I have to agree with the criticism here. I've defended you guys asking for money a few times and even made some suggestions as to how to bring in some income via other avenues to Mr. Plummer himself. However, it seems that the site seems to be taking a steady decline the further we go into the money issue. The first half of the Supersport shootout was delayed by snow... a valid thing. Where's the second half? The news has been slower than usual... it's never been the first thing as you guys like to say. Then, today I get an email about a chat for the money thing. I show up at the appointed time and no MO reps are there. I email Mr. Plummer and now(6 hrs. later), I have yet to get a reply or hear of this chat taking place. I intended to go into this chat earlier today to get a few questions answered before donating and now this old news combined with a few other concerns has me rethinking.
To Mr. PLummer himself, you once told me you had so many people visit the site per year. I personally can account for about 400 to 500 visits to this site a year at this time. I have a feeling many others in your readership also log on to this site multiple times a day, inflating your numbers a bit. You also said you only needed 10% of the people who stop by a year to pay to stay in business. I can say from my own experiences reading posts and talking to other readers, that you are fast approaching that point. You and your staff have been nothing short of , arrogant, and have done a bit of embellishing to make your site look like it's worth the fee. All this comes with delayed stories, old "news," and continuous news items about needing more cash. Please, don't keep trying to make it sound like you're living out of a dumpster doing a terrible job. Everyone who visits this site would take your job in a second and never look back. As for revenue, you seemed to have pretty nifty MO shirts in one of your videos... are we to pay so you guys can have coats or leathers with the MO logo on them? In the past couple weeks, while we've been left to bask in the glory of your half-shootout, another online publication has reviewed the 2000 vs. 2001 Ducati 996 with none other than Carl Fogarty as a guest tester. For free. You also took a bit of a shot in a published magazine, when they announced the less than supportive results of your subscription poll. An article that seemed to me to be written in a bit of a mocking tone. In short(finally, right?), the quality of this site has gone noticibly down since asking for money. Good sense would seem to say that you would want to display some of these great new things for us instead of performing below par when asking us to go the extra mile for you. Show us something and I'd be willing to give financial support another thought... but these divx movies that play out worse than the MPEG movies(yes, I have a new computer with all the bells and whistles necessary to play the files correctly), and narrated films of things we've already seen seem to be just getting a lot of mileage out of a steadily declining content base. Sorry to bash but that's the way I see it.