[vapor]

Nighthawk wrote:

If the collective here can come up with over $7K to fund one man's sock fetish, I'm sure we can come up with something to keep this place going. Is a Kickstarter fundraiser plausible? The way I see it, not much to lose there..

I keep thinking about that, too. It sounds like the cost of hosting for the year could be covered by about $6K.

It looks like Kickstarter might be out of the question, though since this form of fund-raising would go against their community guidelines

I still love the idea of a game which includes a fundraiser but can also see how it would be hard to get an idea like that off the ground. For now I'll just give what I can however I can and wait for a more solid decision.

[Euchre]

Monetizing doesn't have to be to generate revenue to make someone rich. The most successful not for profits have to operate through a monetization plan. The difference between a good not for profit which doesn't exploit its patrons and a bad one that does is when it runs like a business as opposed to running as a business. If uF runs itself like a business and considers how it can monetize itself, the patrons - the players - never have to think about how they are going to pay to play. Consider that in my previous examples, nobody has to pay to use those sites. Compare how each has tried or managed to make that possible, and what it has done to each site.

[redct]

I'm not really acquainted with the mechanics of running a large site, but I'd have to imagine that most of these would be negligible. Google saves hundreds of thousands with every byte it takes off its search page, but we're not quite at that traffic level yet.

The one I think that would do the most for bandwidth (I'd need some stats though) would be offloading images. There are plenty of image hosts like imgur that have an API you could work with. Heck, I wouldn't be opposed to hosting images for uF—I have terabytes of unused bandwidth and hundreds of GB of unused space on my hosting plan.

Another option would be switching hosting companies. I have a feeling something like MediaTemple's (ve) server would be a bit cheaper, but I'm going to bet Space has already investigated that end.

All of these, though, are just ways to treat the symptom.

diszaster wrote:

Since we've discussed ways of getting money into the site, and clearly disagree, I thought I'd throw in some ways of reducing the cost of the site. -- Trimming down? I don't know what the stats are on the other pages that make up the unfiction site. Would load/traffic be alleviated if those other pages were somewhere else (like the updates)? The Rot-it thing does seem like a resource-heavy engine when it's used. -- Call to users to clean out their message boxes? Making the message boxes smaller? -- Locking threads that really aren't, and are not believed to become, active? This might also lighten the load for volunteers keeping an eye on the really old thread for spammers. -- Encouraging users to find alternate places to post ginormous image files while still using the forum for discussion of those ginomrous image files. Not demanding, encouraging. These seem like small things, but I can't help but think that in volume, they might make SOME difference. I'm sure there are other ways that actual Web people can come up with.

[diszaster]

Since we've discussed ways of getting money into the site, and clearly disagree, I thought I'd throw in some ways of reducing the cost of the site.

-- Trimming down? I don't know what the stats are on the other pages that make up the unfiction site. Would load/traffic be alleviated if those other pages were somewhere else (like the updates)? The Rot-it thing does seem like a resource-heavy engine when it's used.

-- Call to users to clean out their message boxes? Making the message boxes smaller?

-- Locking threads that really aren't, and are not believed to become, active? This might also lighten the load for volunteers keeping an eye on the really old thread for spammers.

-- Encouraging users to find alternate places to post ginormous image files while still using the forum for discussion of those ginomrous image files. Not demanding, encouraging.

These seem like small things, but I can't help but think that in volume, they might make SOME difference. I'm sure there are other ways that actual Web people can come up with.

[Nighthawk]

If the collective here can come up with over $7K to fund one man's sock fetish, I'm sure we can come up with something to keep this place going.

Is a Kickstarter fundraiser plausible? The way I see it, not much to lose there.

I do agree that the $100 sponsorship entry point is kinda high, and probably a deterrent for most people giving (in the past, it has been a deterrent for me). If you lower that entry point I'm sure you'll make up for it in volume.

[rose]

The main thing that strikes me about this discussion is that SpaceBass (and the admins) has been covering the out-of-pocket costs-- pretty much alone-- for years. I am at least as opposed to advertising as he is, and I do think we can cover these amounts - say $600 a month ourselves. ($600 would give a $100 cushion to work with) We've basically been getting a free ride for a long, long time.

