Slashdot Mirror
Financing Growing Websites?
William asks: "I'm currently writing PHP and MySQL code that runs a website that is receiving a modest amount of hits per day. Currently we are able to reasonably pay the montly costs of running this website without a problem, but we are growing larger every month and I could imagine that in the not so far future we will need to start finding ways to finance the cost of running the site. One thing that conserns me is that more and more websites that are being run by average people are on thier way to being down now because they can not afford to pay for the amount of resources being pushed through every month. Up until now banner ads have help displace the cost of running a site, but from what I've been seeing, that is no longer true.
I remeber when Slashdot was just Chips&Dips, and figure this would be the place to go when asking how to scale up a website in an affordable manner."
>You want to know where most of the money given ...You're average devout Christian is giving a
i d=0
c id=0
>to churches actually goes, even if it renders
>your clichéd comment irrelevant?
>Feeding the poor. Healing the sick. Housing the
>homeless.
>
>lot more of his or her income to charitable
>causes than your average Slashdot reader
So much wishful thinking, so little time. Where is the money going?
To support church bureaucracy.
To the legal defence of thousands of church-employed pedophiles.
Don't believe it?
Some examples:
"In the Roman Catholic Church there are over 800 priests that have been removed from ministry as a result of allegations against them. We also know of 1,400 insurance claims on the books and that the Church has paid out over $1 billion in liability with an estimated $500 million pending. One noted expert claims that there are over 5,000 priests with some type of allegation against them. If this is true, then there are at least 1,000,000 direct victims of clergy sexual abuse and between 4-6 million indirect victims in the U.S."
--- http://www.thelinkup.com/stats.html
Browsing the rest of the statistics detailed should be a sobering experience for you.
"The Anglican Church administered 26 "Indian residential schools" between 1820 and 1969. It, along with the Catholic and United Churches, is now involved in numerous lawsuits arising from alleged physical, sexual and "cultural" abuse during the operation of those schools. 6,200 people have already sued. The figure could reach 10,000 if the courts accept seven class-action suits now pending. The potential liability is estimated at $(C)1 billion."
--- http://www.thelinkup.com/canada2.html
Why not spend an hour reading through a handful of the crimes of abuse your church donations are going to defend against. There are hundreds of reports, detailing thousands upon thousands of victims, here:
http://www.thelinkup.com/crimindex.html
Given what qualifies "religious donations", and how the money is really spent, you'll understand why I am less than impressed with studies that report religious vs. non-religious donation patterns.
> Who do you think started "The Red Cross"
> and "Doctors Without Borders"?
In both cases, not any religious organization.
Were you guessing?
From the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
"The Red Cross arose out of the work of Henri Dunant, a Swiss humanitarian, who, at the Battle of Solferino, in June 1859, organized emergency aid services for Austrian and French wounded. In his book Un Souvenir de Solferino (1862; A Memory of Solferino) he proposed the formation in all countries of voluntary relief societies, and in 1863 the International Committee for the Relief of the Wounded was created. This organization in turn spawned national Red Cross societies."
Red Cross and Red Crescent
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=64537&toc
"Doctors Without Borders was founded in 1971 by 10 French physicians who were dissatisfied with the neutrality of the Red Cross."
Doctors Without Borders
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=368593&to
If I were you I would pack that Christian smugness up somewhere where it wont embarass you again for a long long time.
Crap. I'm planning to do exactly that with a Slashcode-based site I'm developing. I thought I was the first one to think of it. :-) (Well, maybe I am ... I thought of it a few months ago, just haven't gone live yet.)
How long ago was Chips and Dips? I used to read it as well, then this site became Slashdot. I used to read every single comment from every article for the first while, then it got popular, and well, you know what has happened to the comment section. Rob, do you have any stats from Chips and Dips archived? I am curious as to how many of us Chips and Dips readers there was.
Jeff Knox
For example, if our Beloved Zesty CmdrTaco were open to the idea, I'm sure there are people who would pay to be a required slashbox, just for the hits. It's almost like a banner ad, but it could be considered valuable info.
The slashbox perhaps isn't a good example, because that genre is all about user preferences, but what if CNN were to start selling you space to put 5 headlines per day in? You maintain the data via whatever means you like. The data gets pulled from your site and links to your site, giving you tons of hits and links back to your site.
But we're talking about MAKING money to pay for current resources. Well, if you're concerned about paying for more bandwidth and more server power etc, sell some space on your page. You sell it the same way you would sell a banner ad, you get this much space, and it'll be up for this much time. if you sell it right, you'll get someone who buys the spot right under your menu for a year.
Except it's NOT a banner ad, it's a list of news headlines, or a list of recently added resources, or whatever. Something that gives THEM hits, and gives YOU money AND added content.
Why would anyone pay you for this? Well, you're looking for financing because you're presumably getting good traffic. People will pay to have their content in front of eyeballs. And if you get the right people to pay, it could significantly add to the value of your site, makeing MORE traffic, make MORE people want to pay you MORE money.
I love my job.
yadda
Simply upgrade the hardware and bandwidth to cope with increased loads but don't improve the site. I.e. Don't add more editors to a news site. Don't build a biger test lab to support a technical site just keap it efectivly the same little site but on a biger box with a fatter pipe.
What this dose is make the site running costs into known quantities. A T3 or a P4 costs $x and will only get cheaper. Your labor costs will not increse but your add revenue might.
Another side benifit of this is that it slows the rate at which new visitors are added.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Is there some way you can put a bandwidth cap in place? Say NMb/day, after that you tell people to try again later? Sure, it's not as nice an arrangement, but there's no reason to martyr yourself for your hobby.
Just junk food for thought...
I know of your site, and I used it just a few days ago to download a FreeBSD ISO. It's a great idea, and I think that yoi deserve some help.
However, I'm not sure you will be able to do it in the bounds that you have set for yourself. I realise that you want to 'give something back' to the community, and you do, but if you're doing it at an exteme loss, it's not worth it.
Saddly, I think you need to go a *bit* more commercial, and my idea for that is a 'pay-for-bandwidth' scheme. Take for example the Distro releases we've had these last few weeks -- Every site was (and probably still is) completely satturated... and if you can connect to a site, you'll only be able to get 3-4 kb a second. Now, in such a case, I would gladly pay you 5 bucks if you could give me a high-speed connection at times like those...
You could have the free stuff there, still, but you could also offer the option of users being able to download over a faster, members only connection for a small fee. Most people would jsut sign up for one month at a time or so, but still..
I'm assuming that your co-loc fees are a few hundred a month.. chances are, you would normally only make 20-30 bucks a month, but when A major distro revision is released, you could easily get a few hundred, which would offset the losses incurred in the other months.
Just a thought
.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
But, OTOH, this means that you then have to play Mr. SysAdmin, and that is usually no fun. I'm doing this now to offset the cost of a number of projects I'm running, and playing the System Adminstrator cuts quite a lot onto my code time. Not a HUGE amount, but enough to make me cranky in the morning.
The easy of being a sysadmin in a case like this varies inversely with the kind of people you're going to sublet your service to -- if they're techincal people who can handle things on they own, okay, but if they're newbies who just want to sell Furbies on-line, watch out.
.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
That would be a fine assertion if savvy business people were the only people to spend money on an established venture. The dot-com boom taught us otherwise, I thought...
Tim
that should be 'curtails' (curtains demand?)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Hello,
I was in a situation where I had a small clan of geeks on one of my NetBSD machines where I worked. I started hosting some small sites for friends, and all was cool.
