Continuing from where we left off on Friday's post: as a result of the move to a dedicated server, our monthly costs went from $5 (or $0, depending how you do the math) to roughly $80. That's a huge jump for a small site. I made a news post pleading for donations. EasySpeedy required 3 months' worth of hosting payments in advance, plus a €60 setup fee, when paying with PayPal. As a result, we had to raise €240 up front, or $360 US. The community came through. In two days we'd raised $250 and had enough with our previous donations to make the move.
However, going to the member base with hand outstretched is very poor form, and something I like to avoid at all costs. By the way, when you see a host do a donation drive, don't forget that there are a lot of generous people out there and the host may be making more money than you think. I heard secondhand of a site where things slowed down and the administrator announced they needed a new server and started a donation drive. A few weeks later, the site sped up again, "we're on our new server", and the admin walked away with a cool $10,000. Don't let that prevent you from being charitable, especially to a small site—please don't—but that's something to bear in mind.
Anyhow, we obviously needed to find a more sustainable way to supplement our income to ensure that we could make our next hosting payment. I hadn't gotten around to looking into advertising up to that point because it often requires credit cards, mailing addresses and other undesirables. The provider that we did end up with was Project Wonderful. They're wonderfully subversive to normal advertising models, which appealed to my rebelliousness. They certainly don't pay as well as other providers might, but it's all right. Instead of scams, spyware and pyramid schemes, we got ads for web comics and independent online clothing stores. Again, a little subversive.
I also implemented a few perks for donors. There's not a lot of incentive to offer without removing features for regular members, so I added the usual formula of donor star, your choice of username color (staff names in italic), and x days of status per dollar donated. It seems to have worked all right, and we did manage to meet our next quarterly payment with a bit to spare.
I have a feeling there was something else I was planning to mention here, but since I'm actually writing this days in advance as a result of my unnecessarily long post attempt on Thursday, I imagine I'll have time for it to come to me. If not, maybe you'll be lucky and I'll remember later on and tell you then.
2 comments:
For me, donations seem to be one of the bottlenecks facing the torrent community. By that I mean that many of the more popular sites are very secretive about their donations and so it is often difficult for the rest of us to get a handle on how to predict tracker donations. My favorite TV tracker is a good example of this. There are masses of details about who is meeting the distribution costs (ie their ratios, up and down speed, nationality, time in the community etc) but whenever anybody asks about donations, they are fobbed of with something like "All donations go towards server costs) This makes me wonder whether such sites are true communities or just businesses for profit. The site does not advertise itself as a business but as a sharing community. So how come this information isn't shared?
I like sites such as One Big Torrent that show clearly how much they are receiving in donations. Which other sites go for transparency on this issue?
I remember QuebecTorrent having a live donation meter. The problem with providing too much transparency is that large donations can make you look bad, and your monthly costs can become somewhat erratic as time progresses and you have to move hosts on short notice or what have you. Right now we have about $500 in reserve, but that's a comfortable place to be and we don't want donations to slack off because of it.
So yes, there are legitimate reasons to avoid divulging donation information, but there is also tremendous potential for abuse of power.
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