Taking out all systems that are less the 1 month old and taking out all unprofitable systems, what’s the average subscriber rate. I mean, how many subscribers does the “10 Most Subscribed To Systems” have?
This is an issue that has been discussed before. I certainly don’t mind re-stating my opinions. (They remain the same as last time this issue was broached.) [In fact, I am simply copying and pasting my prior response to this question, which was posted about 6 months ago on these forums.]
There are several reasons why C2 chooses not to reveal detailed subscriber numbers.
1) C2 is a private company. I am a private person. Releasing financial data along the lines you propose would make C2’s finances even more transparent than any public company of which I am aware. (Note that even public companies do not reveal detailed breakdown of revenue sources, for competitive reasons.)
2) Vendors are running their own private businesses on the C2 platform. They may have reason to desire (and expect) financial privacy.
Those are the “human” (read privacy-related) issues.
But the more important reasons have less to do with my sensitive and delicate nature, and more to do with smart business practice.
The main thing to consider is that releasing subscriber numbers has undesirable consequences. Winners tend to become even more successful. Losers (or young systems) have even less chance of catching up. The feedback effects are massive and probably impossible to overcome. And the effect on the C2 community would be overall negative. Releasing financials would protect incumbent systems at the expense of newer (and potentially better) systems. In other words, it would adversely affect the site as a whole – reducing system variety, decreasing numbers of new systems, limiting the universe of system vendors.
The idea behind C2 is the democratization of finance. Releasing too much data would have the exact opposite effect as what we want. It would contract the C2 universe and decrease the breadth and usefulness of the C2 platform.
OK,I can accept that.
But how about this.
Does or has any system have or had at least 50 Subscribers?
Yes.
So if this is the goal, quote:
"The idea behind C2 is the democratization of finance."
Then logically, it would make sense if the option to reveal or not reveal how many subscribers a system has was with the system vendor. By default, you can disable it but ultimately, the democratic thing to do would be to allow the system vendor to choose whether to show or not show their # of subscribers.
There is nothing to prevent the system vendor from publicizing this info on his website, forum or etc.
Of course there is: they are free to write whatever they want, that they have 1 subscriber or that they have 100.
If they should publish information on their website, why don’t we just tell C2 to shut down, since system owners can already publish information on their website…
The whole point why C2 exists is that it serves as an independent verifier of information so that subscribers can gain confidence in system vendors. I don’t want to take a vendor’s word on their trades, open positions, past positions, slippage, or even the total # of subscribers! That’s C2’s job.
Trendy Bendy
So if we start a forum for System Developers to discuss “Business”, would this be in voilation of C2’s “Terms of Service” rules?
Respectfully
"Then logically, it would make sense if the option to reveal or not reveal how many subscribers a system has was with the system vendor. By default, you can disable it but ultimately, the democratic thing to do would be to allow the system vendor to choose whether to show or not show their # of subscribers."
Francesco,
Whenever this subject comes up it invariably is a result that the system vendor is not only anticipating to collect subscriber fees, but has enough optimism to entertain thoughts of what that quantity might be. To be honest, I am no different.
But a more realistic approach is to first establish a successful track record, since an excessively large amount of systems barely make it out of the gate and into a few months of gains.
Even still, people come and go and often “wonder”. Well my studious nature has uncovered a relatively roundabout way to come up with an approximation. You see at one juncture, Si Nguyen of [LINKSYSTEM_23905671] revealed that with about 20,000 views of his then highly successful system, about 200 were actual paying customers. Keep in mind this may have been misrepresented and/or an error by a large factor - but say 50 subs per 5000 views (give or take).
Meanwhile, my systems are currently sporting some rather decent statistics after nearly 4 months, yet barely have broken 100 views! That’s fine, since with continued success the rewards will come. Anyways, best to your success!
Gilbert
Clearly, you do not understand my point. Let me spell it out for you:
When a vendor edits their system on the C2 website, there is no checkbox that would say “Display total number of subscribers in my statistics”.
I am arguing that such an option should be added, if C2 is to live up to its “democratizing the world of finance” slogan, otherwise the slogan can be considered a bit of a hypocrisy.
I am also arguing that sure, the system vendor can put the number into the description by themselves, but trusting the vendor that he/she will report this number accurately is utter naivety.
I am also arguing that some system vendors might want the # number of subscribers displayed, some might not. Whatever policy for the default value of the above-mentioned checkbox, that’s fine, as long as the checkbox is there for the vendor to (democratically) choose whether they want the number reported by C2 or not.
Trendy Bendy
Trendy I believe Mathew was very clear and had some extremely valid reasons for not listing the number of subscribers for a signal. Please read again his post. This issue comes up every now and then. If you stick around long enough you will see for yourself.
I agree, he was very clear.
C2 is a private company and it’s up to Matt to chose a policy that suits his business goals. I think it is very right of him to not impose a rule across the board upon everybody to display the subscriber totals or other business details.
However, I think there is a bit of hypocricy in this approach, given that C2 is advertised as a site that wants to “democratize the world of finance”. If it truly wanted to democratize it, then it would give choice to system vendors. That would be true “democratizing” - giving choice to the people who use the system.
But establishing a policy of a “there will be no way for let vendors make C2 publish this piece of statistics” is a decision by C2.
And I have no objection against this current policy but I think that C2 shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.C2 should give vendors the option to publish this stat as they have been requesting and then C2 can keep the “democratizing” rethoric or leave the current policy but drop the whole “democratizing” as BS.
Trendy Bendy
"Clearly, you do not understand my point. Let me spell it out for you: "
Clearly I DO understand your point.
…Matthew laid out the policy. It will not be published.
You are not happy.
…I said vendors are free to put their numbers in their description.
You are not happy.
etc.
I can understand potential vendors wanting to get some idea of possible subscriber numbers, but I can’t see any good way of providing that info without compromising privacy, as Matt says; perhaps there should be a secret squirrel inner circle who are privy to such information. To be fair, the point about democracy doesn’t make much sense to me - there’s already the “most popular”, and “best systems” lists that presumably drive a power-law subscriber distribution of some kind (ie the most popular systems get more popular, etc).
From a subscriber point of view, I suppose I’m vaguely interested in how much vendors are making, but I’m much more interested whether a system actually has ANY subscribers using real money, and at the other end of the scale, whether the number of subscribers is likely to be big enough to cause problems.
For example, by moving thinly traded markets against itself, or attract the attention of system-killers, ie someone who is looking at trading against the system, knowing where the stops etc are, to profit in some way.
Of course we’d need to see the scaling factors too. For example, I’d be very interested to know if Lehmans or someone had signed up to a system and were scaling it 100x…
Interestingly, I started this thread yesterday about subscribers and last night I got my first one. It was for the free autotrading so we’ll see how things go.
So there you have, I choose to tell the world the # of my subscribers…1…1st one!