When I decided to leave, I realised that I couldn't (and didn't want to) just dump everyone, so I decided to colocate. At first, I was paying the bill out of pocket, but I asked users for donations, and they were more than happy to give.
As time has gone on, I have added paying customers and now have more than 50 domains and about 100 users. The people more than pay for the colocation, and the additional money has gone to several server upgrades and additions.
Now sixgirls.org, running NetBSD on an Amiga, is actually pulling a profit and is growing nicely. People like the server because it is a community, not an impersonal ISP. People prefer to develop there because they can talk with me directly and have things they need added and updated easily.
It hasn't always been easy, but taking that first step to ask for a few dollars from those who benefit the most is the best thing to do. In my case, they were more than happy to give it.
Good luck!
One thing is to limit page content and size. you dont need a 1.2meg truecolor background, and another 500K in fluff images. Make it lean and mean, and try to make the front page static (not dynamic) oh, get rid of all java,javascript,flash,etc... If people are coming to you in droves it is not because they like your graphics and flashyness. This one change will increase your users->bandwidth ratio. also switch to thttpd (for the throttling capabilities) and only increase your bandwidth if you can afford to. Buy that 128K fractional and stick there (if you pay for amount transferred then you are being robbed) and then only upgrade when you have the cash flow to do so. (although 128K - > full T1 isnt much more money every dollar counts. I found that co-locate is usually a lose situation. they gouge you on bandwidth. put the server in your house and have the T1 installed, or rent a closet sized office in an office building. Why dont I do it anymore? selling lambdanet.com for $$$ and getting out when the frenzy was starting is where the dot.com's winners were. not during the frenzy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Or find someone who has an ISP gig and sneak a server into colocation. Either that or team up with some people on a colo. For webhosting colo is the only way to go.
I don't think I've heard anyone suggest this yet, but why not mirror the content? I mean, if the site is as popular as people say it is, couldn't you find a few people to mirror your site, then send them off to the other sites when your bandwidth use is getting high? It seems that you could cut down on bandwidth a great deal by splitting the number of people on your site by half.
-Frijoles-
Of course, CafePress has to keep their costs down so they only offer a limited selection of items and styles (I'd kill for black or blue shirts instead of white) and the base price for most items is a little too high. That notwithstanding, it's still a good idea that eliminates the risk of printing your own shirts and the hassle of running a Web shopping cart. Definitely a way to increase revenue for your site.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
Yeah, Quicktime stole my PNG association from Netscape and does a really crappy job with them. (If you just look at a PNG, it auto-scales it to fit in the window -- very bad.) And IE 5 on my laptop can only show PNGs if they're referenced as IMG tags in a document. This is 6 year old technology; what the hell is wrong with the people who develop browsers?
15% is a little much in my opinion. Would you donate to a good site using paypal or any other service? I never have, but this is what I may end up asking others to do. I feel like such a hypocrite
We are at Valueweb. We pay over $350 per month for that server.
linuxiso is in no way a commercial site. It is a hobby and service to the free software community. We would just like to find a way to not let the site drain us dry. If this was a commercial enterprise we would have sold ads long ago.
Comprendo
We already do this, sort of. We check a list of mirrors, find an open one and connect you to it. At the very beginning we hosted the iso's but we quickly saturated 3 t1's and had to stop. Just serving html and images we use around 30Gb of bandwidth a month increasing about 10% a month. Its all being hosted on a colocated raq with a K6-300 and 128 mbs of ram. We have developed a new site that we can't put up until we have a higher powered machine, hopefully in a month or two.
Rick
We will be upgrading when we switch machines. I want to make several apache changes but I need more ram in the machine before I increase Apache's memory footprint.
I'm an apache admin and developer for a living, but unfortunatly have too little time for my own site.
I have been funding my website out of my pocket, but due to growth this is going to be impossible soon. Plus, I want very much to keep the site in the good standing with all of the users, most of witch are open source advocates like myself. Colocating is pretty expensive and prices don't seem to be coming down. I would love to make the site self sufficient without the need for annoying ads or blatent commercialism. Any Ideas?
Rick
Well most sites have accomplished htis by distributing the load across various servers. Eg. a web page providing information of a non commercial nature (generally) will sprad its self across several geocities, yahoo free web etc. servers now of course this limits you in space available but files can always be linked to elsewhere ... are there any scriptable ftp clients out there? Can I creat a script that will on a regular basis process a director for changes and then post it to 32 different ftp servers on a "bite size basis" limit each server to 4 meg and then just keep rotating along? Not even sur eif that makes any sense but I'll assume that some of you will at least be able to methodically interpret it
I believe your question was 'how not to lose money', as opposed to the ever popular 'how to make money' The guy who posted about lessening your graphics and stuff was right. It makes sense... Shop around for webhosts! Do you NEED a dedicated server, or will virtual hosting be sufficient? There are great deals out there for people who just need virtual hosting. My current webhost is $10 a month, no limits, full PHP + MySQL. If you get a modest amount, then I would guess this is for you. Plus, going the virtual hosting route, you don't have to worry about routers, hardware, or any of that garbage anyway.
Sig missing. Reward.
I was wondering if there's an archive of Chips&Dips, or has that resource been lost to history...
Sorry, but that is just the way taxes work. You don't get to pick and choose where they go. I'd prefer that my taxes not subsidize spectrum bandwith so that religious entities can have a couple of channels on every broadcast system in the US.
Ever called your cable operator and asked them why you have to pay for religious channel 94, which broadcasts some Brazilian guy with Portugese accent sermonizine in Spanish? "Because we have to" is the answer you'll get. Same goes for local access channels... they bring in 0.00 revenue for your cable operator, but the government tell them they gotta have provide it.
There was a good article on Kuro5hin a while ago entitled Website profitability: an economic analysis which discussed how a website's popularity can crush it if its bandwidth costs exceed its revenue from banner ads. Basically the author tackles your suggestion to lighten up pages with some hard math. It also had a really good discussion.
If you're planning on offloading some of your bandwidth to your ISP, be sure that it's ok with your ISP's Terms of Service. Some ISP/web space providers expressly forbid linking to images from an outside page, others simply state that there can be no "hidden files" (i.e. that all files must at least be linked to somewhere on your site). Take the extra time to find out what you can get away with, otherwise you might one day find that all the images on your site fail to load. :-)
;-)
On the other hand, I believe that you should invest a fair amount of time and effort into streamlining your site as much as possible. Not only will it cut down on your costs and server load, you can tell your visitors you did it for their own benefit, so they can have a faster, more navigable site. Great PR stuff.
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Just convince them you are Don Corleone. The favors just start rolling in.
--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
You could possibly find other sites that are having marginal success and simliar problems. At that point you make a collective effort to share costs and profits.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Associate programs can provide a small source of funds. If you can merchandise books, etc. related to your content, you can pull in a fair amount of cash. Amazon.com's associates program pays 15% of the sale price of books bought immediately after coming from your site. B&N.com and others also have associate programs.
If you're talking about needing a few hundred dollars a month in income to pay for the cost of operating the site and you have a good amount of traffic, it might be a good option.
"Bob, what's that on your screen. Are you reading a technical website again? Damn it, I'm paying you to watch this porn site. Now get back to work!"
1) Sell your website to a large corporation.
2) Buy a few hot cars to impress the chix with.
3) Sit back and let the site run itself.
