<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by ozstamps:
The huge critical mass of FT is I understand a valuable asset to Randy's fairly large core business. He or staff can consult to airlines or Hotels etc and KNOW backwards the issues their users have. New ideas can be bounced off this audience. Concepts can be floated. Press can and often do can draw from it.
A large FT makes all the above easier and more effective. IMO.
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Obviously, this is a very valid and most important consideration, but this would be taken care of by the fact that you would make parts of FT visible without registration. The details, of course, would have to be worked out, but one thing does not necessarily contradict the other.
Responding to the mention of moremiles.org: I think they took it a bit to the other extreme - it is very difficult to become a member of that site, plus, it really does not serve that much of an additional purpose compared to this site. "Network effects" are at work here and once someone else already has a certain critical mass, it becomes hard to compete with something like that which already exists. If you restrict registration too much for a new site, you will never reach the critical mass that you need.
My proposal would be to take the critical mass that exists and to slowly start to monetize it in a better way, without doing damage to the core business the critical mass is supposed to support, while at the same time getting rid of some of the trolling problems.
It can be done, and it would actually make Flyertalk MORE attractive to advertisers and cooperation partners.