Maybe there is a bit of a misunderstanding, I don't think Space is about "monetizing" the site at all, he wants help paying for the hosting and other costs, which is only fair -- and probably long overdue. Space isn't providing this forum for "users" and asking things of them--maybe people who feel that Space has asked a lot from players here, are just a bit burned out - -(though to be fair, I missed seeing the fundraising requests for ARGFest )-- this forum is a place for people to meet, play games, share ideas and make friends. (eta - I just read euchre's spoiler so we are thinking on the same lines.)

I feel that if we don't care enough to invest in this forum and keep it going, maybe we should let it go. I'm in no way willing to do that, and I will fight for this forum forever, but, it really is up to us to make unfiction work. (Or Space should just decide to turn this into a business and make some money on it, instead of pouring cash into it - but I don't think that is an option he is interested in pursuing)

I think that now the community knows more specifics about these costs, we should be chipping in to pay them. And, as I've now said three times, forgive me, I know that we can do this. I don't know if the community is getting smaller, and if it is I'm not sure why, but I think we can work on growing the community at the same time we are investing in keeping our forum going.

I don't know if anyone has more ideas, but after reflection, the voluntary monthly or 6 -months or annual subcription--with or without a badge of honor-- sounds the best option. It will probably be the simplest to implement and raise the most money. I too like the idea of PBS modeling for fundraising. Allow access to everyone, have certain fundraisers for costs.

I think $6 a month is cheap ( for a while I was paying $10 a month for Mr. A's in that one browser based game) as is $50 a year; and, probably most of us could come up with it - or at least enough of us to make a dent in the cost Space is paying.

Heck, playing ARGs and meeting my friends here has profoundly changed the way I view the world--how much is that worth to me in terms of dollars and cents? A great deal. Still, that is my valuation. No one is saying that if a person doesn't contribute they will be judged. I'm never going to tell someone else how to spend their money.

In addition to the voluntary subscriptions - we can do an annual fundraiser and sell t-shirts or merchandise as needed. Those projects will take more work and planning to get off the ground, the subscriptions can be put in effect pretty quickly, I think.

edit: you know, whatever we decide about monthly subscriptions, etc, why not plan an annual fundraiser anyway? I propose the founding of unfiction anniversary for that date.

[Euchre]

Take a few moments to consider a few sites, and a few questions relative to them.

Twitter hosts no overt ads. Twitter does not offer advertising services in the sense of banners or space on its pages. It is worth millions, if not billions of dollars. People inside and outside of the company are still not sure how to monetize it. Regardless, it has an obvious value as noted above. No competitor has even come close to supplanting it. On a smaller scale, this could be a fair description of uF. Is there any other site that cover the expanse of chaotic fiction (ARGs, virals, etc.) that has or is able to come close to the consistent results uF has?

YouTube was not the first, or initially even the best video hosting site on the internet. It surpassed all others, and proceeded to become hugely valuable. A rich community arose within, but as larger interests became involved this community became virtually eradicated, and certainly obfuscated. The decision was made to use various advertising means to monetize, as well as various partnerships. Ever since, the signal to noise ratio is horribly biased to the latter. The site is largely treated like a public toilet, with a large billboard on the side.

Google makes as much or more money from sources other than advertising than most people know or will ever see. What is worth more than CPM is never having to question if the people a vendor wants to 'click' will do so. Ask yourself where that magic comes from.

Wikipedia begs and pleads for money on a regular basis. It is almost completely created, supported (in a technical sense), and maintained by volunteers. Despite being the first resource people go to for research on a topic, it has almost no credibility as a source of reference.

Now, after pondering those, consider again if slapping subscription fees or ads is really an answer to an enduring solvency of the uF we presently know.

ETA: And after spending more time crunching on this idea and subsequently discussing it in chat, one of the key ideas I'm trying to draw from the above is...

Spoiler (Rollover to View):

The real question about uF funding isn't 'how can we make money', its 'who has the money we need, and isn't paying it to us now?'

[redct]

That was one hell of an inspirational post on P4.