It's a scam, I know, but it's been done before and should probably work again.
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
if this (www.clanbob.net) is your website (as picked from the email adr.), then the only thing you need to do is cut the freaking Flash!!! And all those graphics!
that would *really* cut down your bandwidth. That is all well of course, if there is anything left afterwards...
cheers,
Roland
I would use it, but it seems that it lags behind the Apache release schedule.
Any idea if that functionality will eventually be rolled into the Apache source?
--
We're trying to come up with something like a public access Akamai system for web publishers to keep these small things going. Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/web2project
--
OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
I guess the only solution to this problem is the kind of 'tipping' like Mandrake is trying to install in their Mandrakeexpert. If I'm really happy about a site, I wouldn't mind paying a small amount of money (say 2 $), after downloading/reading advice/... if I could do it on an easy way. Something like a central organisation (with a very secure system) that would provide such a service to websites would be ideal. If a site is usefull for you can just 'tip' the webmaster. BTW: Rick: you have a great site, I own you a lot more than 2 $ (problem: I live in Belgium, hard to make donations...)
:)
I think you can send tips using any credit card or debit card (at least through PayDirect), but to recieve a tip you need a US-based credit card or debit card. I'm not sure what US-based means, but I think it's possible to get a US-based credit card in Europe. If you happen to know please tell me
The shareholder is always right.
But I feel its my duty to inform you that speakeasy, rock solid as it is, has included in most if not all DSL packages, redundant 24/7 nation wide 56K dialup support, in the off chance that you really really needed to email your boss or whatever and felt speakeasy was letting you down in this crucial 7 minute period of downness. Any account with a shell account can certainly dialup, the others I'm not so sure about.
-Daniel
Dynamic web pages let you give each viewer different information. Caching lets you give different people the *same* information. Most ISPs and most corporate firewalls do a lot of caching, so if you can manage your application to maximize the amount of cacheable material, that helps. Fruhead.com has done a good job of minimizing unnecessary graphics and frills, and seems to do a lot of for discussion-board applications, which do need to be pretty dynamic, though there are sometimes ways to hack around that. So this advice isn't very helpful to you, but for lots of sites it makes a big difference.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You've got the infrastructure set up already, so just sell some space and bandwidth to people for sites that probably aren't going to pull much traffic. Charge enough for hosting and get enough low traffic sites, and it'll pay for your high traffic, no profit site. But then you do have the extra hassle of actually being a business, and needing to deal with clients.
Experiments must be reproducible; they should all fail in the same way.
I've been reading through a lot of these articles, and I seem to agree with the basic notion: a good business plan is a necessary but not sufficient requirement to be profitable. And, yes, the business plan needs to entail the sale of some sort of good, product or service to someone else in exchange for money. That's how this all works. But what about this whole "information wants to be free" mentality that (like it or not) is at the root of the 'net?
I did some studying at Cal on the economics of technology, which had a rather robust section on the economic properties of information. A lot of this was later used to justify the phenomenal performance of the economy at the time -- information is perfectly replicable and sharable leading to unparalleled workforce efficiencies, yadda yadda ya. But this leads me back to the other side of studying economics...those who get paid survive, the rest fall to the wayside. So, in fact HOW DO YOU SURVIVE as a business??? Without the construct of artificial price supports or tarrifs, or some sort of new technology that eliminates the economic advantage of information...what's there to do? Find something that makes your business unique (truly unique, not "one-clickable") and build brand value. Amazon.com never became Coca-cola, and may never get the chance to. In some cases, your businesses positioning is all that will set you apart for your competitors. Be unique, offer value. If you want to play the commodity game (like selling a book) then I think you're fucked.
At some point in our near future, information will dominate our lives in ways that we can't even understand yet. It will reshape global economies--not terribly unlike the bullshit the MarchFirst and Razorfish fed us for years except for the fact that *they* won't get paid. Maybe this is Marxism after all
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
I like the Yahoo model myself. Very little graphics (requiring low band width) and using open source servers to run it (bsd). If you are getting enough traffic to have to spend more money on bandwidth then I hope you are at least selling something that is making money or charging for people to view the site.
"With enough memory and hard drive space, anything in life is possible!"
Voluntary donations is probably the best way to go.
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Begging is not a bad idea. Look at public broadcasting. It has survived for *decades* on 90% donations.
Politely remind people that your web site is a service. It does not even have to be in words. The hard part is making it painless for your visitors to make a donation.
For example, Slashdot could make a "Donations" Slashbox with a few quick selections like $0.50, $1, and $5, or a text box to allow you to enter in your own amount. Your account preferences *could* (not would) store your PayPal account number. With this you could just set just click three times and you've donated a small amount of money to Slashdot.
If your web site has 50 loyal (like how you read Slashdot) visitors. Assuming they all donate $1 every other month. That's $25 per month. Now scale that up to 200 loyal visitors. That's $100 per month; about twice the cost of web hosting, with $50 extra for management and so forth.
"What's Bob reading over there at his desk? Is that a porn site?"
"No, it's a tech site...I'm just reading the articles--REALLY!"
Caveat emptor...
... I've heard numbers for banner ads on porn sites isn't bad, 3-6 cents per. Serious. Plus click-through subscriptions are worth $30 each.
Of course, this isn't exactly the kind of thing you want to see on, say, Games For Kids Website.
Post the link to your web site. You'll get a good idea of how expensive it will be if it's ever successful. You'll know how much funding you'll need.
Should I add a :) for the humor impared.
--TyI don't know how well MSIE uses it though.
The HTTP spec has lots of ways for your browser (or any cache for that matter) to be able to hold on to content.
Two examples are the
Expires:
and
Cache-Control: max-age
headers. I'm not talking about meta tags, but actual headers in the request.
See section 14.9 of RFC2616 for more info.
--TyI have no answers. I have a very large problem. I think it's one more and more sites are going to encounter in the next couple of years.
I'm working on the re-work of ARKive; an educational site about biodiversity and cute animals, with lots of streamed video. At present, the old site has no hits, and no real problems in funding the bandwidth. The problems start if our traffic grows at all, and the volume of available video increases as planned. The projected bandwidth charges are truly scary, and this is just a small site.
Broadband is a real threat to us, yet simultaneously our real justification for offering video. Even in sleepy old England, enough of the mass-market consumers are switching to local broadband that they can look at seriously large consumption -- our charges for server-side bandwidth haven't dropped at anything like the same rate. Potentially, if we're successful and popular, serving all this content could burn our cash reserves in a very short time.
So what's to be done ? Does it really mean that the only viable way to offer high quality video is by either drastic bandwidth throttling (first dozen people each month get to see it, then the lights go out), or by pay-per-view ?
Unlike some sites, I have throttling measures so that at least we won't receive an unexpectedly large hosting bill at month-end. There are plenty of horror stories though of people, usually the little guys, who've had a sudden content spike and found themselves whacked with a serious and unexpected bill.
I run a community site for fans of the band Moxy Fruvous called Fruhead.Com. The site is very popular, getting around a half a million hits a month, almost all of them dynamic pages. After bouncing back and forth getting screwed by various web hosting companies ("sorry, your site is just too busy, buhbye!"), I managed to find a generous user with a very fast DSL connection who offered to host the site from his apartment. It's been quite reliable, although not as much as a dedicated connection. But so what? It's a free site, and if it goes down for a couple hours it's not like I'm losing money or customers.
