Can't begin to claim my blog on Tribe
Posted: 2008-04-30 07:12:04
I posted a few comments about the problem on a thread in Tribe entitled Tribe.net blog / Technorati Feed, begun by a user named Solsken who had the same problem and posted about back on Tue, October 11, 2005 at 9:23 PM. She saw no movement out of Tribe, and neither did I.
As I said I would, I wrote to Tribe, sending a message to Support, and as of this date, haven't seen a response out of them. At this point, I think one has to be realistic and say "this is just how they're going to be about it", and perhaps not completely surprisingly, although more than a little foolishly. Their ad revenues had reportedly fallen to the point at which they no longer met expenses, and Tribe, rather than trying to correct that by such simple, common sense means as hiring a salesperson on commission and having him hunt down advertisers while running their own advertising instead of using Google adsense (so I'm told) and losing 50% of their revenue in the process (Google's share), decided to start selling premium (paid) memberships.
Value for money, Tribe is probably not the best deal in the world, but it is much loved by many who seem very loyal to it, and will stick with it. An ad supported free service and a paid (or partially paid) service face much different incentives, traffic being a source of profit for the former, but an expense for the latter. Given Tribe's seeming motivation - "forget the profit, we just want to stay alive" - I'm guessing that odds are very good that they're going to act on the motivations of a paid host, and not work too hard on building traffic, especially since the users whose support on which they seem to reply won't demand that they do.
The free memberships are still with us, as of the time of this writing, and I suppose that one can use them to make a few friends and get a few connections, but I think one needs to accept that Tribe is not going to be a good quality, serious blogging platform because Tribe doesn't really want to be. Go over there, have a little fun and do your real blogging elsewhere, and I guess just know that Technorati tried, Tribe didn't and that nobody can fix that other than Tribe. That, and that you'd better hold onto backups of your work, because as a group, burners aren't the most financially stable of folk, and Tribe may, one of these days, be unpleasantly surprised by a mass wave of premium membership cancellations from people who well tell them, in absolute sincerity, that they wish that they didn't have to do this, but ... what can you do?
