Donations

In light of yesterday's post, I'm going to spend the next few days addressing questions as they come up. Today's question is regarding encouraging donations.

In my experience, people are generally pretty decent sorts and will do what they can to support their favorite site, and I'm assuming that's you. I'm not into pushy salesmanship, and I don't think it's necessary. It is annoying and compromises the tone of your site, but more importantly, it crosses a rather important legal line between facilitating the sharing of copyrighted material and outright selling it. Where you want to stand on that question is entirely your own choice, but I like to stay on the light side.

However, I'm not opposed to the idea of buying ratio, as long as your site doesn't make it necessary for users to do so. Ratio represents a contribution to the site, and there are all kinds of ways to contribute. Some sites also provide ratio bonuses for long-term seeders, and I think there is very much the same thing going on here. If you've contributed, I have no problem with recognizing you for it.

I have a slightly less sunny image of donor/ratio perks, though. Any features that you provide to VIPs are features that you are denying to other users, which in turn prevents your site from being as usable as possible to as many people as possible - kinda the point in my view. Providing recognition is fantastic, but adding concrete features is a little more questionable. VIP-only forum boards will fracture your community, since the VIPs will tend to hang out with their kin and other users will never really be pulled into the fold.

In terms of recognition, I suggest simply giving users more control over their own profiles and the way they are presented to others. I know some sites allow avatars only to power users. However, since I only ever notice peoples' avatars rather than their usernames, I want to encourage as many people to have avatars as possible. You could allow people to customize the way their username is displayed, add more info to their profiles, maybe add custom stylesheets. None of these things have any practical use, but they provide a degree of social status as a reward, and that is enough. Of course, the ubiquitous donor star is a must.

I suggest placing a clear donate button on every page, but nowhere obtrusive. In keeping with my previous point regarding selling copyrighted material, I would keep it away from torrent description pages. Make it clear to your users that donations are always appreciated but never expected. A simple button in the header or footer ought to be plenty. I like Demonoid's approach of using an animated GIF that flashes briefly and subtly every couple of seconds. It draws attention without being too distracting.

Demonoid also has a neat donation system. I'm not sure I should be detailing it here, but you should be able to get some idea by making a donation yourself, or going through the process up to the point where you're asked to key in your PayPal account. Basically, donated money is received not through Demonoid but through a third party site, so PayPal can have no complaint. Very clever.

Big-Tracker Finances

As I mentioned yesterday, I am seriously strapped for time this evening and won't be able to continue my announce-writing series as I had intended. I'll do some coding over the weekend and hopefully get things going again on Monday.

Early in the life of the blog, I discussed the financial logistics of running a small tracker. Well, TorrentFries grew out of that phase. As you grow, so does the complexity of your bookkeeping.

Obviously, the cost of hosting increases as you move to faster and faster servers. However, things also become a lot less predictable. I've previously advised that contingency is a good thing, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of finances. While you're small beans, you will probably be paying the same cost every month for a long time. Hosting is predictable, although we were impacted by the dropping US dollar, which caused our hosting costs (charged in euro) to increase without any benefit to us. Of course, we were growing and becoming richer as time went on, so that was more annoying than difficult.

Eventually, it is likely that donations will outstrip expenses. Don't let it go to your head and don't squander the money. A big site is always in danger of being taken offline or even coming under threat from the copyright police. Having a slush fund handy is invaluable, since you won't even be able to beg for money with the site down. At one point, we had as much as $800 in reserve, plenty to get us a new server if need be. In fact, we were saving up to build our own box to colocate somewhere friendly. That didn't end up happening, but it certainly could have with a few more months. At the time, we were making about $30/mo in ad revenues (Project Wonderful is not the most profitable provider around) and over $500/mo in donations, although donors are fickle and hard to rely on – another good argument for a slush fund.

Now, running into trouble with PayPal (which I assume you are using for your finances) is another concern. I suggest spreading your wealth across multiple accounts, a few hundred dollars in each. If one goes down, you still have access to enough money to tide you through until things get sorted out. Don't use Tor while accessing PayPal. If your geographical IP jumps around too much, PayPal will automatically flag your account as potentially compromised and will freeze your funds until you confirm the account with a credit card. Prepaid cards are handy there, but a massive pain in the ass nonetheless.

How you choose to use your donated money is entirely your own choice, but I have no ethical problem with paying for personal projects that have direct benefit to the site. For example, I bought Coda with donated money, and paid for a course in UNIX administration that significantly improved my ability to do my job. I went from absolutely thumb-fingered to only moderately thumb-fingered, and I think the cost was worth it.

Since there is a massive time investment involved in the operation of a torrent site, I wouldn't begrudge you making a profit, either. The excess donations I received would have amounted to something in the ballpark of $1/hr, and I don't think that's unreasonable. However, profiting from the site opens a whole new can of worms. Profiting from copyright violation puts you in different ethical and legal territory. The implication of sale is what landed the EliteTorrents admins in deep shit, and will get you kicked out of Spain, too. As always, it's a personal decision as to where you want your tracker to go, and I decided to take the high road.

Retrospective 5: Money

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.

Retrospective 3: Shared Hosting

Up to now, I've been talking mostly about setup. Now it's time to delve a little more into the day-to-day operation of the early months of the site's life.

As one might expect, things were pretty slow for several months after our January launch. With the low activity on the site, there wasn't a lot to do aside from tinker with features as suggestions filtered in. The more I customized, the more I realized how woefully unequal TorrentTrader was to the task. Unfortunately, I was committed and to change at that point would mean more work still. Instead, I quickly developed a policy of rewriting entire pages as a whole rather than tweaking what was already there.

One of the suggestions was that I add a favicon to the site. The existing logo didn't fit the small size very well, so I set out to make a new one. The product ended up looking pretty good, so I redid the entire site design based on the icon. What I wouldn't give to have that kind of time at my disposal nowadays...

Aside from the constant refinement of features, there's not a lot involved in running a small tracker, no more than what's involved in tweaking any other pet website. Since someone else may be taking care of your server for you, you may not even need to worry about that. The whole experience feels a little like running a lemonade stand on a deserted street, sitting in the sun while the ice in your mother's lemonade pitcher melts. It's just that exciting.

Despite the last few paragraphs of doom and gloom, we did grow slowly thanks to some of the methods I detailed yesterday. In March, a member asked how to donate to the site. Bemused, I opened a PayPal account. The $5 donation felt like a fortune. Since the site was sharing a hosting account with my personal stuff, we were essentially being hosted for free at the time.

Don't worry, all that changes soon enough. More on that tomorrow.