How Large Is Our Community?

[Bluestone]

Hey Guys and Dolls,

Have you ever wondered how many like-minded individuals there are in our community? I'm sure that guys like JohnM, who came up with some great stats on declining murder rates on another thread, probably have studied this subject and know much more than I do. I'm only posing the question for others to answer, but I am prepared to contribute what I do know.

Message board memberships in our community can be very misleading. If you have noticed, FF's numbers seem to have been stuck at 1,541 members for months. In actuality, we are adding 2-4 members a day to our numbers. Here is the background to membership numbers. Many of the message boards, such as DS and PP, at some time in their history have set their membership application software to 'automatic' mode. This simply means that spammers would be automatically approved. On some boards, there are controls on first posts which have to be approved before the member can make further posts, but the person would still be in the member list and in the membership numbers stated at the bottom of the board's main page. FF also was once open to automatic sign-up, but we have discontinued this process, because we want to ensure that only legitimate people join this forum, not spammers.

So, of the 1,541 members that are listed, about 450 are accounts of spammers that resulted from our period of automatic approval. We have deleted their passwords and are reusing their membership numbers for new members as they apply by email. We estimate that in less than 6 months our membership numbers will start to grow again. So, in actuality, FF has about 1,100 real live registered members.

What about the other boards? PP reports 1,685 members. I suspect that their numbers are closer to FF's, plus many of their members are also members here. So, let's say together there are about 1,500 real live people who frequent these two message boards. Then, there's DS which boasts an unbelieveable 8,054 members... and I do mean 'unbelievable'. DS has been around a lot longer, and I strongly suspect that they do not in-fill their spammer accounts as FF does, but merely leave spammer membership accounts on the membership list. So, how many members do they really have on DS? Only Geno knows for sure, but taking into account that they usually only have the same number of registered users on-line as FF does at any one time, their membership is probably very close to ours, and there is a definite large overlap of members between these two boards. At the present time their are 5 registered users on FF and 5 registered users on DS. There are usually twice as many people surfing DS than FF, but these are for the most part guests or casual surfers. So, if DS has real membership numbers of even 3,000, minus an overlap of about 1,000, all three message boards probably cater to a combined community of 3,500 at the very most.

Anyone else have any information or insight into this subject. I have a huge jar in the foyer of the Bluestone Mansion full of jellybeans with the name of every necro community member on each jellybean. Anyone care to guess how many jellybeans there are?

Blue

[JohnM]

6 people.


Mmmmm, ok, so do you mean inactive or active. Actual fetishist---and do we lump the just plain curious in?

My forum boasts 2500 members. Since I made my website private and the only way in is to register on my forum, I am getting 15-30 new registrations a day for the last month or so and it has not been slowing down. With an average so far of 500-900 new people a month that want to check out my website and photos, I would surmise that that community has a fluctuation of about 5-10K. Probably much more.

Most, however, are lurkers. Active members, meaning those who view the sites regularly, post, and maybe buy from producers--probably 500-1200.

JohnM

[Bluestone]

Thanks, JohnM!

Some good info. Yes, there are active members, plus lurkers (who are still part of the community), and finally the curious. I personally feel that the curious cannot be considered part of our community. They may be checking out sites to see naked women, but have no interest in the erotic death fetish, or they may check us out, become appalled at what we're about, and surf away, never to be seen again. We all started as unregistered lurkers, afraid to register for one reason or another. Then, we registered at a board, but didn't post right away. Finally, we became active members of the community.

So, active community members of about 500 to 1,200, and active-plus-lurkers of 5-10,000. That sounds reasonable. I believe that the active community is closer to the 1,200 figure, since we have that many registered members on FF and I have a little over this amount as registered purchasers at my Silk 'N Blood store.

Anyone else want to share their perspective, and come up with a guess on the jellybeans in the jar?

Blue

[elsullo]

Random fact from an original source: at its peak about four years ago, AnnabellesFantasy had sixteen hundred paying monthly subscribers. Granted, AF tried to appeal to all death and peril fetishers, but it was never an inexpensive site, and so the mass of non-member fetishers would have been much larger. There are quite a lot of us extreme fantasists roaming about........................elsullo