I think most people who are on forum boards are not digital marketing people. I am not digital marketing people. My daughter works in digital marketing, but she is not on forum boards. She does “analyze” or “hghlight” what people who ARE on forums, especially Facebook do, but mostly with regard to the connection between ads and sales. Did this ad “work”? Is what her company is doing, helping their clients meet their goals. At least thats the way I understand it.
I have also started to pay attention to how stuff like this works on YouTube, which I have come to respect more than I could have imagined even a few years ago. I find myself going back to some folks in food and gardening over and over, and then I subscribe. Sometimes I’ll even click on an ad because I want to financially support them.
I used to belong to a group that required professional credential documentation to participate. It was “mad cray” (as my daughter would say; she writes “af” but not to me) at imes, but it carried on as a great place to socialize with a niche group of folks for more than a decade. People complained about various things at times, including about any hint of moderation, or money to be made, and then “poof”, one day it was gone. We got what we paid for.
I think the reason daughter thinks I should have Instagram is my new DIL in Turkey does some cooking stuff ( and has followers!) on Instagram that she thinks I would like to see outside of our usual WhatsApp group chats.
Also, I like to collect internet ideas on pinterest and houzz, and share pictures and reviews on Google maps and Opentable.
That’s how I’ve always seen forum boards too, I tend to overthink things. I’m trying to be more zen about my social media presence, I’ll enjoy it for the moment knowing that at any minute it can change or I can be banned.
I’m sort of blind to the money making aspect of social media.
I have the advantage of living across the street from a mountain so my IG feed is almost entirely an evolving pic of said mountain and shared with friends that mostly don’t live in the mountains.
And I only post food pics on FB or here.
Interesting how we get such diverse experiences from the same medium.
I think the relationship between fora/blogs/websites and marketing/advertising falls along a spectrum. I have a little pop-up blocker that shows the number of ads on a page. Hungry Onion shows two; if all such websites had so few I wouldn’t bother with the blocker. Serious Eats on the other hand on one page I recall had 92 ads PLUS the “product placement” in content. There is quite a space between taking advertising to operate and being an advertising mill.
My daughter-in-law is a lifestyle blogger with around 175,000 IG followers. I can tell you that, although it’s not easy, she makes much more money with this venture than she did in her previous job, works from home, and gets tons of free stuff on top of it all.
Just my observation here, a thread on a food forum asking if food forums of this nature are dead? One full year after the original post the conversation continues with the thread generating approximately one new post every 3 days on an admittedly small audience site. I think we have answered our own question and the results speak for themselves folks!
(Bonus points the thread also required moderation as well!!)
HO does use google-analytics, I assume for their own statistical purposes (though I still disallow that). Aside from the top-level HO domain, the only others I see in my blocker’s stats are a couple of Zotabox-related domains, which I allow, though I don’t know exactly who that is or what they do…
ETA: Having mentioned that I didn’t know what zotabox does, of course I had to check it out. Apparently they’re a “promotional tools” provider, which stirred a vague recollection of seeing a post here about it being what provides the little pop-up window that suggests creating an HO account when you click on intra-site links without signing in. After just a brief skim of their home page, I can’t be certain that tracking/stats aren’t part of what they do, but it doesn’t look like that’s the main reason for their existence…
Just followed a Google search to another food website: 526 blocked elements. sigh I’m pretty happy with just two here. This is especially important for those who function on the edge of the Internet. All that stuff takes bandwidth.
Or who use “ancient” computers, like my desktop Core2Duo with “just” 4GB of RAM. Not only do they take up bandwidth, they’re computing-resource black holes… on “bad” sites, my browser will sometimes hang for a full minute or even longer while the CPU churns away swapping virtual memory on and off disk just trying to keep up with them all… which I find even more disturbing when I’m not seeing a lot of ads - makes you wonder what exactly it is that they’re doing, and to whom they’re (often) “phoning home”…
I’ll match your ancient and raise you Jurassic. My Dell 20 MHz 386 with 2 MB of RAM was on the cover of PC Magazine as the “fastest computer ever” when I bought it (for $5,000 in the mid-80s). With Linux and some good interface cards it makes a dandy firewall and router. grin It struggles to keep up during parties with more than forty or fifty connections but day to day it does fine even when I’m working and streaming Netflix, my wife is working and doing VOIP.
Family, some business entertaining. The little kids tuck into corners and stream and/or online game - they aren’t too bad. It’s the business with people looking things up to show each other that mean lots of connections and big spurts of data. I use MAC filtering to throttle streaming and Netflix and Amazon Prime do a great job of scaling to the pipes.
I’m here to share and learn. Started out on eG around 2004 or earlier and still post there as well. Never had an issue with the mods as far as I recall and if I did it was quickly resolved as it would be here, YMMV
At this point I don’t even remember how much RAM my first computer - a Gateway 386 I bought in 1989 when I was in grad school (because stripped down, it was comparatively cheap, though it still cost nearly $1K), that literally died a few years after I bought it. (As in the mobo died, bit by bit - not just the (obviously tiny) HD. The only time that’s ever happened to me, despite using whatever my “latest” computer has been until it basically can’t run anything useful anymore…) For the most part I bemoan the fact that “they don’t make things like they used to”, but I have to admit that when it comes to tech, that’s not just a Good Thing, it’s a Delightful Thing…
Not only do they take up bandwidth, they’re computing-resource black holes… on “bad” sites, my browser will sometimes hang for a full minute or even longer while the CPU churns away swapping virtual memory on and off disk just trying to keep up with them all… which I find even more disturbing when I’m not seeing a lot of ads - makes you wonder what exactly it is that they’re doing, and to whom they’re (often) “phoning home”… 
