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www.TELE-satellite.com —
04-05/2012 —
TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
from the satellite scene in the forum”,
remembers Scott. He became so ac-
tive in the forum that the operator of
the forum eventually started to get un-
comfortable. “One day I found that my
account was locked”, shuddered Scott,
“and I was out.” That shouldn’t have
happened to him, not even once. He
found a sponsor that provided him with
forum software and space on a server
- that was the birth of www.Satellite-
Guys.us
“It was September 7, 2003 when my
own forum went live for the first time!”
says Scott and then explains how he
came up with that name, “Many small
companies use the founder’s name as
the company name. I wanted to do that
too but not so directly. My initials are
S and G. I thought about it and won-
dered what could they stand for? S
could only be Satellite and the G?” The
answer came to him in a flash: “It’s all
the members of my forum, it’s the Sat-
ellite Guys.” For a domain Scott chose
.us since it’s an American forum. “Just
recently though I was able to acquire
the previously taken .com domain so
that now SatelliteGuys can be reached
from every important domain.”
It has only gotten better since then.
Scott pulls up the server statistics on
his PC: “In 2004 we had 29 million page
views and in 2011 it had jumped to 500
million page views.” Since then the
curve has gone steeply upwards: “If the
trend stays the same, the page views
for 2012 will double to one billion.”
Scott’s forum is viewed mostly in the
USA. The server statistics show that
95% of the visitors come from the USA,
4.5% are from Canada with the remain-
der from the rest of the world. How
does Scott finance the costs for such
a successful forum? “On SatelliteGuys.
us you’ll find banner ads, Google ads
as well as sponsors”, lists Scott (TELE-
satellite is one of those sponsors) who
then gives us some numbers, “In 2006
we took in about US$10,000 and in
2011 it was roughly US$50,000.” Not
much is left over from that income: “I
use that to finance the server costs, the
software licenses and the bandwidth.”
On top of that there are goodwill ac-
tions such as the distribution of T-shirts
with the SatelliteGuys.us logo as well
as other similar promotions to promote
the web site.
Scott emphasizes that he’s not run-
ning SatelliteGuys.us for the money;
he finds that he has a lot of fun pro-
viding other satellite viewers that have
problems with their satellite system or
receivers with a platform to get help.
“Numerous forum threads are archived
so that you can find help in older forum
threads for devices that haven’t been
available for some time.” Scott is proud
that his forum can provide answers to
even the most exotic problem; at some
point, every problem was handled once
before. “If you have a technical prob-
lem, you can utilize our search function
or use Google to find the appropriate
forum thread.”
In the meantime SatelliteGuys.us has
become the first web address for any-
one that has a technical problem with
their satellite or cable connection. The
incredible assortment of tips and tricks
that have been collected in the forum
have opened up an area that surpris-
ingly is also becoming interesting for
commercial providers: “Recently we’ve
become direct partners in customer
service for a number of companies”,
reveals Scott. “DishNetwork works to-
gether with us: some of their customer
service employees are registered mem-
bers of my forum and answer questions
from other members directly in the fo-
rum.”
Other companies have noticed Sat-
elliteGuys as a place to better support
their customers, Scott offers the com-
panies the resources they need to sup-
port their customers at no charge. Be-
sides DISH Network, official support is
now offered by Satellite Radio provider
Sirius XM and cable television provider
Bright House Networks. Scott hopes to
one day also get DIRECTV on board as
well.
“America is starting to learn that if
they need support with their satellite or
cable service to come to SatelliteGuys