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News reaches me that James Kerr (ckerr) from ezboard/Yuku/KickApps died suddenly recently.

My sincere condolences to his family.

Looks like KickApps want to see some return after they’ve been sold a pup.

The Yuku Support Forum [sic] is now displaying ads. like there’s no tomorrow. And they’re not just coming from one source either. Adding into the mix all the tracking services they’re using to Yuku code and the up-and-down-more-than-a-whore’s-drawers Yuku servers, is it any wonder their whole system is slow and timing out regularly?

Let’s have a look at a sample thread on their support forum [sic]. In addition to all the scripts necessary for the software to actually run, it loaded content/tracking from:

• partner.googleadservices.com (x5)
• pagead2.googlesyndication.com (x3)
• optimizedby.rmxads.com
• ad.yieldmanager.com
• google-analytics.com
• edge.quantserve.com

Wow!

I suppose that all those keyword-generated ads. are why they are running around hiding/closing/deleting threads that are in any way critical of the dog’s dinner that is Yuku: you wouldn’t want disaster recovery ads. or personal accident/negligence lawyer ads. turning up all over the place, now would you?

Almost two years ago, I posted about the big push by Yuku staff to get users to switch browsers to Firefox so they could enjoy the best Yuku “experience”, i.e. fewer crashes and failures, because they didn’t appear to be testing on the most popular browser out there. They also wrote a Firefox extension to encourage people (though guess what - they’ve forgotten to make the latest version widely available…)

The problem is that Firefox can run a number of extensions including those that block the precious advertising they rely on so much… Oops!

Of course, the fact that it still isn’t cross-browser and cross-platform compatible even after all this time doesn’t help their cause - see this recent thread on issues with Safari on the Mac.

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…

…in terms of page views and Yuku pricing.

Our self-hosted vBulletin board’s stats. for February 2008 saw successful requests for pages at 675,353.

According to Yuku’s pricing formula, ads. are shown on topic pages and not the summary pages, so it’s difficult to estimate completely accurately what a like-for-like cost would be - I wonder if that’s a conscious decision by KickApps to avoid direct comparisons? - but the equivalent Yuku board would cost us something like the following: 

Ads. served: 675,573/1,000x$0.20=$135.08

Ouch!

Our monthly cost? Less than $10…

Total annual cost = $1,620

How much do we pay? $120

Now like I said, our message board is not a heavy traffic board but I wouldn’t want to be throwing away $1,500 every year…

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…

… no apparent way for an Admin to change the status of a member to a Moderator or Admin. or indeed to demote someone.

The Yuku Help wiki is of no use whatsoever, needless to say.

And yes, the board was indeed down all day again.

Well it looks as though Yuku - powered by KickApps - is living up to expectations.

Our old ezboard, migrated to Yuku on Saturday (but not working properly then) was down most of the day on Monday and came back up for a short while in fully-functioning form. Well, I assume it was working because we don’t want people posting there so no-one tried.

Anyway, we managed to ascertain how long it will be ad-free:

“Contributor Settings
This community disallows contributions.
This community has Ad-Free status until Jan 4, 2016 (2877 days left)”

We’ll see.

But as expected the board has been offline all day today, showing the Yuku magician graphic. It really is amazing … just how useless these people are! And looking at the Yuku support [sic] forum, it’s not just us having boards (and servers) down or showing just a white screen. No sign of any support or even replies from the Yuku magicians either.

So much for KickApps’ focus on customer service…

… to Yuku, the fabulously-complicated pricing model is further explained here. One thing caught my eye:

“This is not fair. I paid on ezboard for 365 days, I had 200 days left, my board migrated and now you’re replacing my days with page views? This was not the deal I signed up for.
The deal has not changed. The remaining days from ezboard will be applied as days, not page views.
Contributions made after the board was imported will be applied as page views.”

Now I cannot access our Yuku board’s administration section to check to see what that says, but when it was on ezboard with a closed community chest - i.e. the contributions were made before the import took place - we still had $389 left in the chest and Gold status until 14 October 2008. On the basis that we were paying the minimum renewal, we would still have enough to keep it there until at least October 2015.

So let’s see if this is a promise they keep or yet another promise they renege upon. Place your bets!

[edit] Ah wait, there’s another page that says something different (what a surprise):

“Migrated boards that are over 50k views

If your board migrated from ezboard with active gold community, then the remainder of your Gold that was copied from ezboard will be applied in DAYS, not pageviews, to honour the time that you paid for when you intially purchased gold on ezboard. Contributions and the balance of your ezboard chest will be applied as pageviews.”

Now of course our ezboard was not a board with over 50,000 page views, so this two-tier pricing should not apply…

…is down:

“Updating Software

Our internet magicians are currently working their magic. Please try accessing the site again later. We appreciate your patience.”

I’m so glad we left this shower! Migrated on Saturday, offline on the Monday. And no, we still can’t administer the site.

Something of interest though: the board down graphic still says “beta yuku” so the ‘is it or isn’t it beta’ debate continues. One day they’ll decide whether to actually remove the beta tags from the system, but I presume that means they need to get it working. Still, they’ve only been working on this for three years now…