unforum

[Nighthawk]

[thebruce]

Quick OT insert...

[jessie1326]

[FSURobbie]

[SpaceBass]

Re: question

[rose]

I commented about keeping the work to a minimum. I did mean keeping the work on Space and the admins to a minimum. I think that my comment was in response to ideas like those about making changes to the servers, forums and selling email addresses that seemed like they would just add to the burden of work on the administration side of unfiction.

I think the iphone app is a great idea. Maybe someone here already has the software needed to make an app?

About advertising the forums to get more people here: Maybe we need to work on getting the people who already know about and use the forums to be engaged in voluntarily supporting the forum?? I'm not sure how to go about this. There are always a huge number of lurkers - how to get them more involved has always been a mystery to me. I don't know if we need to be more welcoming, supportive, nicer? I think we already provide a service that has value - what we need to do is generate some revenue so that service can continue.

I do think that we've taken a great first step by having this discussion on funding. Until Space posted how much it costs and how much time he and others put into it, I had no idea what it takes in resources to keep this forum going.

I don't think we should add the cost of advertising to get more members to this mix at the moment.

I don't like the idea of having a separate place in the forums for contributors to talk to each other. I just like the idea that everyone sees the stuff posted here...but I don't know what others think of that idea.

I looked around a bit and really there are only a few funding models out there: voluntary contributions, selling goods or services or advertising. I think we just have to decide what mix of this we want to use.

[WolfHawk]

I haven't been around much lately. Was restructured out of a job in November and have yet to find another. Got student loans so I can work on my master's degree. Hoping to be able to keep my house.

Even when I was working I didn't have much in the way of disposable income. I also know a lot of kids/students follow this forum and play the games. I remember my time as a young student - I had no disposable income at all. I have to say I could deal with a banner ad or some sidebar ads.

Being unsure about the physical setup of unfiction I am assuming there is some type of access to lawyers. Could an advertising agreement be written up that specifically states that the advertisers cannot dictate content?

Because the advertisement is not directing people to unfiction, but rather, unfiction is directing people to the advertiser, should an advertiser be unhappy with something said in a forum and threaten to pull their ad, let 'em. It's not like network television where people get mad about a program and threaten to stop watching a specific channel. (Like that has ever really worked anyway.) It is their loss. Particularly if uF already has other advertisers who just want eyes on their ads.

[rose]

I'm curious, for all the people who have suggested advertising, is there any wya to find out exactly how much it could bring in? I remain completely opposed to the idea and will resist it as being a last resort if we can't raise the money ourselves...but say we did go with advertising - how much are we talking about and how reliable is that revenue.

Due to the economy all of my friend's businesses who have relied on advertising are really hurting. They have lost revenue they counted on because the advertisers simply aren't there. I'm talking about magazines, film, TV, radio, newspapers and the net- it would be a false step to decide to take in advertising and then have it be canceled or dropped.

I think that would put us in a bigger bind - if we start relying on outside sources instead of funding ourselves- what happens when that outside source money dries up?? Then we are up a creek without a paddle.

We need to stay independent of that possibility. (along with my other repetitive arguments that this is a community. )

As Nighthawk said, we raised plenty of money just for a sock puppet game - why shouldn't we be able to do the same here?

Again, I understand there are a lot of students- but plenty of people here have decent jobs and could probably afford a minor contribution. That is why I think that contributions should be voluntary-- no one should feel like they don't belong just because they don't have a few dollars to spend.

[Broklynite]

I'm not saying to become completely reliant upon ads, but a few bucks wouldn't hurt. There are two basic forms of ads. Pay-per-click and Pay-per-view. PPC tend to pay more, but relies on people actually clicking on ads (you can ask people to but most don't bother). Pay per view is how a number of sites make a few bucks, just having modest ads on sidebars that will pay the person every time the page is loaded. And they do tend to allow you to track numbers of views, etc.

Advertising on google is very easy and works well. As I said, I set up an online store some years ago. I was able to easily drive thousands of people to my site every week with a simple, cheap text ad. This works for spending a little to potentially get a good return, as well as spreading the gospel about ARGs.

I still like my ideas of people paying a small fee to trade thru UF. I don't think it would bring in much, but it would help. If I had something to trade and it cost me a dollar to make sure I didn't get screwed, I'd go for it. It would be completely optional tho, keep in mind. Also paying a dollar to have what you have and what you want in trade in a specific trading thread- it would help keep currently available items visible and out front.

Is there some sort of auction item donation page? I can't seem to find it.

[konamouse]

I like the idea of subscription model that would make uF ad-free while lurkers, visitors and non-subscribers see PPV ads.

[Broklynite]

[ljm]

I posted links to the other community where I mod/admin earlier, and have talked with my friend who is the webmaster/owner of the site and he had a few things to say.

First of all, our site/community isn't nearly as large (in bandwidth or members) as uF, so it's not a direct comparison, but go with me for a second.

We have literally one ad per page, a top banner ad that's above the content frame of the site... nobody cares about it, it's not a problem. In fact, including the ad, our overall header is actually about the same or even shorter than uF's, so there's that.

But more importantly, that one ad, for our smaller community, pays more than the server costs per year, every year, and has for the past 4 years or so also generated enough income to cover our software licenses and all other back end costs.

When I raised this with him to ask for advice, he had a few comments... one, he was surprised at how much your hosting costs, even though we're both aware that this is a substantially larger site than what we work with, it $500/month seems pretty egregious. I guess the bandwidth demands are stronger than I'm understanding from the surface.

Secondly, and more importantly, he suggested that if the bandwidth is that large, that means the readership MUST be pretty damn significant, in which case you should have NO problem covering your hosting costs with ad revenue. The only way that you have high bandwidth with a proportionately small reader base is if the constant posting of huge pictures/files on the boards really mauls the bandwidth. If it does, make people host their own files or link to outside sources (of which there are plenty to choose from for all file types), then pay less bandwidth and generate ad revenue that should cover your lower costs.

Bass, I'd be happy to put you in touch with our webmaster if you'd like to see what our numbers are like.

[SpaceBass]

Broklynite: If you have auction items to donate, send us a message through the contact page on the main site to set something up.

ljm: The $500 is all costs, including domain names, software, hosting for all sites besides the forums, etc. (but not including business overhead). The forums hosting is about $360 of that because we're running them on multiple dedicated servers. We have tons of excess bandwidth that does not get used because the real problem is CPU cycles for the DB and PHP rendering, as well as concurrent connections of users. The forums would run fine on shared hosting somewhere as long as only a few people were hitting them at any one time. With the dedicated servers, we have the extra capacity to keep the forums snappy even with dozens of simultaneous users when traffic rises. Currently, we do not have enough excess to keep them running well during high traffic spikes, which apparently is when it really matters to people for some reason.

[jessie1326]

Sorry for the randomness, but I just wanted to chime in with a t-shirt thought: uF needs trout t-shirts.

[Broklynite]