My two cents:
Advertising

It can be done. Look at other people who have successfully monetized their community without a conflict of interest. The two examples I can think of are Reddit and TWiT (podcast/online tech radio). They both accept advertisement and derive a large part of revenue from it, and there seems to be no editorial conflict of interest.

Monthly meter

I'd kind of call this the PBS approach (I'm sure other nonprofits worldwide do this too). Basically, set aside a portion of the year for a pledge drive and encourage people to donate. I don't see much of an issue with this.

Merchandising

Would make money, but it's kind of uneven.
[/b]

[diszaster]

SpaceBass wrote:

As soon as we become dependent upon that kind of ad revenue, it provides leverage against us that could be used to attempt to control the nature of our discussions. We are currently free to tell people to piss off if they don't like what our users have to say about things (provided that what they have to say conforms with our Terms of Service, of course). If we need that ad revenue to keep going, we lose that freedom.

There are plenty of bloggers, news sites, major newspapers, etc. that take ad revenue and are not corporate shills. Especially given that uF is really in a position where it can make these terms clear (Hey look, we're really not responsible for what our members say). If they don't accept that, fine. Let them pull out. It just doesn't hurt to try. You're going to get those cease and desists regardless of whether there's a sponsor. You can decide to not be dependent on ad revenue even while accepting ad revenue. Given your estimates, it sounds like you need whatever moneys you can get. And this is just another tool to offset costs, ice the cake, get some resources for further capacity building.

SpaceBass wrote:

These campaign sponsors realize that they don't need to pay for places for people to discuss things because people will always find places to discuss them anyway.

You're right, they don't need to pay. However, it can be really made enticing if approached the right way. And none of it has to impinge on anyone's free speech.

Again, perhaps they won't take the bait. However, it's such a small investment in effort to make possible, I find it baffling to not give it a shot.

I don't know... as a purely hypothetical example, if an international geeky magazine wanted to sponsor uF, would you say no? I would hope not.

SpaceBass wrote:

I have a really hard time with the idea that none of this is valuable to us, even a little bit. How many hours a month do you spend on this site, even just reading and not posting? 4? 30? 100? How much does it cost to spend four hours at a movie? Around $30 or $40? How much do you spend on magazines each month? Or XBox Live? Or your cell phone, or iTunes, or your Kindle eBooks, or your FarmWars, or the newspaper, or cable, or Starbucks every morning? Is six bucks a month too dear to say, I love this site for being free, in every sense of the word, so much that I will kick it a couple of bucks every week and wear this ribbon on my chest because I'm proud to be a part of something I have absolutely no obligation to but that I value anyway?

That I do not have $6/mo to contribute really shouldn't be a measure of whether I value the site (and no, I'm not spending what money I have on those things you've listed but the one which I need for work). And, perhaps, I won't convince you that taking ad revenue or sponsorship doesn't have to mean loss of freedom. However, I do find it frustrating, generally, that requests for contributions from users have been coming from everywhere (seriously everywhere), when really, I view ARG players as consumers of the industry (paying into the industry), rather than producers within it (trying to profit from it).

I guess what I'm saying is: I already feel "donor drain." And "donor drain" should really factor in to uF's long-term survival plan.

[VeritasK]

This might be unfeasible, But have two versions of the site.

Ad-Free and Not-Ad-Free.

Same exact Site, one with an Ad on it, one without any Ads on it.

Members can then select to Enable ad's or not.

Only negative would be some people would think "Hey, I don't need to donate, I just opt in to the ads."

[amandel]

*Shaking in my boots posting after SpaceBass on P#4* Am clueless about badges, other external validations etc. Being the weekly sponsor on occasion just seemed like a responsible thing to do and the only viable option to keep uF autonomous.

A flat yearly subscription has the advantage of being a gauge to plan expenditures per annum. While I might believe this is necessary I'm hoping that the amount would only be a small financial burden for each member.

[SpaceBass]

Someone asked me recently what it actually costs to run uF and it came out to about $500 per month. That doesn't seem like a lot until you think about it being every month and increasing over time. Actually, our recent server upgrades, which seem to have improved overall performance a bit, ended up costing us slightly less than we had been paying previously, so we gained a little ground back there.

