PinoyExchange (PEx) is probably one, if not the oldest, of the commercial sites in the Philippine cyberspace that breezed thru the dotcom boom and survived the bust. With memberships of 171,729 and 15,258,823 posts since July 1999, PEx could very well be the second biggest site in the country in terms of traffic next to Inq7.net.
There’s no available public stats for PEx but a quick check with Alexaholic showed it’s neck-in-neck with PhilStar for the second spot.
Still, despite the relative success in the online business, PinoyExchange is still under the red and funds are always short (mainly from advertising and co-branding). The site is currently suffering from slowdowns/overload and the admins admit they could not upgrade the servers because there’s no available funds for it.
I’m not sure how many servers they have but I reckon it could be around 2 or 3 costing as much as Php50,000 in monthly hosting cost. That’s on top of the cost of operation and salaries of the admins, sales and marketing people. So you’re looking at a conservative estimate of Php 300,000 monthly burn rate.
They’ve already scrapped AdSense altogether so I guess they’re not earning enough from the real estate it used to occupy. What’s getting a lot of heat right now are the huge ads that came along with the Server Busy page (makes people think they’re doing it to pad ad impressions). Another option they will be trying is “interstitial ads” which is similar to what you get in YahooGroups (much like an 8-second pause for an ad when you flip pages).
Active users are now suggesting that maybe the subscription model alongside the advertising model would help ease the cash-strapped forum/community. They used to have PEx Plus+ which is an annual subscription for premium members a few years back but they discontinued it. I think it’s time to revisit that idea. With over 170,000 registered members (ok, there’s a lot of multiple and dead accounts in there), even if only 2% of that are premium subscribers paying Php50 a month, that’s already Php170,000 — more than enough to quadruple (4x) their server capacity with some spare change for a good Web 2.0-ey redesign.
Of course, the rest of the 98% of the members will still have the free and basic services they get from PEx, maybe with the search function enabled as well.
This really is funny, I was just searching about this yesterday. For some motive I discovered this site lol. I’ll be coming back again here. This can be a good blog.!..rare for me to stumble on new web sites Cheers :)
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Haven’t been active in PEX fort some time .. I drifted away during one of their many outages.
Disagree completely with the paid subscription model. A great, current-day example is the meet and dating site Plentyoffish.com which is totally free and kicking the virtual ass of all the for-pay competitors.
POF has about 13 million page views per day and primarily runs on one web server machine, one database machine and one email/ancillary machine. It’s not the number of servers that count, it’s the way the servers are being managed and the way the message load is being managed. (oh, of course, POF operates on .NET ASP, IIS, Exchange Server and SQL Server, so maybe the for-free software isn’t always the answer.
Methinks, perhaps, some real talent is needed in PEX’s IT department.
They can save on server resources by strictly moderating the Fanatic Threads, which don’t give any info at all, just how they love their idols. Ban threads that has anything to do with Kapamilya-Kapuso Wars… hehehe…And make the Chat thread for premium members only.