LoFi View ? Still available,,

[rexclark]

Thanks for the hard work anyway keeping this site running, it is appreciated by most if not all.

[greenfairy43]

Thinking about it I need a new efests lighter. Haven't seen them around for a few years. Could easily flog them at festivals.

[rexclark]

Thinking about it I need a new efests lighter. Haven't seen them around for a few years. Could easily flog them at festivals.

[Bort]

How do I access the mobile version? It used to come up by default on my phone but I had to switch to do a search and now I can't find a way to get it to go back to the mobile version.

[eFestivals]

if you clear your cache, that should get you sorted. It might also work (I'm not sure) if you log out and then back in again.

[grumpyhack]

Maybe you could talk to Lenny who runs Joe Bananas. He's at a lot of fests and could possibly run a sideline in selling e-fests merchandise.

[bombfrog]

With all due respect to Neil for creating an amazing site, I've always thought that he's gone about making money from it in the wrong way. Lots of irrelevant display ads plastered all over the place which no doubt pay a pitiful CPM price but nothing relevant to the audience.

Neil, you have around 90,000 registered members on this site, all of which have supplied you with an email address. A little bit of analysis of which pages we're looking at and forums we're posting in would show you what festivals we go to. We all buy camping equipment and travel deals in the run up to a festival so why not mail-shot us all with some deals from affiliate programs like Blacks or national express?

Or, if you don't know what to do or don't want the hassle then hire an agency to do it.

I'm sure I've mentioned stuff like this before though.

[eFestivals]

With all due respect to Neil for creating an amazing site, I've always thought that he's gone about making money from it in the wrong way. Lots of irrelevant display ads plastered all over the place which no doubt pay a pitiful CPM price but nothing relevant to the audience.

Neil, you have around 90,000 registered members on this site, all of which have supplied you with an email address. A little bit of analysis of which pages we're looking at and forums we're posting in would show you what festivals we go to. We all buy camping equipment and travel deals in the run up to a festival so why not mail-shot us all with some deals from affiliate programs like Blacks or national express?

Or, if you don't know what to do or don't want the hassle then hire an agency to do it.

I'm sure I've mentioned stuff like this before though.

While what you say has some relevance from some angles, the realities of running this website pan out differently.

In an ideal world I'd much rather not have ads - and in fact, with the original company that owned efests (still with my involvement) there were no ads. That company soon ran out of money (it didn't 'go bust' - but had to cease trading so that it didn't run up debts it couldn't pay).

It takes a huge amount of hours to keep all of the info up-to-date. This means that there's little time for the commercial side of things - which makes ads sourced and placed here by a third party on our behalf the only realistic income that can fund the site. It also means that there's very limited time for putting mailers together (which is why, until the last couple of years, there's been very few mailers).

The simple fact is that a mailer for camping equipment would bring in income of just a few hundred quid, and would only work with much effect once in any year. Having an income stream of just mailers like that would mean that efestivals would soon disappear.

While this website has a huge amount of traffic - over 800,000 unique users in the busier months - there's a big difference between website visitors and visitors who spend money here on stuff like tickets, which we get some income from. The only realistic way to monetise those visitors to the extent that this website needs to fund it is via ads.

All the same, eFestivals doesn't chase every penny, and that's reflected in the income I get from it (less than the average wage for around twice the average hours of work). Another festivals website has half the traffic but twice the income because it does chase every penny. Despite doing that it recently got into financial difficulties, had to make people redundant, and was shortly afterwards 'sold' (perhaps for no money - I don't know the details) to new owners. And of course, it has half the traffic because its pursuit of money comes across in its content, which turns people off.

So all in all, while there's some minor improvements that could be made here, I'd say that the balance is about right - the usage of this website compared to others seems to bear that out.