Something I forgot to consider when calculating the above, however, was the overhead for running as a business, which we incorporated when Andy Darley made his generous donation from his Perplex City winnings, and which we did so that his gift wouldn't be eaten up by taxes and more of it could go to support the site costs.

None of the above takes into account the manhours that go into running this site with the volunteered time of a few great technical people who help with things like server administration, upgrades, and PHP coding. If we had to pay for those services, it would probably run us about $20,000 a year. If we were to pay the active moderators a decent wage for all of their donated time and effort, we'd likely be spending another $350,000. And then there's the admins and me. That's a pretty great value for a free site that only exists because of the support of its members.

Rogi, I did not mean to consider ARGFest in this discussion. It was run separately from uF this year and that will most likely continue in the future, so that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

I do have to address the issue of advertisers and sponsors in more depth. I suppose we all recognize that even if we were to start running just google ads or something, the return would not be great unless we were targeted by specific advertisers such as studios producing these campaigns we follow. As soon as we become dependent upon that kind of ad revenue, it provides leverage against us that could be used to attempt to control the nature of our discussions. We are currently free to tell people to piss off if they don't like what our users have to say about things (provided that what they have to say conforms with our Terms of Service, of course). If we need that ad revenue to keep going, we lose that freedom.

I'll go to bat for you fucking guys, too. There was a major campaign recently, during which I believe some enterprising players stumbled across a few images that hadn't been intended to be leaked, and posted them to the internets. I think they may have showed a certain monster which hadn't yet been publicly revealed because on a Friday morning we received a DMCA takedown notice from the studio's law firm demanding that they be removed. I replied fairly quickly that I would look into it and have an answer for them within the 24 hours allowed by the DMCA, and an hour or so later I received a notice from our hosting company that they had been served a DMCA notice and would be removing access to our entire site within 24 hours, automatically. Did I mention it was Friday, and we would probably have been siteless until at least Monday if we couldn't resolve this quickly?

I managed to get a contact name at the studio through some of my ARG friends, and was able to get her to call off the lawyers, who she assured me were just acting according to standard procedure, you see. And the thing was, they were, and she fully understood how their campaign invited players to participate and discuss their experiences with each other and show off what they learned or saw, and the only reason we weren't taken down that weekend was because of her help and the fact that she thought uF was a valuable part of their audience, for which I am very appreciative.

I asked her a little later after things had calmed down if they might be able to spare any swag for uF to auction off to help pay for things, or maybe make a donation, and was told they had no budget for those kinds of things and strict rules about how props or promotional items could be used.

These campaign sponsors realize that they don't need to pay for places for people to discuss things because people will always find places to discuss them anyway. Players will repurpose parts of off-topic forums or start their own free group somewhere or whatever. But a lot of us still come back to uF for our ARG fixes because for whatever our individual reasons are, uF scratches that itch for us better than anyone else. Is that worth something to us?

So that's advertising and I am so far against subscriptions or paid participation that I might as well be standing behind the idea. It pisses me off and it has for about 8 years now since people started talking about how websites couldn't possibly continue to be free and would have to use ads or subscriptions to survive because it just wasn't worth it to people to voluntarily support something merely because they enjoyed it.

Well, fuck you, End of Free Discussion from 2002. I have more faith in humanity than that and I have that faith because of ARGs and the communities I've seen them catalyze. Our communities do band together in times of need and will fucking step up to prove you wrong time and again.

So the only appropriate group to have this discussion with is all of us. We're the group that has come together for discussion and play and it's up to us together to decide whether or not we want this thing we've built to continue, or to get better or worse, or maybe fade away. I've begged people to branch out, start their own forums or discussion spaces, expand the options for people. Why does it seem like none of them lasted more than a year or so before imploding?

This discussion itself typifies how we do everything, as ARGonauts. The kinds of responses we've seen so far have been a few quiet donations (thank you!), some ideas for things people are willing to do to help, some ideas for things other people could do or which would have little to no effect on the suggestor, and 90% silence. This is about right if you think in terms of the audience participation levels in ARGs. It confirms my faith.

