of course, weekends are when there’s no technical support on Yuku or ezboard. Now given that I’m such an outspoken critic of ezboard/Yuku, you’d have thought they’d have been careful that the migration went smoothly, wouldn’t you?

Well maybe if you were anyone other than Yuku with their technical ability and commercial awareness anyway.

The first thing you notice when you visit the board is that right there is a link to allow people to make payment to Yuku. That is despite our having closed the community chest when it was on ezboard, so it’s clear that the settings weren’t migrated like-for-like as they claim they should be. Either than or they’re ensuring that every effort is made to make money off the newly imported boards despite the clear requirements of the board owners.

No problem: I’m an admin. of the board (and listed as such), so I’ll log in and turn the contributions setting to off again.

Ah. No, I can’t - as soon as I’ve logged in and return to the board, all I get is a completely blank page - no HTML or any code is loaded at all. Brilliant!

Wait! Maybe it’s just me they continue to have their petty feud with. So I speak to the board owner. He logs in, migrates his profile and … completely blank page!

Ah wait a minute: he upset them a bit once too. Never mind, one of the other admins can do it. So he migrates his account and logs in and … completely blank page!

Way to go Yuku.

Oh and one other thing: I noticed that Yuku have renamed my account (and promptly banned it) like some kindergarten child would do if they were having a tantrum. I thought that KickApps were focussing on customer service? Apparently not: it seems like the Yuku staff are still the same bunch of also-ran hackers with the same petty agenda as they always were. 

KickApps must be so proud of their new acquisition…

Some things change and yet remain so familiar. With the acquisition of Yuku by KickApps finally announced on both Yuku and KickApps (but the acquistion of ezboard by KickApps only mentioned on the former…), some Yuku users are asking about who is running the show now.

“Let It Rip” Alison helpfully said “the boss of kickapps is the boss”* and left it to another Yuku customer to actually provide a link to KickApps’ “People” page. Being a bit of a geek, I recognise that URL structure as being the type that you get with Joomla! sites and a quick check of the page source revealed that to be a correct assumption.

So just as in the old days when Rob Labatt’s CEO Blog was written in WordPress rather than on Yuku, KickApps aren’t using the technology they’ve acquired but are using Open Source software instead. After all these months, wouldn’t it have been a vote for Yuku to have used it to run KickApps’ own site? Other blogging software like WordPress can be used very successfully to manage static sites and of course it was the blogs and profiles that Yuku worked on first all that time ago.

*what was it KickApps was saying about focussing on customer service? It didn’t take long for them to revert to type, did it?

Well then! Over two months after I revealed the news here, it’s finally been announced that KickApps has bought Yuku/ezboard: it’s their dirty little secret no longer!

The annoucement mentions this:

“As part of the merger, a new leadership team is in place with a renewed focus on innovation and customer service. Rob Labatt, ezboard’s former CEO, has left to pursue other opportunities.”

Well they couldn’t have set the bar much lower in terms of customer service, could they? And funny how they mention the departure of Robert Labatt in the same section about improving customer service. I wonder if the two are by any chance related?

Still no mention of the sale on KickApps’ own website but that San Francisco office address sounds awfully familiar…

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.

With Labatt apparently gone and no word - either to confirm or deny - the sale of ezboard, Inc. and its bastard offspring yuku, you do wonder why whoever has bought them hasn’t seen fit to publicise the purchase with a press release.

In most industries - and especially anything to do with the Internet and online services - anything and everything of hardly any importance is greeted with a flurry of press releases and news items on web sites.

So why not this? Or is ezboard such a dirty word these days?

…who appear to have all their eggs in one basket, which should be a worry for its customers.

One of their servers apparently failed on 1 December 2007 - coincidentally the server where the Help Forums are hosted (including the Server Status Forum…).

Unfortunately for their customers, that was a Saturday and Internet services provider ezboard, Inc. don’t work weekends… Three days later and they were still copying data to other servers. Five days later and people were finally seeing their boards up and running and the missing data restored.

Of course, some were not quite so lucky and they are awaiting the one member of staff who can apparently fix things:

“ckerr wasn’t available yesterday and I don’t think he is in the office today. I did give the URL to your board and this topic to one of the other technicians and he tried reloading your board, but the missing forums didn’t display. He said they are still there, but ckerr will have to be the one to yank them out of hiding. (There are simply some ezboard things no one but ckerr can fix.)”

