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Dear members and friends of ipernity,
1) More than 70 ipernity members participated in our club's first annual World Photography Day event in August. We thank them all for their engagement. Their contributions can be viewed in the group World Photography Day.
2) The beginning of September this year marked the fourth anniversary of us members taking over this website. We thank all those who have been and continue to be committed to it. Apart from the known risks and some minor malfunctions, there aren't currently any technical problems. Our association is also very well positioned in organisational and financial terms
3) Nevertheless, we have a watchful eye on the number of Club members. This has declined to 991 primarily due to pandemic-related disruptions that have impacted businesses, markets and websites around the world. There are 850 inventory club members (215 with multi-year memberships) and 141 new club members since our takeover in September 2017.
4) We are still well above (42%) the minimum number of paid memberships (700) required to sustain the site. However, to protect the viability of our club and take advantage of the reversals that will take place when pandemic-related disruptions ease, we must increase our efforts to recruit new club members. We urgently request you support the promotional activities envisioned for this site, which belongs to all of us and is operated by us for ourselves.
5) With regard to IT matters, the ima team has been strengthened. We welcome the club member Realbeck to our team. According to our Statutes, VII, 10, he will support the ima team together with Rob Stamp as another executive assistant.
6) To save costs, we will soon discontinue all domains registered by us except www.ipernity.com. If you access our website with a different domain, please update your links, as only the domain www.ipernity.com remains.
Your ima team
Here an update of that chart:
One should not consider the maximum of 1441 as a reference. This was the result of two measures [b] and [c] taken by the ima team. The more realistic reference value is the number of club members after the expiry of the two-year subscriptions offered by the former Ipernity S.A. in 2016 as a low-cost promotion campaign [a]. This reference value is
Unfortunately, both measures were only moderately sustainable. From [b] only one third renewed at normal conditions after one year, from [c] less than 20%. This confirms the old merchant's wisdom that bargain hunters rarely become regular customers. Moreover, this also means that all imaginable possibilities of gaining club members from the inventory of registered accounts have been exhausted.
On the other hand, we are very pleased about the high commitment of many club members to sign multi-year club memberships [d] and [e]. A quarter of all Club members thus show a high level of confidence in the future, in some cases until 2025. The slight decline since the beginning of 2021 is normal because the offer has ended. We have so much liquidity in the coffers that there is no longer justifiable to continue this offer.
The correlation with the Covid-19 pandemic is obvious. Because until March 2020, the number of regular members (shown in green) was stable. Admittedly, there are also other influences. For example, the remaining paying Esperanto members have left us. But there were not many. Most Esperantists had free memberships and were more of a burden than an advantage to our community. The same applies to the freeloaders with very large upload volumes who had abused ipernity as a cheap cloud. Their departure is actually a financial gain for us. The introduction of Basic memberships was, contrary to what was desired, not an advantage at all. It has not led to increased bookings from guest members, nor has it attracted members from Flickr, where some were very angry that the cheap Grandfather rate was abolished.
As can be seen, the exodus of the 2007 to 2010 cohorts is particularly striking. However, these are mainly very aged members who have either already died or no longer pursue their photo hobby due to declining physical strength or other motives. This is completely normal. In fact, it is very positive that our community has so many long-standing members.
The loyalty of the cohorts from 2013 to 2015 is also impressive. Most of these club members are former Panoramio members.
We know that there are many dissatisfied users on both Facebook and Instagram. Not least because of the announcement by Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram) on Twitter that hobby photography will be given less prominence in the future. (German article about this matter on: www.futurebiz.de)
However, we are very sure that the billions of users of these large platforms are completely unaware of the existence of ipernity. Changing this is our greatest opportunity.
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