To advertise or to not advertise. That's the question

Bonanzle, now Bonanza, has been live for about 2 years now. It's member growth has been phenomenal. The members for the most part are a good group of people, willing to help each other out and are a pretty funny bunch of folks.

There have been rumbles about the lack of advertising on the part of the site, for a very long time. There have been numerous threads started asking if members would be willing to pay a bit extra for some really good advertising by the site.  Talks about why there has been no advertising by the site itself. Almost every one of those threads get deleted.

Now tonight, someone posted a link to an article by AuctionBytes about how the smaller selling sites need to get going on PR work and get some serious advertising done to get their sites growing and bringing in sales.

In the matter of a few minutes, support or the owner did something to make it to where the members posting to that thread, not be able to see their own posts and subsequent posts made by other members.

All of a sudden the site announced that they are "opinion gathering" and not letting the responses to that thread be seen by either the persons that have responded to it or anyone just wanting to see what others have said, that they are "gathering"  those responses and that they are "going directly to supports inbox. 
Pretty suspicious if you ask me.

It leads a person to wonder why the site would treat a thread like it would like to delete it, but doesn't want the appearance of outright deletion to be seen. So rather than risk that, they fix the thread to where it will sink into oblivion under the guise of "opinion gathering" and allow it to be buried to where no one sees it, let alone be able to respond to it in any manner that could be seen.

The full article can be read here

http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl

Here's the original thread in the forums at bonanzle. This is the one that is rapidly sinking as the site has, at the time of this post, made it to where the posts that are made to it, do not keep it at the top of the forum it's posted in.
http://www.bonanzle.com/forums/1/topics/131493

 And this is a new thread that started as the result of what happened with one post that got deleted that was made due to management making the other one stall.
http://www.bonanza.com/forums/1/topics/131554

The AuctionBytes article brings to light the fact that a lot of these smaller selling sites, like bonanzle, rely on what is in my opinion, almost a grunt labor to get their site advertised for almost nothing. The grunts being us, the sellers there.

We sellers spend countless hours advertising in the way of 

FaceBook

Twitter

MySpace

PlumDrop

Blogs like this one

Multiply

Zimbio

and countless other social and blog type sites in the hopes of getting just one customer to the site.

It's been proven over and over again that simply does NOT work. In order for a site to flourish, it needs to do some advertising for itself instead of depending on little sellers to do it for them.

Sites that are serious about wanting to grow and become a major contender for on line sales, can't just rely on it's almost slave labor to get the word out. As one of the sellers said, people come to market places with the expectation that at some point the site itself will do some advertising. And that should be happening with Bonanzle now.

Bonanza charges a fee when an item sells. 
Bonanza has paid memberships. 
Bonanza was handed a MILLION dollars by an investment group just a few months ago.

Some of that money needs to be used to advertise and in a manner that will get peoples attention, not to buy some silly adwords like rootbeer.

There's an old saying that Bonanza and sites like it need to adopt and put into action. "It takes money to make money".

It was true when that phrase came into being, and it's true now.

My opinion only, like it or not, but it's shared by quite a few!