I'm hoping to move to a dedicated server someday, but not until prices come down. It'd be really nice to find a hosting company to host non-profit websites without the unreal markups they give to commercial sites. Any takers?
---
Josh Woodward
Josh Woodward
Shayne
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
I can think of three ways to pay for your site:
1) Sell advertising on the site. (Like how NBC pays for itself)
2) Switch to being subscription based, and charge your readers a fee. (Like HBO)
3) Keep the site free to view, and free of advertising, but beg your readers for voluntary donations. (PBS)
If you had trouble understanding that, let me run the sentence though Altavista's TacoFish:
English to Malda:
--
--
I like to watch.
along with incentives like the option to turn banner ads off for registered users
I like that idea! (one of those nice simple ideas you wish you'd thought of yourself). I guess it'd be easy to knock up some simple code (maybe a cookie with a "noadd" in it) and then before calling the add check for the existence of this. Yup - so what would you pay for this at an average smallish site you visit often - $20 a year? $10? Reasonable?
- Very sparse graphics, and in small palette of colours to reduce size of
.gifs.
- HTML code on a page kept as simple as possible. No chaff.
- Cascading style sheet instead of formatting inline or styles redeclared on each page.
- Information per page kept as concise as possible. Extra information that is not always wanted isn't sent down unrequested (eg: details popup on the listing).
- An AvantGo channel with caches set many days ahead: it will download from AvantGo's cached server 99% of the time, not here.
- A PalmOS application of the content which will only run up the bandwidth for the tiny initial download and then subsequent update packs.
- A WML port, which only draws only a trickle of bandwidth, since pages are so tiny.
- And no banner ads (they suck up bandwidth too, as well as slow things down especially if offsite).
Best of luck with your free website, Robert---
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
Minor sidenote: png support in Netscape 4.x is pretty spotty at best. YMMV. But still, you'd only be pissing off ~15% of your traffic (unless _all_ of your visitors are using non-IE platforms).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I'll leave the details on e-gold to your search engine.
The idea that interests me is the possibility of micropayments as low as 5 cents (possibly smaller) with a lot more convenience than PayPal and some of the other electronic payment systems. The transaction cost is 1/2 of a percent, with a maximum transaction fee of fifty cents no matter how large the transaction.
This could allow payment for content without the need for a twenty or thirty dollar subscription when you only want to read one article or only want one-time access to the site.
I'm curious as to whether anyone else has considered this specific payment mechanism. At first glance, it seems that it allows a number of new business models that actually work.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
We haven't posted to /. and our traffic levels are tiny! Perhaps if you'd sent your "ask slashdot" question to Microsoft Support, you too could be basking in absolutely no increase in traffic.
Next time...
--
Tarkwyn.
I've been running loveblender.com for a while now. I have some banner exchange ads there just as to try to keep up some new blood incoming traffic. Places like http://www.ezpublishing.com/ and http://www.arrowweb.net/ say they have no bandwidth limits... I don't know how they pull it off. The total cost is less than $200 year. The biggest tradeoff is that both only give you a finite amount of diskspace (50-200meg depending on the plan), you can't just throw in extra disk. But they do take care of all the administrative hassle!
--
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
You should probably consider just capping the bandwidth somehow. You can write something so that your site will return a friendly error page if it surpasses a popularity threshold (concurrent hits, etc). Then as you get donations you can give it more resources.
In the long term though, you really will have to be creative about getting a residual income out of it. It used to be that the money you could get from ad banners would offset bandwidth costs, but I'm under the impression that is rarely true now. Think about a way that other businesses could benefit from your resources and approach them... like how hotornot refers people to homepage providers.
tune
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
Sounds like a good idea, but I'd imagine you'd have to already have a popular site to be deamed worthy of their sponsorship. They want to be associated with top sites not a bunch of nobodies. The question is will the advertising revenue you bring in for them outweigh the cost of equipment/services they give you, and will you screw up and give them a bad name. They'd probably want to monitor any sites they sponsored so the number of sponsorships would need to be kept low.
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I did a quick seatch, this may also be interesting:
www.w3.org/TR/WD-Micropayment-Mark
Micropayment is the best way I think, instead of getting 2ct from a banner, you might as well get 1ct directly from the user.
(-% TwistedMind %-)
- Promotion costs: Never paid a cent. Submitted it to a few search engines and people started finding it. Also emailed a few likely-looking sites and got reciprocal links. People recommend to each other, portals add links, traffic shoots up. Last week was 1.3GB in 223000 hits (almost all of it dynamically generated). Admittedly, a good proportion of this was Googlebot.
- Hosting costs: Very moderate: roughly the cost of a cup of coffee per day (depending on your café).
- Revenue: Not much needed (see above). It is very important to us that the users see us as being on their side, so this means no banner ads or other explicit commercialisation. The only revenue-earning item is a Books page which lists a few relevant books with Amazon links, plus a generic Amazon search button with the message "If you want to support us, use this button when you want to buy books, because we get a percentage". And people do, and it more or less pays for the site.
Universalis isn't necessarily very typical, because the cost of the content itself is zero (I do it, plus users write in and offer to help- inspiring in itself, since the email address is pretty well hidden); but it's worth noting that even nowadays, if you keep costs right down and get people on your side, you really can give a lot of benefit to a lot of people without it costing you too much.It's hard to say considering the question did not say what kind of web site it was. I would think the advice would be different if it was an alternative sales site like Amazon or an Informational news site like USATODAY.com, Review site, Geek News site like /., etc.
I have a friend that runs a popular game review/ chat/ discussion type website and he pays the bills by selling trinkets like Tshirts, Caps, Mousepads, bumper stickers, custom Linux distros (NOT), etc. that show off the website logo..etc..etc..
Off the top of my head I would think it would be good to spread your high bandwidth content like pictures, downloads, etc...to multiple alternative or even free or low cost hosts.
I think a better question would be: "What web hosting provider(s) give me the most bang for my buck....."
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
The cost of an SDSL line - even at T1 capacity - is pretty cheap, all told, compared to standard hourly tech consulting fees. It should take you less than a day's work a month to pay for it, or only a few hours' if you're at, say 384 - which is enough for a mostly text, moderately trafficed site. And you can get rid of any current dial-in or cable or ADSL line, save a little there. Of course, the whole thing is a business expense, too, for taxes.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
>with the exception of VB funding hmm... I didn't know Visual Basic was a revenue source... =) That might change around my opinion entirely... And yes, just "joshing" I know what he/she meant... e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Have a look at www.livejournal.com.
Briefly, it's a free site that allows you to write a journal that other members (and the general public) can read. It's a little more interesting than that, but I can't really do it justice.
ANYWAY, they've set it up as a free site and given their users the option of paying $25 to use the site. I think only 2% of the (now) 100,000 or so users have paid, but they have enough money to keep upgrading servers and have even started paying some of the staff, who up until now were working for free.
Well unfortuantely, it really depends on what you basis of business is...the real truth is that a site that lives by providing free access is doomed in the web these days. At least unless its supported by other services that pay its cost of existance.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
If it's software, perhaps divide and conquor.
I suspect powerful hardware can solve your problem, as /. proves MySQL can handle the
traffic.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
Try to come up with services related to your site's expertise business users would pay for. :)
An example of this model is www.dlsreports.com. They have a great collection of network troubleshooting tools (the kind usally run from the outside). Everything a residential user needs is free, but if somebody wants extra stuff such as 24 x 7 network monitoring, they charge for it.