I'm not here to persuade or pressure you to contribute but I am here to find out how to keep everything going for as long as necessary. More so, I'd really like to be able to do things like add capacity on our own schedule instead of having to wait until the last minute and then beg people for funds to cover it, to be better able to withstand large traffic influxes when they come periodically, to be prepared ahead of time instead of after the fact. And wouldn't it be great to be able to do things like invest in a couple of servers with Chat-Solutions to bolster the stability of their network? I'd be ecstatic to be able to add a mobile template to the forums, or produce iPhone and Android apps.

I have a really hard time with the idea that none of this is valuable to us, even a little bit. How many hours a month do you spend on this site, even just reading and not posting? 4? 30? 100? How much does it cost to spend four hours at a movie? Around $30 or $40? How much do you spend on magazines each month? Or XBox Live? Or your cell phone, or iTunes, or your Kindle eBooks, or your FarmWars, or the newspaper, or cable, or Starbucks every morning? Is six bucks a month too dear to say, I love this site for being free, in every sense of the word, so much that I will kick it a couple of bucks every week and wear this ribbon on my chest because I'm proud to be a part of something I have absolutely no obligation to but that I value anyway?

When a lot of us get together, our collective efforts can have huge payoffs through almost insignificant individual contributions. Together, we can make this site far better than any one of us could do alone. I don't think it is too much to ask of us, certainly not for all of us. And because of my faith in us, I have been willing to bet that I will not be proven wrong.

[FSURobbie]

I'm part of an iPhone dev team at my job and a simple app wouldn't be hard, but you have to buy a one time $99 dollar dev license for app deployment on the iTunes App store. Designing a web app is free, and also will work on any smart phone, but you lose certain features like push notification. If we wanted to design a native uF app for deployment that one time license cost would have to be factored in.

[zygotesix]

I work as an affiliate marketer online for a living, and I can tell you that there are tons of ways to monetize your traffic that are better than Amazon links.

You could offer banner or interstitial ad space to media buyers, or through a media network (AdBrite, Gunggo, etc). You could sign up with some affiliate marketing networks yourself and place banners on the forum (using a simple banner rotator script or plugin) to display offers relevant to the users of the forum. There are literally hundreds of possibilities, everything from simple email submits that pay a dollar, up to offers that pay $30 to $50 when a user takes a free trial. It's all about knowing your demographic.

Considering that ARGers are across a pretty broad demographic, you could try putting more generic banner offers on here and let someone else manage what gets shown - easily done by selling adspace using a placement network (like the ones I mentioned above) or Google AdSense. Google is the easiest to set up but you'll probably bring in the least income from it.

Oh, another thing to consider - if you do ad placement through Google, you get a small amount per click. If you do placement through a network, you get a percentage of the flat rate they charge per day/week/month to the advertisers who buy the space, or a cost per click to the advertisers who do CPC advertising with them. If you make banner space available directly to media buyers and direct response marketers, you can charge a CPM (cost per thousand views) fee and this will make more money for the site - you get paid every time their banner gets 1,000 impressions (is viewed 1,000 times, by anyone - not by 1,000 individual users, just in total). Doing it this way can make you a lot more, because if people are paying on a CPM basis, you can run many advertisers ads and make a lot more than if you charged a flat rate per month cost on the banner space. This is how a lot of big websites do it. Go to almost any larger site (fox news, magazines, newspapers, etc) and look at the bottom where it says "Advertising" or "Advertise With Us" - they have pricing structures set up similar to this. You might not be able to get the $15 CPM they get, but even $1 or $2 CPM adds up quickly.

I'd personally be happy to try to help you figure out a monetization strategy for the site, as I love this place and thats sort of what I do for a living anyway. If you'd like me to chime in in more detail, feel free to PM or email me.

Hopefully everyone can put their heads together here and we can come up with a way to help the forum increase income. This place is one of my favorite spots online and I'd hate to see it disappear or diminish.

[diszaster]

I just think "the community" is small, is possibly getting smaller, and cannot sustain itself; that going directly to users should be the last resort rather than the first; and that you can only ask for so much from your users all the time.

Wasn't thinking about how this would affect ARGfest sponsorship, but that should probably be a separate conversation anyway.

On the specifics, while I'm not opposed to booster subscriptions, I do think $50/year is a little high, and would like to see an "a la carte" option for some of those extra perks.