Of the 206 job postings on the gCaptain jobs 132 are HornBlower. Thats 64% of postings. How many of those have nothing to do with a maritime career?? Too many. It’s spam.
gCaptain has appeared to be in decline for the past several years. Attempts to monetize gCaptain’s status and user traffic do not appear to have been overly successful.
I was the first person to buy something from the gCaptain store (an overpriced T shirt), but I don’t think that the store ever took off.
The gCaptain waterborne pallet size shipping for New York City never took off either.
I know people that read gCaptain News everyday, but never look at the Forum.
I think a lot of us look at the Forum, but rarely the News. I get a lot of the same news from other sources.
The Forum does not have nearly the volume of active participants that it did a few years ago. Some of the best contributors have disappeared or drastically reduced their participation. Perhaps that’s just a natural cycle for most forums.
I thought that the gCaptain jobs had great potential to become THE MARITIME JOB BOARD in the USA, but that never came to pass.
I agree that nothing but Hornblower and MSC ads are a huge turnoff.
I’m curious about gCaptain’s web traffic statistics.
They are likely shit. Most of the articles are reprints of bloomberg/AP/Reuters/etc and the few that are self-written by a certain author are so terribly written that they are incomprehensible.
And don’t forget the overabundance of woke and “green” articles that nobody cares about. Toss in some jumping-the-shark on crewmember accusations and you got a the perfect recipe for a completely insignificant and negligible website that nobody of importance reads.
I agree with both posts above. Maybe the forum could spice things up is and monetize the answers to popular questions like “I just watched an episode of ‘Below Deck’ and I wanna be a sailor, what should I do?”
You could expand to include a wider base of subjects than just than maritime, like wardrobe or fine wine, cigars or cars, whatever. For a penny a word, I’d be happy to answer questions like “I got some money saved from selling weed, what color car should I buy?”. See where this is going? It could add up to real money.
Otherwise, the forum is like it’s like shooting the breeze on the bridge wing with whoever happens to stroll by.
Forums are a dying niche from the early days of the internet. There was a reddit thread the other day about “what do you miss about the old internet” and a lot of people were missing forums and chat rooms. gCaptain is a niche within a niche, perhaps a testimony to the mariners commitment to doing things the way we’ve always done them - with technology from the 90’s.
r/Maritime has 13.2k members and apparently had over 100k visitors last year. Dont know what the stats are here, I’m seeing 14,000 monthly visists but who knows how many actuve users that is. The conversation here is just as useful on r/maritime.
I think that is true for me. I miss that. I also miss that in the old days, you had to have some skills and knowledge to use the internet. Gopher, Archie, FTP…Usenet…
For awhile @Ombugge was one of the few keeping the forum alive. He has consistently been a top contributor. Most of his posts are informative. The anti-American posts are tedious.
If you only want to see posts about US subjects and USCG licensing problems, just don’t look at any of my posts.
Warning: if you do you MAY get to learn something about the outside world.
Thanks for that. I try to post things that MAY be interesting to forum readers, whether US based or otherwise.
Not everything that doesn’t glorify things American is anti-American.
As I have said many times before; I don’t believe that nationality, race or religion decides who makes a good seaman, or anything else.
Anybody who have spent their life working around the world, with people of different nationalities, races and religion will tell you that there are good and bad everywhere. Abilities are not decided by the colour of your skin, or your passport. (Attitudes maybe, in some people)
I don’t think everything American is perfect, nor does every US citizen on this forum.
If that is anti-American, then I accept the title.
@John, how about stringers (paid on acceptance of material) who are deeper into the industry than the AP scribes. Does getting recognition (tags?) from the likes of FOX or MSN rather than disseminating their sloppy work have any monetary value?
Just a simple sailor trying to lend a helping hand.