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Another take on the demise of FCP.co
Larry Jordan’s take on the demise of FCP.co
However, with the rise in social media, advertisers – the life-blood of any web service – demanded more and more eyeballs. Specialized websites, like FCP.co, couldn’t deliver the traffic that a more general-interest website could.
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There is no effective business model that can support a technically-specialized website catering to a small audience of a single piece of software, no matter how popular. Compounding the problem, Apple has made clear over the decades that they don’t financially support websites supporting their software.https://larryjordan.com/articles/requiem-for-fcp-co/
More generally I see the loss of centralized locations for questions, tips, and education. COW’s FCP forum is one of the last remaining and even here traffic is lighter than it used to be.
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6 Replies
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I have to strongly disagree with Larry. The business model wasn’t the reason. Unrelated, Apple’s own FCPX forum has always been the largest and most active community, still is. No slow down there.
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Apple’s forum doesn’t depend on revenue to cover expenses.
An independent website has hosting and management expenses that must be met.
That means advertisers and the content to draw views for the advertisements.
I don’t doubt that the COW itself faces those issues.
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This is correct! Creative COW does face the challenges that brought FCP.com down, along with everything I’m sure was not mentioned in Peter’s original announcement. We can only extend a digital fist-bump of understanding to our fellow independent forum.
Apple itself is a large and powerful enough company to overcome hosting a site of incredible database size, so these challenges might mean little to them.
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And Apple’s entire forum deals with so many subjects unrelated to FCP that it’s hard to be sure you have a wide swath of targeted interest. The importance of discussion boards whether it be FCP.co or COW is that the readership is looking for or helping with video specifically.
I do hope a lot of the FCP.co discussion moves back to the COW.
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Well I guess I’ll make these my forums now, but PLEASE someone add a REPLY button to the bottom of the page and a quote function (unless I am missing something??)
Anyway:
“Compounding the problem, Apple has made clear over the decades that they don’t financially support websites supporting their software.”Why would Apple give money to random forums? Honestly I think that would be a conflict of interest if they did. The people who run the forum would bow to Apple’s will on what the posts could and couldn’t say. I wouldn’t like that at all. It’s the main reason I stay away from the Apple Discussion forums.
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Duly noted on the location of the Reply button, and a possibility of a Quote function. These ideas have been passed to the dev team.
Long ago, Apple DID support Creative COW. One day their business model seemed to change.
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