To be blunt, there's a certain number of mild stretchers in the pitch on the front page. LuLa is in the top 10 photo web sites, but there are at least 4 more popular ones out there. They get 330,000 unique visitors a month on 1.8M pageviews. Costs of servers and bandwidth are negligible when stacked up next to the need to put bread on the table for three men.
LuLa is a very respectable popular web site in a relatively niche space. With respect, I think they're overstaffed, although I am certainly not calling for anyone's head, I'm just looking at the realities of meeting payroll for three men on the numbers the web site generates.
Ad revenues are in free fall out there in a wild, and the photographic industry is, as a whole, shrinking down from a bubble, which is surely producing a double-whammy on LuLa's ad revenue. Revenues are trending down, and payroll rose by 50% when Kevin joined. These curves are going the wrong way.
What are you gonna do? I don't know what the staff here looked at, but what *I* would have considered was:
- an email blast-based set of surveys and questions to investigate some possibilities
- A patreon or kickstarter based system
- a membership model for various subsets of content, up to and including the whole web site
- consideration of branching out into other businesses
- sell T-shirts and other merch
- sell more workshops
- sell workshop support services (so you want to run a workshop, let us help you)
- a market research operation serving the still and motion camera industry, leveraging the user base
- print sales, either lift the entire model from ToP or invent something new (art by subscription?)
They have a huge user base with a disproportionately high number of affluent dudes in it, and the only thing they can come up with is
put up a lowball $12/year paywall?
As I say, I have no idea what the thought process was, and I am loathe to say it was flawed, but I will say that the result doesn't strike me as particularly top-drawer. As always, I could easily be missing something.