Besides, selling services based on open source software, isn't it sweet?
it looks like the field guide for the hunting trip already exists. *shudder*
Diversifying your content is always a plus. You must realize that Slashdot is owned by/a part of Andover.net. Not only is the content of slashdot interesting to many, which bumps up the overhead-- but it also helps interest the public in certain types of products (often sold by the wonderful people at ThinkGeek -- oh wait...hmm, Andover.net again). Banner ads are all well and good, but banner ads for products you sell...what do you have to lose? If your content has a specific purpose or goal, make or buy products that you can sell at a profit, and turn that profit around into your bandwidth, hardware, and maintainence costs. You may be thinking, "Duh, no sh**." But then...quit thinking and go do it. :)
It's actually +2, Realistic. Try running a content site and you'll find out soon enough.
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
Humor. Very nice. Upward mod, anyone?
If you approach the powers thay be the right way they will see this as a cheap way of keeping you in the company.
When negotiating such a deal, remember that it's expensive to have good hosting and connectivity but it's cheap to share the excess bandwith of such a connection.
The largest scale example of this is Philip Greenspun who not only uses what equals a T1 of MIT bandwith but received a large HP9000 server for free to run the site.
There are plenty of decent sites like Geocities out there that provide sorta-web-hosting for free...
...well, hate to sound harsh, but it seems to make sense to me that you're on your own... for now.
If that isn't good enough, and you want to do your own PHP/SQL stuff...
Perhaps in a few years, these free web hosting services will allow such features, but until then...
Really bad thing is that they caught me just as I was starting to expand my site and bring other ones online. Now I'm trying to figure out how to cover the cost of hosting & bandwidth.
And paypal donations are a joke guys. I added a tipjar over a month ago. Net income: $3.00.
I'm surprised more sites don't use mod_gzip (available through modules.apache.org. Most browsers currently in use can uncompress gzip'd content before rendering it. Since html compresses very well, unless your site is mostly graphics, mod_gzip can often reduce your overall bandwidth by 50% or more, at the cost of some cpu cycles.
Gradually turn your website into one of an 'adult' nature, and then sell subscriptions! No one will ever notice - www.picturesofron.com used to be pictures of me rambling through the hills of Scotland. Now look at it!
Microsoft - not all bad.
Now, UGO has paid half (repeat: HALF) of what was due for December, and the fundraiser helped as well.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hmmm... Build a battlebot, get said bot a juicy sponsorship, then take the money and buy new servers?
/*drunk.. fix later*/
The cost of keeping a website up is astronomical in terms of labor and money, particularly if you want to host a server from home... and, then, time spent on building in new features is many hours of coding. Not to mention DoS'ing, crapflooding, etc. that comes with the territory.
Now, you can solicit donations without nonprofit status, but if you're appealing to the community at large, you'll want to reassure the community that the IRS is keeping you in check and you're not going to walk off with their money.
I recommend tossing the banner ads unless you want to fully anger your users. There's no reason to use banner ads today unless you want to be viewed negatively.
CD-ROMs are good, though burning CD-ROMs is time-consuming and hellacious if your equipment is down. You're going to want to use another computer to do that, as I've tried to burn CDs on my webserver and... um... it's just not happening.
T-Shirts are great if you have a witty idea, but forking out $400 for x number of shirts sucks if they're just sitting there day after day because no one wants to buy them. So, also consider whether you want to/can afford to hold inventory or not.
Lucas
One way to keep the cost down is to write smarter code. Stop doing text searches with your SQL statements if you can prevent it, use numbers, limit your text fields... all sorts of little tricks you can do to speed things up a great deal so you can handle the growing demand and only need to upgrade to better hosting services every once in a great while.
As another poster mentioned, these are all good suggestions. Although, a growing website has two other costs that rise rapidly as traffic increases - equipment and operations (people).
/. not long ago regarding using this. It helps alot when the browser supports it. And finally, consider converting images to PNG's. They compress really well and are supported on all the v4 and v5 browsers.
Equipment costs can be redcued substantially by taking an honest look at your site and deciding whether you really need every page to be PHP (in other words, are you parsing every page just so you can say "Hi, Allen"?). Static page delivery is extremely efficient. Can you, for example, frequently refresh pages instead of dynamically generating them? If a page gets more than one hit per minute, you can still reduce resource usage by regenerating it every minute.
People costs can be reduced by making the investment (some time, some money) to automate as many repetitive tasks as possible - log rolling, content updates, backups, purges, etc. There are quite a few free tools out there to automate these tasks - you just have to invest the time to learn them and install them properly. Also, install BigBrother or other monitoring tools to understand what things break frequently so you can fix them once instead of over and over again until you suddenly think to yourself, "Oh no, not again!".
Oh, and on the bandwidth issue - you might consider using "Content-encoding: gzip" where possible (there's an Apache module for this). I'm too lazy to look it up, but there was a discussion on
Actually, theres a corillary to this:
Make sure that you are properly using the Cache-control and Expires directives. I managed to cut the bandwidth utilization of a major website by 15% by properly configuring the web server to allow AOL to cache images. While not allowing anyone to cache your pages sounds like a good idea at first, it drives your bandwidth way up. Also, using "Pragma: No-cache" is not a substitute. HTTP compliant proxy caches will ignore this as it is supposed to be a browser directive, not a proxy directive.
Uh, the governemnt doesn't subsidize that. The FCC has required (the "must-carry" rule) cable companies to give the broadcast outlets free access to their cable system. I believe that this rule has been repealed, though.
This has happened already, to a certain extent. HP was running ads a while back for Amazon with the main point being that Amazon runs HP servers (it was also an ad for Amazon, though HP paid for it).
Things you can try:
:)
1) Tell your ISP that you found a better deal somewhere else. Then try to bargain the price they are charging you.
2) Strike a deal with your ISP where you advertise their hosting service - in return they slash the prices of the hosting cost.
3) Break up your site to two. Have two cheaper ISP's instead of one expensive one (sounds crazy but I've seen it done) where text is on a different server than multimedia.
4) Inform the users of the site that you can no longer keep up with the demand so you have to limit some features of your site until you receive proper funding (then of course ask for donations)
5) Call that rich uncle of yours and tell him that you're sitting on a gold mine - then ask for money
I have yet to discover the real reason why farts linger longer in an office environment
Whatever you do, don't take free information you got from your visitors, then lock it up and CHARGE them to get to it. Don't be a net-dweeb. There are a lot of good strategies on this list, follow them. If it comes down to you charging for illicit-gained info or closing shop....have some ethics and close shop. Distribute your DB on CD. www.eqmaps.com should rot in hell. I hope their user-traffic clicks to zero.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
http://www.equalfooting.com/
http://www.sba.gov/financing/
Something to ponder: if there is a problem with making money from the site now, are you confident that loans or gov grants to expand capacity will help? These sources of cash (as well as investors / acquirers) represent a only part of making an online business work.
I run several sites, which do make money. If you have a reasonably large throughput of visitors, then consider well placed book/video links to Amazon/Blackstar/Whereever. It surprises me how much traffic these generate, for the little work it takes to put them in. These can include the "Support this site by using these links to buy your books" approach and after a review of a book/video particular links for that item. (My CGI customises these links to the most appropriate link for the customer - eg in the US video links go to Amazon, for the rest of the world to Blackstar).
