Raise the Cap?

Yeah, good points as well... Enjoy your vacation, Shawn... we'll discuss when you get back.

 

I'm with you tim I only run my ads on the archive of my SEO Forum and I'm at the cap 91,500, I would gladly add the ads to my main forum pages, but my weight wouldnt go up, so what's the point right?

 

Exactly... so the cap for PR7 must be 91.5k... only 10.5k up from PR6... interesting.

 

Somebody asked him why he hasn't put his forum on the coop yet.

To me raising the cap will effect the little sites..The network needs to stay beneficial to everyone..Letting a couple a big sites dominate the saturation wouldn't be good for the coop IMHO.

Thanks

 

If its relative -- as it should be, then it would be benificial to every site: big or small.

 

We really need to think about the effect on the smaller websites before raising the cap.

Whilst we are all comfortable with websites having 10's of 1000's of pages the average website must be less than 100 pages. To these guys the idea of building even a 4500 page website would be daunting (thats > 10 years at 1 page per day!).

Lets not get too greedy and turn the coop network into an exclusive club for 'large' websites.

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Having said that I have to admit that I am in a very fortuitious position. I was foresighted(!!) enough to build two websites around a domain and 4 subdomains 2 years ago. So that gets me 10 accounts at PR4/5. If I had built these sites around subdirectories it would only be two accounts. I can see a great temptation for coop members to start breaking their websites down into smaller chunks on new domains and this can't be healthy
</edit>

 

I don't think you guys are getting it... with the co-op network considerably bigger than it was just a couple of months ago, there isn't a fear of a couple "large" sites taking over the network. As the network grows, the links become more and more spread out. When there were only 100 sites, obviously if someone had 10% of the weight, every other ad would be from that guy, but now that we have well over 1000, the weight of the big sites is quite small compared to that of the network...

WTF? How would removing the cap do that? How does raising the cap even negativly effect smaller websites at all?

 

Maybe you're right Mr Bassman and I'm not getting it.

Currently there are a small number of ads that seem to appear very frequently - this lends strength to the notion that a few large sites can still dominate the network at its current size.

I am not statistician though - perhaps you could illustrate your point with some numbers. You seem to have a fair understanding of the network so you could take a stab at some of the important variables.

 

It effects them negatively compared to their position in the co-op now. They would get less share then they currently do.

However I also agree with your points that the current situation does not give large websites their fair share.

 

But if you don't limit Shawn, or any other site that has a weight of > PR6 or so, you may run into the problem of their ads showing a lot more often and the lesser guys not getting their fair share. Granted, they'll need to work on generating a higher PR and page count, they still won't get nearly as many back links as they are now.

I've been thinking about the cap issue and while i don't like it being based on my PR, since PR rarely changes, I think the cap is needed. However, there is a problem where the overall network weight increases while all sites hit a static threshold based on PR/page count. Gaining more weight is then done by referrals, making the cap somewhat invisible, however what this does is slow the growth of a site's weight, but doesn't limit them entirely.

If we remove the base weight cap entirely, I think it may do more harm then good. What will end up happening is a separation. Larger sites with higher PR and more pages will have a higher weight, smaller sites will stay where they are with the same amount of weight, and likely have less ads shown since the guys at the cap already will start to show MORE ads. I don't know about you, but I've seen a LOT of Ebay ads for shawn on my own sites. If there isn't a cap, you'll see MORE of those ads since his PR is higher than most, and his weight will most likely increase.

 

Having the caps relative to the total network weight would be fair. If the weight of the network increases, so does the cap. If it decreases so does the cap.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a cap. Also the only ads i see dominating the coop network are those of digitalpoints, everyone else seems to be on a pretty level playing field.

 

Exactly... I'm not saying remove the cap either, but it should fluxuate as the size of the network fluxuates... Even without the cap, however, the smaller sites don't loose out... if they have a weight of 100, the number of ads that are shown will directly reflect their weight. My weight (without referrals) is 80,999, but if you removed the cap, I bet it would be 200k. I'm giving more than double that what I'm receiving, whereas the smaller sites are getting exactly what they are giving... how is that equal and fair?

 

Your weight would be substantially more without the cap.
And frankly, one site has only so much benefit to the network.

Yes the cap should be raised...
I think most would agree with that.

 

Tim, you are not letting this one go are you?

I totally understand what you are saying, as I was saying the same thing, especially when I first put it on some sites. We have some large sites in the network (60k+ total weight) and some "small" sites as well (2k to 10k). At first I really thought that us "larger" sites were giving away more than we were getting....and you can probably make a good argument that we are. To me, the problem with the larger sites (10k pages and up) is simple. The vast majority of pages in the site do not get crawled or seen by anyone. So, they are really of very little value, other than to the site owner for BW purposes. So, if I am a small site owner (50-100 pages), my ads will see very few impressions in the network. And, if a few of them end up on the pages that never get seen by anyone or anything, the coop is of extremely little value to me and once I realize this, I will most likely quit the coop.

The greatest benefit to all coop members is to get more sites into the network. To me, I always thought that segmenting the network into size groups would benefit everyone, if there are enough sites at some point. It is pretty much impossible to make a network like this "totally fair and equal" for everyone, when there is such a difference in what each member brings to the table....hence the cooperative spirit. As the network grows and the coop sites benefit, we will all grow and benefit together. You are not going to get 100% return on your investment. You don't do it in most business situations and you surely aren't going to get it from the coop. Hopefully this makes some sense as I tend to babble a bit.

 

Alright... sounds good to me. I guess we just await the Grand Poo Bah to get back from the beach.

 

IMHO, it should be fairly easy get the weight to increase logarithmically with respect to the size of a site. This way there would be a big difference between a site with 1 page and a site with 20 pages, but not as much of a difference between a site with 10,000 pages and one with 100,000 pages.

This would ensure that adding content always gets some boost, but would discourage people from just adding millions of pages in order to steal the network.

Here is a graph of the natural log function ("ln" on most scientific calculators), so that you can see what I mean (sorry, not enough posts to create a live link yet).

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~piccard/huwe/logarithm.jpg

 

Yeah, that works for me too... I guess it's just frustrating to see your site grow, but to know your weight is capped... lol.

 

Something like this should probably be used for referrals too. Double your weight for 10 referrals, Triple for 100, 4 x for 1000, etc. Right now someone with 1000 referrals seems to get their base weight multiplied 100 times!!!

 

Referrals are very correctly set at 10% of the weight of the person referred. It is even generious in that by my calculation, the 10% is not deducted from the referred person. I don't know where you have got this double/triple... multiplier from.

See my thread on "How the digitalpoint coop works"

 

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my post, and I misunderstood how the referral bonus works. I thought the bonus was 10% of your site, not the referred site. Also, the double/triple stuff was something I made up as a proposal, based on my misunderstanding