Vendor posts




Since the site was launched in 1999, the premise has been that the supporting vendors would pay the costs of operating Corvetteforum so that the site would be free for the rest of us.
In exchange, they get exclusive marketing rights to sell their products and services to those who might be interested. Historically, they have been given posting privileges in most all sections of the site.
In recent years, we have limited the number of sales/marketing threads a vendor was allowed in a section. The limit is no more than one thread on the first page of a two-day directory. The exception involves the vendor for sale sections, where vendors are not limited as strictly.
I note that about 80 percent of your posting activity takes place in C7 General, so I just made a check in that section to determine if it was “clogged up” with vendor sales threads. I found that 22.6 percent of the threads on the first page of the section were vendor threads, so I gather there is a measure of hyperbole in your comments.
If you spot what you believe are excessive sales threads by any individual vendor in a section, please report it to the section moderators and we'll be glad to take a look.
Long-term, the notion is that vendor traffic may shift more significantly toward those vendor sales sections, but at this point there is not sufficient exposure in those sections to justify removing vendors from the discussion areas they have used since 1999.
The vendors depend upon traffic to generate sales. There is little or no traffic in the vendor sale sections. If after 15 years of allowing vendor sales threads in most every section, we force those sales threads to the new vendor sales sections, many of the vendors would have to drop out.
We'd be the losers because there would not be sufficient revenue to pay the significant bandwidth expenses on a site with the volume of traffic we have at Corvetteforum. And the vendors wouldn’t be here to support the products we have bought from them for our Corvettes.
The users would have to pick up the slack or, more likely, the site would have to shut down. And when I say "we," I'm speaking as a Corvette owner and enthusiast since the site's administrators and moderators are volunteers, not employees of the site's owner.




