Well, time will tell if they can build a generation of people who will click on their links.
The other thing I am thinking is that CBSi does not always have to make Chowhound profitable – at least not directly. Chowhound can be a branding vehicle. Basically something to build reputation.
I was listening to NPR and it stated that Playboy actually does not make any money from the magazine for a long time and I have read the same thing many times. Playboy use the magazine as a branding vehicle.
They can care less about building a generation of anything. All they want is a click, they can care less where it comes from. They have made the decision they are more willing to roll the dice with a flashy site and hopefully more traffic/random visitors than with a loyal contingent of complainers.
not that I have any love for the place, but methinks there’s something goofy with the statistics. just gandering through Home Cooking there’s 34 messages posted in the “hours ago” - i.e. last 23.99999 hours - if I counted correct.
is that perhaps “new threads” being measured?
I believe the moderators are volunteers. They may be recruited, but they’re volunteers.
Yes, it’s just new threads. The official parlance is “posts”, not OPs. There are, as you say, many more “responses” than “posts”.
But CH won’t disclose their “response” traffic, so we peons do the best we can with what we have available…
Aloha,
Kaleo
You’re missing the flipside JR. They might not have made money off of your ad clicks, but you were a part of a group of prolific posters who was giving free content to Chowhound. That content brings visitors to Chow, which generates ad money. Imagine how much they would have to pay someone to generate content the way you did for Chowhound?
So… I’m waiting at my mailbox for my checks from Chowhound…
Maybe they’ll use direct deposit?
There are a lot of names there I don’t recognize. Now I haven’t been a Chowhound a very long time, so I haven’t seen every post ever made, but could the current staffers be employed creating new posts along standard lines?
Well we do agree I was way under compensated, that said, I completely understand your point. I just think with the amount of content they had on the books, our original content was a sacrifice they were willing to forego for a quieter my compliant “community”, or lack thereof.
Glad to see you hear Joon. I think we were all taken for granite on Chow. Chow & their management made their beds. JR lies in our bed. Even thought he is a delinquent, he is our delinquent! 
But he’s not Jr.!
Not from a Onion sense, but those of us who know him…
I’ve been thinking the same thing. So many of the posts are in a different vein from earlier posts too. There are a lot of generic “which do you like more x or y” style questions - or questions that you might make up if you didn’t have a “real” question …
I think nature abhors a vacuum. Many of the new posters on CH I’ve noticed seem to be long time lurkers who felt intimated (or something) by what they perceived as a clique. Now that the “clique” is gone they are filling the gap.
Wandered over to CH this morning - I usually wander and skip town pretty fast but this caught my eye. Seriously? An ad about night creams?
http://www.chowhound.com/post/sleeping-beauty-night-creams-basic-1027078
WOW ! Certainly have ventured from food!
Just checked to see how the mods handled it and it was removed.
Posters on CH are wondering what’s going on. I’d love to tell here where to come. Maybe I’ll try to find a post of interest to her and reply with it.
I tried to politely nudge them in the right direction. I see you took a much more direct approach, let’s see if either of our attempts work.
The new Chowhound is not for me. I didn’t post much on the old version, but I did read it every day and learned a lot from the witty and informed posters. Now it’s just Chowhound self-promotions and pretty pictures. To them, I ask “Where’s the beef?” as the old Wendy’s ad used to say.
