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."
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.
If you want to know if it works, as the guys over at newsmax.com. It looks like they're selling headline space. (See the headlines that start with "Adv:" and are usually about hair loss treatment.)
It's not surprising that they didn't publish that article. It sounds very similar to one that they published over two months earlier.
What's wrong with charging a buck or two per ISO download to cover the cost of your bandwidth?
I mean, if it's costing you money, I don't think you should feel bad about asking those who are benefitting to share the costs.
I have so much trouble finding reliable mirror sites anymore that I would happily pay a buck or two for a solid, fast mirror.
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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.
Religion sells because people don't know they are buying something, they feel good about themselves while they fork over their money, they WANT to pay. They use sex, drugs and rock and roll to sell their goods. The use all kinds of fear to generate their income, it's a brilliant business. But how can the fairly consultant such as you(assumedly) and I use such tactics effectively? I havn't found many applications of FUD in my daily business, though I am looking!
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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.
Well, those are $0.03-$0.06 per UNIQUE clickthrough. And yes, the pay sites do pay $25-$40 per signup, generally, but signups are waaay down due to the abundance of good quality free porn out there. But yes, most porn sites are still profitable. That's because porn webmasters generally keep a sharp eye on the bottom line, and don't hire frivolous employees, and generally work long, long hours.
Hey, let me tell you, after a few hours, it doesn't matter whether it's porn or accounting. Work is work. It stopped being entertainment a long time ago for me.
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
The above poster makes sense. If your web site is clanbob.net, you've got allot of problems.
.25 per detail
.45 to 1.00
.25
.25
.15
.05 per detail
Lets reduce cost: optimize your graphics. Currently your second loading page (which I think is your true home page) is somewhere in the 128k - 200k range, that is way too much.
Next let's see what's you can do.
Do you have a subscriber list that you CAN send e-mail to. If so those names are worth about
4.00 to 5.50 per 1000 mailings.
if you have demographic data city, state, zip on those names
add 2.00 per 1000 names or
if you have age
add
if you have gender
add
if you have Income
add
if you have Creed or religion
add
if you have any likes or dislikes data
add
IF your list has an 90%+ average of women
add to the bottom 15% premium.
it seems that the women list are very valuable
I don?t know of anybody that?s getting over 25.00 per cpm on their mailing list.. I know a few people that are getting 9?s and 10?s.
That now covers income from mailings.
Banner advertising:
Work with someone that will sell you advertising. You give up 25% - 75% of your revenue, but your get income.
Check your web logs, can you correlate your page loadings, with geographic info and web site patrons likes and dislikes.
This is the rate I?ve been offered.
3.00 per cpm is easy to find. And could work as a first / second page loading
5.00 per cpm takes some work should be in the more targeted parts of the site
Over 10.00 per cpm, I?ve seen the contracts for this I have to give up 40% of my earnings to advertising broker for these rates.
You have to make sure you get about 5000 page loads per day. A page load says the entire page is downloaded, that?s what advertisers want.
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
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.