ali123
Banned
We are almost a year out captain.... am I overstepping in asking how things are looking? traffic up? what should we do to keep the site healthy till a gen3 arrives?I read a few business articles recently that reminded me I needed to take a different look at Hayabusa.oRg Here are a few of the questions with the answers as I thought about them.
1. Is the excitement and thrill is gone.
Yes, the bike is still great but with nothing more than some bold new colors there isn't a lot of excitement.
2. Mission loses its creativity and drive:
Just as with the first point, we see new folks coming in and asking the same questions, digging up old threads and members don't have a lot to share.
3. There is no market for your service.
As the website Hayabusa.oRg if the members aren't excited then the site won't be exciting. The bike is a fantastic ride but we can see many threads in the forums today that there are a lot of other bikes catching up with the Busa or that look more appealing.
4. Your Mission Loses Its Luster
Our Mission has always been to foster an environment where Hayabusa Enthusiast could come together, build relationships and create memories. People still have the Luster, it's just on another bike.
5. You Love Your Product More Than Your Customers Do
I have to be cautious here, I have a lot of work in the site and at some point I have to let the old girl go. I often feel like that line in the movie The field of dreams, Build it and they will come! It's always been the members that kept this place functioning so let's not kid ourselves. The drive and desire for large masses (this is what it takes) to come to the site are just gone.
6. Your customers aren’t coming back for more
Even our long term members still lurk around but don't post images or talk anymore, what causes this? Could be that we have talked about everything on the Internet there is to talk about or it could be that Facebook and other social media sites have lowered our abilities to have real conversations but in the end we don't see folks coming back to use the site to build relationships in the manner they did in the past?
I recently noticed several threads on the site that spoke to the issue of Suzuki not releasing a bike comparable to other manufacturers or how Zook has fallen behind on the Hayabusa. It's interesting that you the members see this because the website lives and dies on the interest and support of the Hayabusa Community.
I am sure you long time folks have noticed traffic has continued to decline and I would call out specifically for the reasons listed above. I have watched as members have slowly moved on to other bikes, sites and hobbies or given up riding all together just to mention a few of the causal factors.
We have made adjustments over the years to try and keep up with the changes in technology and trends in social media but at some point we had to be our own site using the technology that matched who and what we were about. We have a mobile version of the site that allows users to upload pics right to a thread but this is seldom used on rides or get togethers anymore. Over the years other forms of social media have continued to grow and absolutely dominate the market. Facebook makes it really easy to create a group or a page of friends to all "hang out" in but try to go look up old messages or pictures and its next to impossible. Forums were created for conversations and community and Facebook was designed to check in, share and forget.
Because of the above mentioned factors we have been working for some time to keep the lights on and to be creative with what we do. We have tried to keep folks posting and showing interest with picture contest, inserting topics to discuss but the most use and one feature gets it the "Like" button. When traffic is down our advertisers don't see the return on investment and they pull out and one thing leads to another and in time we end up where we are.
We currently do not bring in enough cash to cover the cost of the site, the software, servers, renewals etc. With all of this said we have started to make the steps to wind things up.
What does wind up mean? I've discussed behind closed doors with the mods / admins the plan to start shutting things off. To plan out the eventual closure of the site completely and what steps that would take and in what timing we should do this. I have met with most of the advertisers already and explained where we are and what is driving the changes.
The downtime we experienced a few weeks ago was me moving the site to a new (lesser) server that is month to month hosting which allows us to break out when it's convenient for us. I could not justify a 12 or 24 month contract as we have not covered our hosting fees for several months.
As it stands right now we are notifying the members that our intention is to close shop, we want to give plenty of time for folks to make contact with old friends and get contact information of those friends. We want members to be able to get information that they might need from instant messages, media uploads they have made or post they participated in. We will continue to post up progress and status updates as we go with the next phase to turn the forum read only for a short period of time. The final chapter will be to take the site down to a single page that would essentially show that Hayabusa.oRg was on the Internet and we had served our time to the motorcycle community.
That landing page would be the marker on the Internet for us to simply say " We were here!"
Not much more to say other than after 18 years this is a day we could see coming but still hard to take action on since we have put so many hours of work building it, so many friends made and a lifetime of memories from some great people.
More details to come in the days ahead.
Before the "Save Ferris" banner goes up on the water tower let me say that we will never go back to donations.. While that might cover for a few weeks or months the long term plan has to be more stable than this, we have operated for years with our advertisers on the site supporting the community but they are feeling the crunch in the industry too. Powerhouse, TigerRacing, Boosted Cycle Performance, Boost By Smith, BallZMotorsports and Tobefast.com have been TREMENDOUS to work with and have stuck with us to the very end.. I will take care of them just as they have taken care of us.
Captain
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