The end of Queerclick's Sticky?

Webmaster Discussion
#1

I’ve enjoyed using Sticky at Queerclick for a while now, and we even paid a nominal monthly fee for automatic followers etc, but while attempting to post today it seems they’ve increased their prices and attempting to post anything redirects to the pricing page.
You can like content, but you can’t post or share.

I could be wrong, maybe they have enough of a user base to justify $10 a month, but I doubt it.
Social media sites like NewTumbl send far more traffic, for nothing.
Even donating to them for the service they provide is cheaper than getting far less from Sticky.

Has anyone else used Sticky before?
How did you find it?
Will you be sticking around and paying that $10 a month and does it justify the traffic and sales you might get from it?

I’d be interested to hear your opinions, but for now it looks like we’ll just be diverting our attention to other sites.

#2

I can only answer your first question. I have not heard of such social media. I think this answers the other 2 questions. :slight_smile:

#3

It’s kinda like Pinterest.
It was quite good for a while and we probably would have continued using it but now it’s apparently restricted to paid users only after a certain number of posts (first time I’ve heard of that and we’ve been using it for years).

Traffic had declined from there anyway and after looking at the stats it’s definitely not in our interest to be paying when we could probably replace it with a couple of extra posts on NewTumbl and get a much bigger response.

Of course sites like that need to make money, but they push sponsored posts already and it just seems like a bad business move to tell your users they can’t do anything now unless they pay up. I guess they’re relying on the fear of losing those followers, but obviously those followers weren’t that interested because the traffic we get from NewTumbl in a day exceeds what they were sending in a month.

#4

You can submit for free to GayDemon here: https://www.gaydemon.com/wired/

Its not quite the same thing but gives some traffic at least.

#5

Thanks Bjorn. We do use Wired, and I use it for clients too.
It’s one of our faves to post to.
Only problem is the three-post daily limit, meaning we have to be very selective, unless we open new accounts for clients and our other sites which seems spammy to me.

#6

No, we didn’t increase our prices. Not sure what you are seeing.
Perhaps you can email me some screen grabs.

#7

Ah sorry, there is no limit any more. Or shouldn’t be.

#8

You may not have increased your price but you have banned the publication of new photos for free. Why did you do that? I do it for free on sites newtumbl, twitter, sex.com Each of these sites gives me a lot more hits than your site.

#9

Trying to repin anyone else or posting anything original leads to this:
[ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:“none”,“data-size”:“medium”,“data-attachmentid”:297442}[/ATTACH]
Clicking upgade leads to this (larger text above selections cropped):
[ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:“none”,“data-size”:“medium”,“data-attachmentid”:297443}[/ATTACH]
I’m sure it wasn’t $9.99 when we tried it out originally but maybe I’m wrong, it’s been a while.

We have 1,453 pins published there, which seems like an arbitrary cap for a free user.
I mean, I could understand the explanation and then just go elsewhere if there was a free limit of 1,000 posts, but this seems to be quite random, which makes me think this was implemented more recently and the “cap” didn’t actually exist before.

I don’t mean to be critical, it’s your business and you know more than I do, it just seems self-defeating to start turning users away, rather than encouraging more users.

I’d continue using it for clients and our own sites but the traffic just doesn’t justify $10 a month for me, especially not while we have Reddit, NewTumbl, Twitter etc.

Screen Shot 2020-03-01 at 22.08.59.png

Screen Shot 2020-03-01 at 22.11.56.png

#10

Oh, cool!
That’s good news. I’ll be checking it out this week and hopefully posting more.

#11

Hi Conran,

The pricing is unchanged since we launched the program. $9.99 per month with 2 longer options that are discounted. These have never changed.

We’ve also told webmasters that if they want to join to access premium - which pushes all your pins into the feeds of all users - they should do it via their own affiliate program and get 50% of it back.

What we did change was cap our pins to 200 per day, 15/gallery.

Since I can’t speak to exactly what your flow is before you received that pop-up, I can’t help. It disturbs me that your first step wasn’t to ask us.

Sticky generates over $10,000 in revenue per month. We’re fine. We’d love to have you continue working on Sticky, but communication is needed if we’re to solve your problem.

#12

Fair enough, It’s been a long time so I must have been mistaken.

I’ve been in communication with someone at Sticky before regarding posts for a specific sponsor which had been blacklisted, they never mentioned it to me. I haven’t seen such information on the site, but I’ll certainly have a look.

We definitely weren’t posting 200 a day, I doubt we were posting that many every six months, so I’m unsure why that would be triggered now.
That’s why this is particularly baffling, as we clearly haven’t been able to post for several days but we’re still unable to do anything other than like a post.
If this were a daily cap we should have been released from purgatory by now. :smiley:
The popup also doesn’t mention a daily limit, just a limit on free accounts.

It shouldn’t disturb you, it was a post to a relevant community about a service I assumed some of them might use.
I’m not special, I’m just someone who used this service. As far as I’m concerned I’m no different to someone using Twitter or NewTumbl, I wouldn’t be contacting them and expecting a response if they changed an aspect of their service.

As far as I’m concerned the service changed and I raised it as a subject in a relevant community, that’s all.

Really baffled as to why you’d be disturbed by this. :blink:

It’s great that it’s doing well. But that’s why I thought I would ask others here, because the popup doesn’t suggest it’s a temporary block, or a daily limit, it simply states a limit on free accounts. Again, I could be totally wrong, but unless this is being selectively administered to specific users everyone who posts (the lifeblood of a social sharing site like yours) will be seeing this eventually, and that can only begin to diminish interaction and use of the site.

It just seems counter-productive.

Thank you for your thorough response. I’ll be having a look at this again next week.
Can I suggest that maybe someone look at the information provided when an account experiences this? If it’s not specific to us then it’s a boilerplate message others must be getting too, and it seems to be wrong/misleading and makes no mention of a daily limit.

Thanks.

#13

Had you reached out to us for clarity before posting a false narrative on this board and predicting our demise, I’d bend over backwards to accommodate you.

If we didn’t fix your issue or ignored you, then you take it public.

say what you will about the QC network, but we operate openly and with integrity. And, we aren’t hard to get in touch with.