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Money...


Touchy topic, but an obvious problem. Every site needs money for server costs bandwidth etc. Here's how I plan to get that.

Donations.

Users can donate to keep the site servers running, all excess money gets put towards the costs for future years.



That's the basic upkeep of it.


Now, another person has told me, we need to reward developers, coders etc, which I think is a good idea. However, we can only do this out of donations. Here's my theory.

We split the site admin up into teams. One developer, One coder, One...you get the idea (might have more than just one but who cares..., each team will have an equal number of stations). They are then set out to do particular things. The harder each team works the better.

The users get to donate to a honey pot (not taken from the server costs), then they vote at the end of the month, where they want that money to go, which team they want it to go to. Teams would be rejigged every four months (just in case set people are being lazy and to make it a little more fair) So they would get the honey pot to split between themselves equally.

Who's going to sponsor us if we don't want to advertise? (Another touchy area)

Trying not hire professionals, unless we REALLY REALLY need to. There are a lot of people on gaia that would help out, and are helping out (you guys). Also, I find that voluntary work is a lot better than work done by people who are paid.

well the initial idea is good but the only problem is that in the early stages you wont get much donations. ive seen sites go down within a few weeks just because they didnt get any donations.

advertising would be okay with me personally if the ad was at the bottom of the page and not interfering with anything on the site.
and indeed a very touchy problem smile

edit: i kinda have to agree there ninjaking

If blatent banner advertising would cause problems, there are entirely other approaches that could be taken with sponsers. For example, "website spotlight" just on the homepage. A small box on the side, on this page only.
Of course, that's just an example off the top of my head. There are many other original, less annoying approaches to advertising sponsers. Maybe a specific sponsers page, with a reward offered for visiting each website.

The only reason I strongly suggest sponsers is because relying on donations to raise money would be difficult until the website became a bit more popular.
You could even have someone with a role specifically for raising money - someone who is initially in charge of thinking of alternative ideas for raising funds.

I'm not suggesting we blanket the site. The key word here is minimalistic. We need to make it effective so sponsors see its noticeable but also subtle enough that it doesn't ruin someones trip to the site. Donations are great and i'm sure the people we know would pour a decent amount in but like Emperor said the site could go down if we don't have something a bit more tangible. So we keep costs right down until we can really step up things. Financial plans are incredibly tricky to accurately create so I won't even try but a set of rules and values perhaps quotas even we should stick to....? I think some vague guideline at least.

Its a good thing that people have done this before us.

We need a product that has enough hits to be worth using but still costs little. So as low key as possible while we attract users. Maybe offer people a stake in the site not financially but like increased status or something if they help. I can see coders becoming our only population though which would be bad not because coders are evil but because thats not what this is aiming to do. Anyway yeah ads should definetly be discreet.