What concerns me is the ability to spell concerns
Oh no...they say he's got to go
I know everyone gets mad when people suggest this, but heaven forbid a website have a revenue model. There are alternative payment schemes out there. I have been working for a company that provides such a service. Clickshare (http://www.clickshare.com) provides people with the ability to charge very low prices for content without the hassles of having to deal with credit card transactions. I am not just saying this cause I work there, I took this job becuase I saw that this was a solution to many a content driven yet revenue-less web companies. Free info is nice, but keeping a site alive is a little more imporatant. I would much rather get some stuff for free and pay for some premium services than lose a resourse all together. just my $.02, this one's for free :)
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
another dotcom problem is the technical expertise of the employees of some companies. they are, frankly, below average in technical ability or understanding, have no wish to extend their limited knowledge, and always looking for a fast buck. i do agree with the post, and i think sites that encounter these financial difficulties after 'organic' growth are paying the penalty for all the failed, get rich quick, bad ideas that went before them. ps my use of 'average' is in a different context to that used in the parent...
So far, I think that only works for battlebots.
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Try to do as the others old-fashioned types of media always do, treat users as audience:
Of course you don't need to implant all these items, but some of them would be nice. And you would easyly raise some funds.
I know it's not easy to annouce some of these changes to your audience, but if you want to raise funds to keep you service running, it's really necessary. Try to ask them what they think, the ones who really matters will surely answer very proudly.
hope to help...
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
My site makes around 4x server costs with banner ads alone... Sure it's not as easy to make huge profits with banners anymore but surely you can cover costs...
Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein. www.woofcat.com
Like most real-world businesses, the trick is to diversify your income streams -- McDonald's doesn't just sell plain hamburgers, nor should you expect to make money from just one source. Advertising + Reader Donations + merchandising = just about enough to stay afloat.
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goats.com: better than
The way I figure it, you should pay what it's worth to you, and if it's not worth anything to you, and you still read the site and go through the trouble of registering and shutting off the ads, then you're not the sort of person those advertisers want anyway.
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goats.com: better than
I also run a website that has gotten popular in the last little while. Started from a $20/month virtual web server account and went through all the growing pains all the way to our own dedicated server parked at an ISP. First thing your learn the hard way is there is no ISP that offers "unlimited bandwidth". We are pushing 350 Giga Bytes a month with peak loads of 7Mbits/sec so this really is the major cost. We pay about $2.30 US/Gig with a 100Mbit connection. So our costs are around a $1000 US and growing. Compared to the top server hardware that you could lease for $100 a month the Bandwidth is the real cost pig. Anyone have any suggestions on getting cheaper bandwidth for say a 10Mbit pipe? Thanks
Hmmm, howzabout a radical new-new economic idea called "Supply & Demand" ???? While the cost of /duplicating/ software is so low as to be nearly free, unless you make an artificially scarce supply by enforcing expensive licenses which simutaneously curtains demand (except for pirates) AND generates the revenue needed to grow a business - you are eventually going to run into some kind of supply limits. Those are the costs your going to have to offset somehow, either thru micropayments or donations. All the 'new' economists are re-discovering TANSTAAFL, altho the recent techno advances have drastically reduced distribution costs to where it appeared to be 'free' - what we are now running into is the bottom limits of 'free', becoming disinterested in subsidizing a 'free' service with income from a day job, volunteer work, etc, etc, etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Also, as a side note, you can dramatically decrease bandwidth for pages with lots of HTML (like half-empty's front page) and only some small (cachable) sparse images via GZip compression. In the past when I've mentioned this to webmasters they're usually pretty surprised, never hearing of it before. Netscape 4, IE5, and Mozilla all support client side page decompression via GZip, and all it takes is an Apache plugin (or for servlets, I had to write it myself) to send the right headers along with the compressed data. It won't break on older browsers, it's just sends the uncompressed pages. A 35k front page (something I was feeling REALLY guilty about) now serves up at around 6k, and everyone breathes a lot easier.
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If you have growing traffic and you don't actually offer merchandise or any other business plan of your own then you should try looking for sponsors. This offers a way for companies that can actually profit in good old-fashioned ways to have a pleasing advertising channel. I beleive this is probably why VA Linux bought Slashdot and similar geek sites at least in part.
...' buttons here and there in obvious but non-obtrusive spots on your site linking back to your sponsors site.
You don't need to actually be bought or display ad banners to make this work. Simply find a company profiting off a similar theme as your site that won't actually conflict with what you offer and ask them to sponsor you and offer to put 'Sponsored by
If you can't find a sponsor consider making one for yourself. For instance I am a web developer so to help sponsor my non-commercial sites I have links from those sites to my business homepage. Some of these sites were created just for that purpose.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Other than that, as someone else said here, cut down the amount of graphics you are using, that will really help on bandwidth consumption. One thing that I tried on the pictures section of my site was to not have any thumbnails on the pages, but instead fo use Javascript popup windows for the pictures. This has two benefits:
- No thumbnails loading reduces bandwidth consumption.
- A popup prevents someone from loading a picture into their current browser window, pressing back to return to the list of puctures, and possibly reloading that same page because their browser is retarded/configured badly.
Just my $.02, from the perspective of someone who gets >150,000 hits/month on his website...--
Allow me to summarize your problem.
'We do something for people for free, and it's really popular.. gee.. how can we keep it going now that we can't afford to do this free thing for everyone out of our pockets anymore?'
Charge the users. Don't think they'll pay? Get sponsors. Don't think they're interested? Then perhaps there is no reason to keep it going.
I've donated to some sites using PayPal before. I really think that's a great way to help out a site, put up some PayPal links and say "If you like the site, please donate an amount you feel comfortable with".
The great thing about PayPal for donations is that I don't have to worry about sending my CC number to some strange site, and since it's a donation I don't have to worry about receiving something in return. For those kind of one-way small transactions, you can't beat PayPal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are you kidding? These days it's easy to get money! Venture capitalists are just throwing money after people who have even a vague business plan!
First you need to get a flashy management team, create a company with a name ending in .com, and mention Linux, P2P or B2B if possible. I'd say something like "linuxp2pweb.com", then just go out there with a big money bag and start taking VC money. It's a no-lose situation. Nobody expects web companies to make money yet anyhow. If that many people are visiting your site then it must be a good thing, and will eventually make money somehow, right?
Of course, with all that money you'll need to advertise to bring in even more people to your site. Note: it doesn't matter if each visitor costs you money, because the secret is you'll make it all back in volume. The best way to get people to notice you is to create a flashy ad and air it during the superbowl. Sure it's expensive, but you have to spend money to make money, right? The best ads are the ones targeted to gen-x-ers. Make sure to avoid mentioning anything about your site other than your domain name -- anything else is sure to be ignored by the viewers.
Meanwhile you need to hire more people to proactively grow the mindshare of your site while leveraging your fundamental skillset. Ideally everyone you hire should be under 23. Any older than that and they'll bring along too much baggage and obsess about "standards", "security" and "planning".
Anyhow, good luck (like you'll need it). You couldn't be entering this business at a better time!
Why is it a scam, why are they crooked for doing so?
Amazon charges a 15% fee to give YOUR MONEY to a site you want to support financially. So while passing the plate around to the Internet community, they are taking 15% of your offerings as a fee. In the spirit of, uh, supporting independent content sites? Sorry, that is much too high a fee to be anything but a scam.
And you know this because you run a similar site where you charge 5% and are in the black? Perhaps you've done complicated revenue and cost estimates that you just forgot to share with us? Or maybe god just revealed Amazon's accounting statements to you?
