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It's time to monetize, the question is how?


immamac

How to monetize?  

349 members have voted

  1. 1. How do you prefer to monetize?

    • Purely donation based
      160
    • Light ad support with no monetization after covering costs
      151
    • Heavy monetization and investing back into the community
      38
  2. 2. Would you commit to donating, if so for how much?

    • $2/mo or $24/yr
      135
    • $5/mo or $60/yr
      98
    • $10/mo or $120/yr
      25
    • Big daddy club over $20/mo
      9
    • No, fuck you, you pandering cunt.
      82


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49 minutes ago, selvahorn said:

I'm fine with donating $5 a month. As long as ads are lightly done I'm fine with that.

should be no ads at all if we're donating enough  to cover costs.

 

That's the point in polling the 2 different answers.

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57 minutes ago, millhouse said:

Let's open the link up and let people start contributing. Let the people speak with their wallets

We need parameters first.

1. What the minimum donation is.

2. What, if anything, we get for more.

3. Related to 2., but tiers for gifts to Surly. EX: $60/ year makes you exempt from rep or $42 gets you get a custom title with your handle.

4. How ads tie into the plan if we get x ,y, or z amount of funding.

Edited by slorch
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We need parameters first.
1. What the minimum donation is.
2. What, if anything, we get for more.
3. Related to 2., but tiers for gifts to Surly. EX: $60/ year makes you exempt from rep or $42 gets you get a custom title with your handle.
4. How ads tie into the plan if we get x ,y, or z amount of funding.
I don't agree with rep exemption. Too many assholes will abuse that shit.
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48 minutes ago, slorch said:

We need parameters first.

1. What the minimum donation is.

2. What, if anything, we get for more.

3. Related to 2., but tiers for gifts to Surly. EX: $60/ year makes you exempt from rep or $42 gets you get a custom title with your handle.

4. How ads tie into the plan if we get x ,y, or z amount of funding.

I’d add not having an Aggie ask for money (seriously) and a general budget. 

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12 minutes ago, Bevo Num1 said:
49 minutes ago, slorch said:
We need parameters first.
1. What the minimum donation is.
2. What, if anything, we get for more.
3. Related to 2., but tiers for gifts to Surly. EX: $60/ year makes you exempt from rep or $42 gets you get a custom title with your handle.
4. How ads tie into the plan if we get x ,y, or z amount of funding.

I don't agree with rep exemption. Too many assholes will abuse that shit.

Correct. Can you imagine if Rocko gifted the minimum to gain an exemption?  He’d be insufferable because Rocko, and because he’d remind everyone he’s a donator. Nobody should be exempt from rep. And we should definitely go back to the old rep system. 

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15 minutes ago, Bevo Num1 said:
51 minutes ago, slorch said:
We need parameters first.
1. What the minimum donation is.
2. What, if anything, we get for more.
3. Related to 2., but tiers for gifts to Surly. EX: $60/ year makes you exempt from rep or $42 gets you get a custom title with your handle.
4. How ads tie into the plan if we get x ,y, or z amount of funding.

I don't agree with rep exemption. Too many assholes will abuse that shit.

they already are.  Sock hits count the same as established posters.  Say the wrong thing in the wrong forum and it's a frenzy of bullshit.

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7 minutes ago, Rex Kramer said:

Correct. Can you imagine if Rocko gifted the minimum to gain an exemption?  He’d be insufferable because Rocko, and because he’d remind everyone he’s a donator. Nobody should be exempt from rep. And we should definitely go back to the old rep system. 

Rocko never got crowdsourced, did he?  I thought it ultimately took a ban to shut him down.

 

I just get sick of the anklebiters and bullshit artists who get all offended just because they disagree with you.

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If Blacklab still has any legal fees I think it should be monetized as much as possible until they are paid off, assuming that wouldn't violate any court orders.  After that turn the ads down as needed to where the site is making enough to pay the bills and maybe a basdass tailgate once a year.
I like this idea, also in for a few bucks a month
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42$/yr is perfect. 

