Premium v.s. Basic?

A ques­tion was posed over at the GeoCach­ing Alberta MSN Group last night. Part of the post caught my atten­tion and promp­ted a reply

I woul just like to kown if you have 100 plus find why you are not will­ing to pay for a premium mem­ber ship. After 50 to 100 finds I think you would know if you like it or not. So give me reas­ons not to sup­port geocaching.com. I would like to know..

Well, Testy and I have dis­cussed this in the past, so I was com­fort­able with our (longer than usual) response. I won’t excerpt it all here, but my key point was:

…and I think the premise of the ques­tion is flawed. Simply by play­ing the game, pla­cing caches, par­ti­cip­at­ing in dis­cus­sions like this one, encour­aging oth­ers at Meetup.com or events, and post­ing to GeoCach­ing blogs…participants in GeoCach­ing *are* sup­port­ing GeoCaching.com…by adding value to the GeoCach­ing com­munity. That value is what makes GeoCach­ing play­able — the quant­ity and qual­ity of it’s par­ti­cipants. And I bet the busi­ness model that Groundspeak/GeoCaching.com is using *depends* on a very high level of com­munity involve­ment — at the basic level.

This should get some dis­cus­sion going…

Source: GeoCaching-Alberta MSN Group
Tech­nor­ati Tags: GeoCach­ing, Alberta, Premium, Basic, Mem­ber­ship, Cost, Fee