Changes are coming to the Warrior Forum, but what?

Let's wait and see. The changes on WSO costs is enough for me for the meantime... and I'm happy with that..

I am seeing "warrior forum jooins the freelancer.com family" notification. I hope it is not aquirement or something.

Alex, You shortchange our fearless leader in shameful ways. If you don't believe Allen probably had contingency plans in place for this stuff, you don't know him well at all. He very likely didn't do it as a matter of loyalty.

That said, I agree with you. Freelancer is unlikely to ignore the income potential available from offering an affiliate system here. If I were them, I'd run it across the entire "for sale" sub-section of the site. And maybe make deals for banners with EPCs that reach a certain level.

I like Mike and Brian and Bryan, but Freelancer is operating as a publicly traded company. Different rules, different decisions.

If I were their CFO, I'd insist on rolling it out ASAP.


Paul

I didn't mean to short change Allen I'm sure he has thought about it in the past, but I have no idea why it wasn't done before. My guess was the cost of creating it, but I believe you when you say it was out of loyalty.

I thought the same exact thing... They have a gold mine of potential revenue here with the acquisition of the WF. It's a win win for both Allen and Freelancer... Allen gets rewarded for his 17 years of hard work, and Freelancer acquires an untapped gold mine.

I'm not saying cut out the other portals, I meant offering the service themselves to get some of that money. I'm not sure they would cut off the current 3rd parties as an option, but WF may be able to offer some services that the others cannot. I'm sure many would give WF a shot, if they came out with their own affiliate platform.

There is nothing wrong with a company getting their piece of the pie. For a while W+ was raking in boatloads of money, until JVzoo decided to get their piece of the pie.

I don't see having an in house affiliate system in place, as bells and whistles. Most sellers use it as an option, regardless if it's W+, JVzoo or WF's own platform. It is an option, that helps many warriors without "connections" to find affiliate's.

I can only guess it's in the works... I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the plans before the sale even took place.

Alex, the cost of creating a full fledged sales and affiliate platform built directly into the forum would be no more that a few thousand dollars at most.

I played with creating my own platform to compete with Warrior+ and JVZoo some time ago and it only took me about a week of coding to have the core functions worked out, and that was working alone.

As far as if the new owners have plans for this I do not know, but I do know they are interested in tracking WSO's and will be working on their own systems that will fully track new WSO posting and bumps. I'm not sure to what extent they will be building outward but I do know they plan on some serious backend upgrades to the WSO section.

I am not sure if this move will draw more junk to the forum or we'll be able to see some more real stuff. What ever it is I am looking forward to that.

I have no idea what the price to build is, but I'm sure it will cost more than a few grand, unless you know how to build them yourself

I agree... they will track the posting and bumps, and most of the new revenue will have to come from that section.

If Freelancer does build an affiliate functionality for WSOs, what will happen with WarriorPlus? Isn't WarriorPlus NOT affiliated with WF?

I'll take a wild guess here, more rules (restrictions). That seams the way everything in our life goes.

I'd like to see a Warrior Dating forum.

I don't think there will be that much changes actually.

I think they keep it this way and lower the price of WSO / Bump, to get more people to do it.
and boom higher income for them lol.

JVzoo and W+ allow for self-hosted products as well.

Add an affiliate/vendor system to WF and there would then be one more.

ie, another opportunity to reach another sector of the IM marketspace.

I now generally try to launch my products on the WF, on my own self-hosted page, and on my own affiliate program.

The thing you need to realize is you HAVE to build your business for *you*.

Grow your own list.

Build your own authority.

NEVER be dependent upon the WF or any site *you do not own* to keep your business happy and mooing.

Always look at new developments (that you cannot control anyways) as opportunities to grow.

My data points.

I think the change is awesome, I have been a regular user of freelancer for quite some time and have found the services to be satisfactory. Now, it will be interesting to see how freelancer.com integrates its services with the WF.

It wouldn't take long for them to recoup their investment. It was sold pretty cheap. As for changes, the history of freelancer.com acquisitions being redirected to freelancer.com doesn't fill me with any confidence that they have any real plans to develop the WF and keep it run independently from freelancer.

I'm not even certain why webmaster-talk.com would interest them, and what they got from it before it was redirected, but that's what happened to that forum.

Same with Scriptlance, and numerous other properties they acquired.

I can see the for Hire and Want to Hire sections being of some interest to them in the form of cannabalization ... attempting to integrate that into freelancer, because those sections deal directly with what freelancer is all about.