No adds if you pay

Don't give a shit about rep system but payments shouldn't exempt someone from being banned.

Don't care about tailgate but maybe extra coin can fund original content like was at TOS like Bourbon's film review.

Oh and members only NSAA.

 

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23 hours ago, Hagbard Celine said:

Seconded and amended.... everyone who can needs to drop $100 today to get the costs covered for the first 10 months.

Then turn on the ads, until Lab is covered.  Everyone should be prepared, that this is going to take awhile.

At the end of the rainbow, we go back to donations reinvested in to community "fun and games".

But none of that until Lab is made whole.

I’m down for a few hundo up front if we can avoid ads and get images/imgur working.  I did my part for BlackLab.  I’m hoping others chipped in what they could. That was horseshit.  

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Alright, sorry about being a bit MIA yesterday. 

 

Looks like we've got a pretty overwhelming vote for donations only and if that doesn't sustain us we switch to light ads for non-donors. This is my personal favorite choice anyway so with that being said I have some work to do over the next few days to get the donation system set up and probably some badging that is more for fun than anything. Think "treefiddy" badges for people that have donations over 3.50 in the past year and other funny shit like that. If there's a huge influx of cash through donations I'll look into flying a banner on the communities behalf during USC and we will get that thread started if it needs to. 

 

Also I have received several DMs from users on the board and a few posts in the thread who will pretty much single handedly get us through October with their larger or 1 year up front donations. I'm hoping that we get no ads through at least football season. 

 

Keep the feedback coming as I'm reading everything. 

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22 hours ago, Radical Larry said:

two_dollars.jpg

See... the problem here is that... my little brother, this morning, got his arm caught in the microwave, and uh... my grandmother dropped acid and she freaked out, and hijacked a school bus full of... penguins, so it's kind of a family crisis... so come back later? Great.

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1 hour ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

So, what are the operating costs you need to keep this shit show floating for a year ?

12k would guarantee a year pretty much. Right now we have the capacity to do 2-3x peak with the hardware and planned upgrades that are happening in the next couple of weeks to some servers regardless of donations/ads. 

 

The colocation/metered bandwidth/power/auxiliary power/never down grid cuz of proximity to Texas capital is roughly 600 a month when you average out the whole year including football season which causes some pretty big spikes in amp draw and sustained traffic (we come close to maxing out a 100mbps dedicated line) 

Hardware costs amortized right now are about 200 over the next 24 months paying ourselves back for fronting it, because we got a hell of a deal on the hardware. We currently have enough capacity for 2-3x peak if we set it up right with some slight upgrades planned in the next few weeks

 

Software licensing works out to about $1200/year with all things included for the forum, commerce plugins, monitoring tools, and basic support tiers.

 

Additional services are pretty low right now, but we will need to spend much more on S3 and Cloudflare in the coming months for cdn, dns protection, and raw object storage this will definitely creep up into the 100/mo range in the blink of an eye and even higher after a while. 

Of course this is all with me and the others on the "server team" doing all the work for free + our awesome mod team doing everything pro bono as well. Eventually that should be paid at market on an hourly basis. 

This is a snapshot of today's traffic so far on today, a random non-football Sunday in August. This is about 3x lower than a football Saturday on raw user count and we have a pretty respectable user base. I'd say on a shitty day we have 2k daily active users and on a busy day we have closer to 40k (think mack brown firing day) 

 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/r4KuK9Sh9cvcSMRi7

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On 8/4/2018 at 11:24 AM, Hagbard Celine said:

Seconded and amended.... everyone who can needs to drop $100 today to get the costs covered for the first 10 months.

Then turn on the ads, until Lab is covered.  Everyone should be prepared, that this is going to take awhile.

At the end of the rainbow, we go back to donations reinvested in to community "fun and games".

But none of that until Lab is made whole.

I like this plan

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