Now excuse me, but if there’s only one person who can fix things when they go wrong, I’d love to see ezboard, Inc.’s Risk Analysis/Statement … if they have such a thing, of course!

Oh and it’s the same with yuku: a user who is hosting their domain name with ezboard has been having DNS issues for months apparently. ezboard’s reply when they promised to sort it out after the weekend?

“I think you might have been bumped down the list by the inbox problems.”

Well, that’s what appears to be the case, if the LinkedIn profile page of someone claiming to be Robert Labatt is to be believed. You will need to sign in or join LinkedIn to view this:

Current

• Entrepreneurial self starter at Looking for my next great adventure

Past

• President, CEO, Director at ezboard, Inc.
• Consultant, Entrepreneur at Self
• Research Director, Consumer Internet, Web Services

This part of his summary amused me:

“Most recently Mr. Labatt was CEO of ezboard, Inc. a profitable and growing network of consumer generated and white label enthusiast communities. During his over three year tenure at ezboard Mr. Labatt delivered the companies [sic] first profits, conceived and released the successful successor to the companies [sic] core community product and negotiated and sold the company to a strategic buyer.”

Strange how he doesn’t mention the loss of customer data whilst under his tenure. Nor the extended (and continuing) beta status of the software.

So who is the mystery buyer? Well if you recall back in September, I mentioned the rumour of a sale to Kickapps. Whether they are the buyer of course is another thing as their web site is silent on it.

Funnily enough, there’s no mention of any of this on ezboard, Inc.’s web site or on yuku. I wonder if that’s to calm the jitters about the move to the (still beta, still buggy, still un-priced, still ad. revenue selfish) yuku?

Of course, all of this could be wildly inaccurate so I wouldn’t necessarily rely on any of it.

For a while now, the staff over in the yuku help forums [sic] have been claiming that there are no forced migrations of ezboards over to yuku and that they have to be requested by board owners.

If you recall, I mentioned this back in September.

Now you should bear in mind that:

1. ezboard, Inc. has yet to reveal pricing for ad. removal from yuku boards; and
2. yuku is still in beta, which is the excuse they always trot out when somebody complains that something isn’t working on yuku
3. ezboard, Inc.’s Help Wiki still says “Do I have to switch to this next version of software? No, not unless you want to.” and “Do I have to move my board to yuku.com domain? No, you do not have move to yuku.com.”

Of course, being ezboard, it appears that the truth and the statements at item 3 above are mutually exclusive…

Or what about this?

“Will my ezboard forum be switched over without my consent?
No, boards will need to be switched by the admin. At this stage, they will not be switched over by our system if you do not initiate the switch.”

So nothing to worry about then.

Oh dear. “ezdollar”, presumably someone working for ezboard/yuku, writes:

“My understanding is that they are now migrating some small batches of boards without the owner’s request, but, a few days before migration, those boards should display an Important Announcement at the top of the board, stating that it will soon migrate.

“If the developers had been able to write an upgrade for the ezboard program, it would have been sent out to all servers and no ezOp would have had any choice whatsoever about whether to use the new version or not or when to make the switch to the new version. The upgrade would have happened virtually (if not literally) overnight. This is really no different than a major ezboard upgrade, except that, in effect, ezOps have been able to choose to go to the new version early, and the upgrade is being done gradually instead of overnight.

“Migrating your account to Yuku has nothing to do with board migration.

“Having Gold or not having Gold has nothing to do with migration.

“As I keep saying… if you have issues with Yuku, you have to take them up with Yuku staff by posting at Yuku Support or opening a Yuku Help ticket. We may feel your pain, here, but we simply can’t help you with most Yuku related issues here.”

So that confirms that they are indeed moving boards without the owners’ say-so. And it makes no difference if they’re Gold - with no ads. - or non-Gold. I bet gold communities won’t be very happy when they start showing ads. … which is due to happen soon, no doubt, as they have recently confirmed they are finally working on yuku versions of gold communities and ezsupporter which should be ready for testing “within a month or two at the latest“…

So there you have it: forced migrations despite what they tell you elsewhere. Forced migrations from release code (if buggy) to beta code (very buggy and incomplete). What a way to treat your long-suffering customers!

Oh and still no word on whether they plan to actually share revenues with board owners as ezboard, Inc. CEO, Robert Labatt, promised. And where is Mr. Labatt? Incredibly silent, even for him…