Interesting point of view, Colin.

My personal view ... I wish the existing free users would help, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It costs a great deal to store and recall the images in the Ipernity database for users. Behind the scenes, "deadwood" is being removed to reduce these costs.

Building up the paying user base - the membership community - is a good aim, it is happening already to a certain extent. Maybe the current situation at the other place (F1ickr) will attract people, as it did in 2013.

The recent donation campaign was to fund work on reprogramming the code that runs Ipernity, it raised a significant proportion of the target.

Sara

I suspect the majority of free users are not engaging with IPernity as they have spent little or no time thinking about the concept. They probably dismiss the messages without reading or think if IPernity doesn’t work for me I’ll go somewhere else. Flickr must be on a tipping point at the moment if they don’t get their site to be stable soon many will give up on that site again.

I feel sometimes that some of our problems lie in identifying the best market to target, not forgetting Ipernity is for everyone and not a select few, I suspect a lot of our guests are in what I call the middle group, they are people who still have a working life, families to look after and so and photography is just a diversion from that holidays and weekends etc and they just need somewhere to store their photos. Not interested in memberships and not enough time to presenting their images on IP. We then have the higher group mainly members older and retired people with more time to spare to present their best images and add informative narratives to each shot. Now I suspect this group is the hard core of our paid membership base but there is not enough of them they are out numbered probably 3 to 1 possibly by the middle group. Maybe the team has already number crunched the total membership from what information is available. I would be happy donating but I would like to see my donations going to the re-programming ensuring we are up to date with the latest trends in presenting our media to the interests of all and not updating for the "same old same old". I am totally opposed to donations going to attract new memberships for people who will not support IP beyond one term of membership.

OK I see what you are getting at and I assume its mostly but not exclusively an older group of people have the time to be more involved. The numbers of people who are willing (and able to) to support Ipernity so far are quite low and that's why a relatively modest amount of money has been raised. So donate to upgrade the backend system security etc. and in the long term that will be more attractive to the person looking for an alternative to the commercial sites. How would you target that older group, fed up with advertising and big corporatiions that we are not quite sure what they are doing with our data or our subscriptions. The selling point of Ipernity is the subscription does nothing else but make the site run and continue to run but maybe it will take many more big data failures to get more people looking for the answers