I'm stunned at the number of people on the Internet who appear to believe that hardware, bandwidth, staff, and capital are delivered by pixies in the middle of the night. At 15% I'd bet they are currently losing money, and won't break even until they are doing a fair bit more volume. For all the contribute-via-Amazon sites I've looked at, none of them has collected as much as a couple thousand bucks, and most are a lot less.
And don't forget mod_gzip which gzips content for any browser that will accept it transparently. Users don't have to download anything new or do anything different, but your bandwidth bill drops like a stone. One of my clients tried it and reduced bandwidth by 60% overall. It rocks!
Optimizing your site for better caching can also save a good portion of the bandwith of your site. Check out:. ph p
_ sr c.html
A pa che_Gzip_Auto_compress_web.html
http://www.mnot.net/ for good tips.
Also, you can use gzip compression on both static and dynamic pages to save bandwith, with basically no cost for static pages (only compressed once) and little for dynamic pages. Computing power is cheaper then bandwith at this point.
http://www.linux.ie/articles/tutorials/mod_gzip
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/apache/gzip/get
http://thingy.kcilink.com/modperlguide/modules/
or just search for mod_gzip or the like under google.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Maybe you already got a close look at this, but if not, you should definitely write a good tutorial on caching... It is just amazing how a web site which is nicely set up for caching can save on bandwidth (which is, I assume, your primary cost) ... and that's true even when you serve more or less personalized content.
All you need to do is make sure URLs are unique and totally define what's in the page, set up a good caching policy for all your site and watch your bandwidth costs go doooooown.
Amazon, for those who don't know, has offered to function like a crooked church elder, passing the offering plate around for various content sites like Andrew Sullivan's, ModernHumorist and other content sites. If you want to make a credit card based donation to these sites, you can do so using Amazon's "Tip Jar" system.
Why is it a scam, why are they crooked for doing so?
Amazon charges a 15% fee to give YOUR MONEY to a site you want to support financially. So while passing the plate around to the Internet community, they are taking 15% of your offerings as a fee. In the spirit of, uh, supporting independent content sites? Sorry, that is much too high a fee to be anything but a scam.
If you want to support these sites, like Andrew Sullivan or Modern Humorist, do yourself a favor and mail them a check or money order. Don't enrich Amazon and some credit card companies in the process of supporting content you enjoy, it just ain't right.
Amazon.com- The Relentless Pursuit of a Business Model.
You want to know where most of the money given to churches actually goes, even if it renders your clichéd comment irrelevant?
Feeding the poor. Healing the sick. Housing the homeless. Yeah, I know it sucks to have someone distort the picture with facts, but such is life. The money raised by churches isn't going to put another layer of gold-paint on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, nimrod. Who do you think started "The Red Cross" and "Doctors Without Borders"? Linux Torvalds?
Here is a statement I'd like to see you contest. You're average devout Christian is giving a lot more of his or her income to charitable causes than your average Slashdot reader (no, buying clothing from ThinkGeek doesn't count as a charitable contribution, nerds). Hmmm. They must be doing it because their pastors tell them if they don't, they'll go to Hell, right?
It really sucks when the nature of your online business enterprise is to run in direct opposition to Divine Favour.
The religious sites at least have the additional avenue of prayer to explore when the money starts running tight.
It's not surprising that they didn't publish that article. It sounds very similar to one that they published over two months earlier.
If we can build momentum for projects such as this one and this one, this problem could be alleviated. Right now, small web publishers are hurting because they do not have the resources to serve content to millions of browsers, each of whom is just a resource drain. But, turn each of those browsers into a little mini-server, and the more people read your site - the more copies of your pages exist, and hence, the fewer resources you need to provide to serve them.
Can your IM do this?
Seriously though, you either have to get on to subscription based services, donations or merchandising (or any combination of the three) to make money right now as a little guy
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crazy dynamite monkey
Once again, welcome to the team!
Someone you trust is one of us.
If you control the webserver itself somewhat, you can just use mod_gzip, which can compress pretty much everything and doesn't have the same problems that the compression in PHP sometimes has.
g zi p/
http://www.remotecommunications.com/apache/mod_
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Not necessarily. If someone buys your site, then obviously they already have some ideas on how to grow revenue with it. After all, no savvy business person would spend money on an established venture without first doing an audit of the books, the business model, etc. Selling the site could be a way to grow the brand by putting it in more capable marketing hands.
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
Don't the flycast ads pay much?
I know mine don't... but i thought that was 'cause I had a few hundred users seeing thousands of pages per month each... you must have thousands seeing one or two a day...
BlackNova Traders
Heh... www.goats.com is an actual comic strip... pretty funny too.
BlackNova Traders
Could you provide a link to back up your claim? I find it hard to believe. Why would Amazon use a micropayment system? Their primary business is selling merchandise.
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Having said that, I still wish you the best of luck in your efforts.
Yes, well, obviously enough I disagree with Jakob Nielsen. In a word where people put advertisements in airline dinners, ATM screens and, horrifically enough, other advertisements*, I hardly think Internet advertising is going to have zero value.
I'd be surprised if mass-market Web ads ever get back up to the $40-50 CPM wishful thinking of 1998, but I don't see any reason that they couldn't level out at about $2 CPM. I'm told that that's about the price range of a billboard ad, and that's about how much impact your average banner ad has.
*I'm referring to my current pet peeve, the little "preview" scanner for the video games at Wal-Mart. In essence, you're asking Wal-Mart to show you an ad for the video game, but first they have to show you a different ad for toothpaste or something. At this rate we're going to reach the point where they won't give you your change unless you sit still and listen to them yammer on about their specials for a couple minutes.
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
I'd like to see browser tech that helps out, as well. I like a page with some pretty pictures (such as Slashdot's title, and the topic pics). Since I visit SlashDot everyday, I wish my browser would hold onto the images, so I wouldn't have to download them again, while flushing the ads that I download one times and look at zero times.
Microsoft was never one to cut down on bloat, however, so I doubt MSIE will get any smarter in the future. Is there any standards work out there to deal with this kind of problem?
There are real Christians still left, but they are becoming fewer and fewer. Havn't you ever watched the many "Christian" cable networks? They are more like 24 hour infomercials selling prayers and blessings. Religion is in a sad state overall.
The argument is irrelevant, however. We were talking about using these religious tactics to make ourselves rich, in our own lines of work, which is something I would like very much to do.
I am an ordained reverend, after all. :)
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You, the web site owner sign up for it, then you provide a link on your page through which people can send you micropayments.
Don't know if this link really works, Amazon has one messed up system, I can't tell which links are real and which ones are dynamically generated for my personal account, which it somehow associated with me even through a re-install. There is more than just cookies at work there, scary. Link
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Hey, instead of leaving this cyber-darwinism to natural selection, why don't we open up a "Stupid web site hunting season?" :)
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Good point. My post was not meant to complain so much as to offer it in answer to the question, however.
