If ever there was a company whose senior management’s witterings were to be treated with a pinch of salt, it was Yuku under the leadership of Robert Labatt.

When he made the famous “better than free” launch video at DEMOfall 2005, he claimed that Yuku was better than free because they shared advertising revenue with the community leaders - watch from around 3 minutes 40 seconds in. At 4 minutes 20 seconds, Labatt says:

“…we’ve done modelling on the hundreds of thousands of communities that we have on ezboard and we believe that an average large community should be able to receive somewhere in the neighbourhood of three to five thousand dollars a month if their site is working well and they’ve got lots of people on it.”

So then. Lots of modelling done and a statement that they expect “average large” communities to be making $3-$5,000 a month in shared advertising revenues. Now Yuku was not and is not a charity or not-for-profit organisation, so I would have expected them to take by far the lion’s share of advertising revenues those communities were generating. After all, Yuku would have the infrastructure and bandwidth provision to think of as well as the support and development costs. But even if we suggest that no, they’ll actually do a 50/50 split, that would suggest they were expecting ad. revenues for “average large” communities of $10,000 a month or $120,000 a year.

Wow! That’s a lot of revenue. And that’s just the “average large” boards.

But wait a minute. One of the board owners of one of Yuku’s headline boards, Survivor Sucks, recently posted in the support forum with a pricing query as he was struggling to understand the costings. Yuku Gold pricing is explained here. It says:

“To work out in advance what 1 year of ad-free page views could cost you, use the No Ads/Opted total for 1 month, and apply it to this equation:

(ad-free page views/1000) * .2 * 12 (ad-free page views divided by 1000, then multiplied by .2, then multiplied by 12)”

Right. The board owner’s post quotes a load of stats. but not a whole month’s worth. So I’ll take the middle seven days from his quote (19/2 to 25/2):

02-25 123644 18115 59942
02-24 91601 16377 62084
02-23 91765 14114 57279
02-22 116085 16880 70602
02-21 128017 18510 67227
02-20 129372 17541 67069
02-19 116161 19595 68929

Tally up the last column and the total “No Ads/Opted” is 453,132.

So (453,132/1000) *.2 *52 (for weeks instead of months) = $4,712. In other words, Yuku would be willing to forgo any advertising revenue income from Survivor Sucks in return for receiving $4,712 a year.

Now don’t forget that Survivor Sucks is a favoured/featured board at Yuku: it even appears as one of the three shown on this page and has a special mention on KickApps’ Cameron Shaw’s Yuku profile page. So how is it that Yuku will apparently accept less than $5,000 to refrain from adding adverts on Survivor Sucks when Labatt was saying that they should easily have expected to be sharing revenues 20 to 30 times that large at the very least?

Or maybe all that supposed cost/data modelling and all that bluster at DEMOfall was just to try to get someone to buy Yuku/ezboard for as much as possible?

KickApps must really be kicking themselves…