David, I know you've been thinking this through for a long time and have come to the point where you feel you need to push ahead with it. So probably opinions at this point won't get you to change your mind. But I thought I'd throw out a few points from a newbie perspective.
This forum has been valuable to me. I have learned a lot here in the past couple of months, and even made the connection (indirectly) with the person I bought my laser engraver from. Looking back on it, did it provide me enough to make it worth paying for a membership? Yes. At least it did in my case.
But when I first arrived here, if the forums were for paid members only, there's little chance I would have paid to join. Even with a lot of other features available, such as tutorials and discounts with specific suppliers.
There are so many forums on the web, and so few of them have a friendly atmosphere that you can not tell what a forum is going to be like without experiencing that particular forum first hand for a few weeks. There are tons of sites that promise the world, but once you pay your membership you realize that their perception of what you would get doesn't match your own.
I think this is going to be a problem for you with getting new members. Some may join based on the suggestion of existing members, but most that stumble across it on the web won't. It's not that $100 per year is all that much money. It's that the perception of what you get when you aren't already a part of it makes it seem very expensive.
Your membership breaks down into several groups. The newbies that need the most help, and would get the most advantage of the expertise offered here, but with little experience may not be convinced they'll get that much more here for a fee than they'd get elsewhere for free. So you'll lose many of them. Then there's the old hands that have been here through all the versions of the forum. They don't have as much to learn but value the company of others here. Some will stay and some will go. Then there's the large middle ground. People that are past newbies, but mostly read the forums to pick up the occasional tidbit of advice or new direction to explore. Many of them won't see those tidbits as being worth the money, so you'll lose a large number of them.
Of the experts that hang out, some of them that have the potential to make money off of members will stay for business reasons, but others that are here simply to help others and give free advice will move on to a free forum.
Forums to me seem a great way of creating and maintaining a community. I've been a member of forums since the 1980s, back when BIX (run by Byte magazine) was the biggest thing out there. I've been a moderator on forums at Compuserve, Adobe, CafePress, and others.
To me it seems that a successful, and profitable site can be built around free forums, which bring in and build the community, who then spends money on other features that are not free. If newbies find a free forum with lots of help and then discover that for only $5 a pop they can download tutorials relating to what they want to do, you'll get lots of them spending their money. There are lots of other ways of adding revenue generators to a site, including services, seminars, or tie-ins with distributors (buy products using a coupon code and get 5% off while the site gets a 5% sales commission)
A few other random thoughts (this post is already waaay too long):
I assume you realize that if your system says 1200 people have joined, that you don't think there's anywhere near that number of "real" members. If your software can give you stats, see how many have logged in during the past month or two, and subtract from that the number that have joined in that amount of time. That's a more realistic number of real members. Figure that you may lose 60% of those in this move and that will give you an idea of the true size the site will be 40 days or so from now.
Just some thoughts, and not trying to put you on the defensive. I know you're suddenly under a lot of pressure that you weren't expecting to hit you so suddenly.
EDIT: oops, spelled your name wrong, which isn't easy since it's my name too. :-) |