Sorry to be such a skeptic, but when I see all those redirected sites, I have to wonder why would they change their MO now?

I remember my first office job. I loved it ... then it was bought by another company. We were all told that our jobs were secure. Two weeks later, the notices that "your job has been eliminated" were sent out.

Let wait and see how it goes. Can they stopped shaking hand if everything gone bad? Just curious.

The purchase is still new and there is a lot the new owners need to learn about this place, the community, the culture here, and get a good feel for what goes on here. It may take them weeks, even months before you start seeing any major changes, if any.

Clearly this forum has grown and has been successful for many reasons, I think a wise business decision would be to first see what makes this place so successful before making too many tweaks because one of the main components on what makes this place so freakin' great is the community that's here.

Sure we have our share of annoying personalities, whiners, scarcity-thinkers, etc. but hey, the WF is the size of a fairly large city, so that's to be expected. But there are also plenty of seasoned business people here, authors, product creators, hard-core marketers, part-timers, single parents, college students, senior citizens, speakers, coaches from other niches, and just about everything in between, many which genuinely want to help others.

It's a very smart purchase and this forum still hasn't reached it's potential yet and both Allen and the buyer's know this.

If the new owner's realize the core principles that make this community great, it can only get better and they'll be able to increase their own profits in the process.

Who knows? Maybe they'll bring back the Friday night Warrior chats or have free or low-cost webinars with high-value content for members who want to participate in that kind of thing.

Only time will tell. I'd like to speculate, but I'm going to sit back and give it some time. The new owners have got a lot to learn and from where I'm sitting, they've already rolled up their sleeves and they're doing their homework.

I wish them the best with this new endeavor.

RoD

This is an interesting turn of events. I hope Freelancer doesn't make major changes that effects the culture and community of the Warrior Forum in a negative way. I actually like Freelancer.com, so it will be interesting to see what Freelancer.com does with the Warrior Forum now that they own it.

It will be interesting to see if and when they set up their own W+ / JVzoo function, or they could save some time and energy by buying one of them.

If they negotiated with both of them signalling that they were committed to buying one, they might even drive the purchase price down.

I agree with Dubdubdubdot when he said they tried to emulate the WF by buying Webmaster Talk, I really think they had WF on their radar the whole time.

I think before they even reached out to Allen, they may have had a meeting, and already had a plan on what to do with the WF if they were able to buy it. They know what they are doing... I expect them to monetize the site more, but don't think they will mess with the culture here.

I imagine they already have engineers on the payroll, so they will most likely build their own. No sense in spending millions more, when you can have one built in house

Love your signature Robin, great quote

Wow - 3 million for this Forum - that's great!

I wouldn't be surprised if WF bought W+ outright.

I would set it up so that WarriorForum handles the WSO payments and has the authority to issue refunds. Shut out Warrior+, JVzoo and everyone else. Have an in-house affiliate program. A WSO ratings system could then be built around this.

I have a few comments on everything here:

1. The $3.2 million I thought was an awesome price for Freelancer to get. I don't know the numbers and am just guessing based on new WSO's each day, war room fees, etc., but I'd be shocked if the Warrior Forum did under a million a year (or at least shocked if it wasn't at least close to that).

2. At $3.2 million for something that probably does around a million a year, that's normally a pretty good price for a long standing asset with a long track record that's growing. However, it really gets awesome considering that Allen left a lot of the potential largely untapped (for various reasons probably of his own). Besides the WSO fees, the war room fees, banner ads, etc., there wasn't a ton of monetization done. At least not to the extent that it could have been done. That makes it an even better deal. For $3.2 million, myself and a lot of other marketers that I know of probably would have been interested in talking at that price with all the potential.

3. Creating their own WSO gateway / affiliate setup there would be a natural move for them. I don't think that they'll eliminate the competition right off the bat, as they really can't (or they could, but it'd be a bad move as their network wouldn't have the numbers or proof that it'd work yet). But they'd probably definitely launch one as it'd be the smart thing to do, and then still allow the others to co-exist for awhile.

Then after they've built up the numbers, that's when they'd want to cut the competition out. This second part might take up to a year or so to happen, but it'd be the smart move to do unfortunately for those guys.

- Brian

I was one of the Warriors that got an email from Freelancer and well as the WF though it wasn't really clear that Allan had sold the WF, but that had partnered with FL.

It would be interesting to see what changes the new owners make.

Mikaedi