LIS Links Plan to Close Free Event Posting: Suggestions are welcome

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Respected forum members,

LIS Links is a completely free to use social networking platform for Library and Information Science professionals. As on today, we have 17,652 members in our network. I think you already aware about the fact that the fund for running the network comes from the Google AdSense. However, during present time the fund that is generated from Google AdSense become insufficient to run the network. It made us think to put our once abandoned Infolinks Ads and later on affiliated Amazon link over the LIS Links website along with Google AdSense ads to cover the cost of expenditure. However, all options seems to be ineffective.

In the first part of the year 2015, we also seek donations for our LIS Links News (http://lisnews.lislinks.com). The result was too poor. So, now we are thinking to stop the free event publicizing over LIS Links website. Those who are interested to publicize any event (seminar, conference, workshop) through LIS Links will be charged Rs.1,000/-(all inclusive) and in return we will publicize the event to all our reach. The event will be consider for publicizing through the following ways-

LIS Links Main Website: http://www.lislinks.com- 17,652 reach.

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LISLinksIndia:  7,368

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lislinks: 6,697

Email Subscribers: http://feeds.feedburner.com/lislinks: 6,002

Besides, the event also will be publicize through our SMS Channel, Twitter Profile, Google Plus page and LIS Links Newsletter. In simple, anyone by paying Rs.1000 will be able to reach 20,000+ professionals through LIS Links.

Kindly note that LIS Links plan to close free event posting from 15th May, 2015 and once this comes into effect we will drop four advertisement from the LIS Links website (three Google AdSense Ad link and Infolinks ads). All these will mean more quality content for you.

If you have any comment / suggestions kindly drop it under this thread before 14th May, 2015 (Midnight).

[Rajiv]

Dear Mr Badan, these days as you have a face book account, twitter account  there are number of groups belonging to library science and in each group thousands of people are sharing their views, secondly each library professional have lots of contacts on their e-mail account to inform other colleagues about any event,  putting up charges in my views is not rational, professionals will start taking interest in other segment of same platform. if we have to generate revenue we have to consult publisher for their advertisements.

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Dear Rajiv,

You are right, even before communicating this to all of you, I had this point in mind. However, three points strongly push me to go for this.

1. It is very difficult to get direct online advertisement and a lot of time is wasted in bargaining and whatever amount is generated, is not a static and we cannot depend on such uncertain amount.

2. We know that there are lots of platform where people can share the event but the reach of LIS Links cannot be ignored. As per my knowledge goes, LIS Links is the largest in all sector in India. It is the largest social networking platform. Its facebook page has the largest likes, the twitter profile has the largest no. of followers, the RSS feed has the largest no of subscribers.

3. All event organizing body spend thousands of amount in reaching the target audience by way of publicizing brochure, putting it in the newspaper and communicating it to the audience through surface postal mail and so on. They have a huge budget, out of that total budget, spending Rs.1000 to reach the target audience in real time seems to be negligible and again they will have a satisfaction of spending it to reach to the large no. of audience and a good cause of supporting the LIS Links.

Lastly, if everything will not go as we plan, then it can be revoked back.

[Dr. N K Pachauri]

Badan sir, you are thinking in the positive direction. Funds are compulsory to run any activity and I think that there is no harm to stop free posting of events. 

But some Government organisations also used to organise various events like short term courses, on-line course, refreshers courses, seminar etc without publicity over media, newspaper , TV etc . So,  It will be a great difficulty to all LIS professionals to know the latest update about such events because Government organisations are not going to pay Rs. 1000/- to LISLINKS. 

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Yes, I can understand the paying part. We are only expecting to have three to five such paying event in a month. Lets put it into action. If everything will not go as we plan there is always a way to revert it back. :-)

[Arun Sharma]

Sir, there can be the annual fee and publishing fee both at nominal rates , as every professional is getting the benefit, so nobody will have any objection in paying nominal charges. 

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Dear Sharma,

Annual membership fees is a good idea, however in our past when we implemented it- our sign up was drop significantly. As on today we used to receive 10 new sign up each day.

[Siddu]

Dear Badan,

May I take the liberty of suggesting something -

Why not ask the users who are going to be interested in such events to pay a nominal annual fee towards subscribing to such contents?

Instead of asking the event managers to pay the fee for publicizing their event on the website, let the users interested in such contents be made to pay for the same. 

If the fee is going to be nominal, I believe, there should be good number of subscribers to such contents on the site. Also if, publicizing is free there should be many event managers willing to publicize their even in LISLINKS.

This is just a suggestion for you to think over.

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Dear Siddu,

Thank you for your suggestion of putting charges on the subscribers. When we launched LLinks (http://llinks.lislinks.com/), then also someone suggested us to put the charge on the subscribers end. However our past experiences of putting charges to the subscribers were very bad. Secondly, you cannot restrict a person to visit a site those who are not paying and sending only the content to those who are paying. If you are suppose to do it manually, it will be really a cumbersome job. If there is a way out in between to do it automatically in a public site, I am sorry to say that I am not aware of such thing.

[Munesh Kumar]

 Dear Sir,

Admin, www.lislinks.com

 

Fund is one of the main input or required to run any firm, real or virtual. I would say there are many associations who are recognized and registered under the govt.'s competent societies and known as authentic association and accepted by professionals in environment.

www.lislinks.com is a very rich platform, it can also starts paid membership, (may be lifetime based on onetime payment) those who are interested they can take membership and they will be provided the certificates. So that professional can mention their membership no. in their resume that they are member of lislinks.com, like, other associations. Now www.lislinks.com is having one man army show that is performed by Dr. Barman Sir in major. As per my suggestion Students and Trainees can be waived off for membership.

Those who want to share the events on this site they could be charged to pay the fee depending on the participants belonging to linslinks.com. For this,

 www.lislinks.com will sign a mutual agreement (online only in terms and conditions) with the programme organizers before publishing event that they will to provide the complete list of participants and also will pay for publishing event on this website, according to the numbers of the participants belonging to lislinks.com.

                        These are my views, it might include some legal steps but if we are all committed by our profession then there is no need of legal observations.

It is just an tentative opinion…             

Thanking you 

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Dear Kumar,

Paid membership with certificate seems to be a good solution and if this is implemented we dont need to charge for event posting. Thank you for posting this wonderful idea. I will definitely think on this.

[Munesh Kumar]

Thank You Sir.

[Dr. N K Pachauri]

Dear Mr. Munesh Kumar, 

You gave a very good suggestion of Paid membership with certificate..................