I was under the impression that this Amazon system was much newer than that. I guess I shouldn't believe the marketspeak when they call it a "new feature". :)
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You would know about Amazon's new micropayment system, but the slashdot editors thought it unfit for print, apparently. 2001-04-21 23:26:04 Amazon Launches New Micropayment System (articles,news) (rejected) Donations are minimum of $1. Fees are 15 cents fixed + 15%.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I'm not sure if anyone's doing this already, but I wonder if Hardware & Software vendors might start sponsoring websites pretty much the same way that STP sponsors some racecar drivers. You put a some graphics on your saying that your webserver runs on $HARDWARE and $SOFTWARE (very much like putting a decal on a racecar) and the vendor gives you the the equipment (possibly some $) and lists your website as bragging rights in adverts.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I host on a dsl line. But, when the connections get too slow, i'll switch to 2 dsl lines (mine and my friends). It works, and zoneedit.com has that free nameserver/server swap thingy.
So what actually does pay for those gold-encrusted towers? Okay...maybe not gold encrusted, but at least in my neck of the woods, most of the churches are the biggest, newest, and nicest buildings around. Something has to pay for them....
No, they're doing it because it makes them feel good. And it's easier than volunteering at the local soup kitchen, or treating a homeless guy to a good meal and hot shower. As with most religious exercises, it's a way for them to absolve themselves of the sin that they have just becasue they're human....
As for banner ads, most sites actually just reference the banner ad images via URL, as the ad images themselves are stored on the advertising company's own webservers, like ads.doubleclick.net for Doubleclick-based ads. Thus, banner ads do not usually contribute to the bandwidth utilization of the site that displays them. Granted,
This is not a Fugazi
Those are about all the non-corporate websites or non-corporate-sponsored websites I visit.
Maybe you should visit these and other sites and just ask... "Hey... how do you afford all this?" Never hurts to ask.
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
we will need to start finding ways to finance the cost of running the site
Well, judging by the lifespan of some dotcoms lately, I'd say 90 days same-as-cash ought to do it.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
We're doing pretty well over at Goats using a combination of voluntary donations via the Amazon and PayPal system, along with incentives like the option to turn banner ads off for registered users. If your content is truly worth something to your users, you should be able to raise enough to keep yourself afloat with a similar system.
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goats.com: better than
"Co-branding a la Plastic?"..."WRONG! TRY AGAIN!"
"VC funding?"..."THAT IS INCORRECT! THE CORRECT SPELLING OF 'PROFITABILITY' IS..."
Methinks you've been overmoderated. BigTime! Don't tell Yahoo that Banner Ads are the way to go. They're still attempting to find an alternative business model that isn't so completely, utterly, dangerously cyclical and may actually lose money for the first time in several years.
Co-Branding isn't going to work, either. The collective powers of several money-losing BANNER AD driven websites don't amount to much, if anything. Have you visited Plastic lately? No. And neither has anyone else. It has at least two very dire problems.
VC Funding - yeah, that used to be considered a business model, until somebody realized that, well, it just doesn't make sense to loan money to businesses with holes in every pocket of their proverbial pants, at least not if you want to get any money BACK.
VCs got stupid for a while, and wrote some big ass checks to dumb ass people. But those days are over, mate. And if you really want to make a VC pissed, I recommend you approach one and say, "I'd like to borrow $10,000,000. I have an idea for a business. It will make money combining ad banner revenue with co-branding, a la Plastic". You'll be lucky if you escape with your life.
"Okay Mr. Smartypants Smirkleton, then what DOES make money on the net?" Well, I'll tell you one thing. I'm very surprised to see no mention of ThinkGeek in this discourse. I've heard those guys move a boatload of products, a ton, and I'd believe it. What model is that, then? Well, it is specialty retail, targeting the various geek needs of the same community that Slashdot serves to inform (well). (A community that is extremely specialized, hence the obscure subjects considered newsworthy to the readership and authors.)
Yes, I know ThinkGeek is actually owned by VA Linux. But it seems to remain an independent business unit, from outward appearances. I suspect ThinkGeek's financials are one of the few bright spots in the VA Linux annual report. Sadly, they probably aren't broken out from other revenue streams for the public to see, because then we'd know how much more money VA Linux was losing on their core product lines.
Read this recent BusinessWeek story on MiniDots. You'll see that SPECIALIZATION is where it is at.
And no, after all that, I'm not going to also correct your sig file. You'll just have to do that for yourself.
i've been using it for awhile now and the saved bandwidth in incredible.
note: i have no ties to this product whatsoever, it's just a kick-ass module.
alive to the universe, dead to the world
I think we're seeing a banner ad backlash, both financially and rhetorically. Not only are they selling for less, but the voices calling them a sure-fire path to online riches are being replaced by voices declaring them dead and a horrible idea to begin with.
Personally, I think typical ad banner prices will probably even out to about the cost of hosting. This is based on one part basic economics and nine parts bald speculation.
My thought here is there are plenty of people who are willing to put up comic strips, video game reviews, and pages examining the minutiae of Christina Ricci's career as long as they don't have to actively shell out big bucks to do so. When income drops (as it has recently) many of these people will shut down their sites. This reduces the pool of available ad spaces, and makes ad space more valuable, driving prices up.
When ad income goes up beyond hosting costs, then more people are encouraged to put up their own sites, and the pool of ad spaces increases, driving prices down. So you see.
Obviously, there are exceptions to this, such as sites that are funded by companies with deep pockets, and sites that have operating expenses well beyond hosting (you can't run site about travel experiences unless you or your writers can afford to travel), but I think for your typical pro-am started-as-a-hobby site, this will hold true.
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
Now, that is kindof a harsh statement, don't you think? ;)
^]:wq!^M
I belive Slashdot solved this problem by being bought. :)
--TyYour main cost is probably bandwidth, right? One very quick way to alleviate bandwidth problems is to drop the graphics on your high bandwidth pages (or if you must use graphics, use fewer of them, higher compression, and smaller sizes). I had a page that was getting 30k hits a day and dropping the graphics on this page cut my bandwidth usage for my entire site in half.
Another related trick which I use is to put the graphics which are necessary for my site in the web space that came with with Earthlink account. I figure I'm paying $20 a month for nothing right now (Earthlink is my backup account in case my DSL goes down, but my Speakeasy DSL has been absolutely rock solid so far) so I don't feel very guilty about offloading my traffic to Earthlink. If you have an ISP account that includes web space, consider putting your graphics there. This could save you considerable bandwidth.
Along those same lines, try to split up high traffic pages with a lot of content into multiple pages.
All of these changes also have the nice side effect of making your site easier to read and navigate. Not only is your site more accessible to the vision impared and users of text browsers like Lynx, but things tend to be more concise and consistent when you aren't focusing on form over function.
What I would recommend is using a web log analyzer such as Wusage or Analog to determine what pages draw the most bandwidth and focus all your energy on the top pages. As with software profiling where most resources are generally used by a very small portion of the code, you will probably find that a very small portion of your content is contributing to the majority of your bandwidth usage. On my site, it was a single page contributing to over half of my bandwidth usage and optimizing that page solved my bandwidth problems.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
One of the things that the recent dot-com bust has shown is the difficulty of making money off of a website, especially in the so-called B2C arena. Generally speaking, those sites have done the best that offer tangible goods, such as eBay and Amazon. /. does fine by providing information only via it's banner ads, but /. is an exception because of the huge amount of traffic it receives.
To answer your question, you have few options:
Banner ads
Co-branding a la Plastic
VC funding
Goodwill of others
Subscriptions
None of these are ideal, and none (with the exception of VB funding) will bring huge amounts of cash to your bank account. If you are simply seeking to recoup costs, you will probably want to go the banner ad/goodwill route. If you're trying to make a profit, however, you'll need a business plan on some solid relationships.
Good luck.
- Rev.