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It's a strong community of users, so I'm going to try the donation route soon, with bonuses for donators. I tried having someone well connected in my industry directly sell advertising campaigns. They were able to increase ad revenue by about 30k per year. However, I needed to pay them, so at the end of the day it didn't have any benefit, and I went back to using ad networks. Edit: I run another site as well that has 5,000 daily unique users and 70,000 daily page views. It has two advertisements, one above the fold on the homepage, and one closer to the footer. It earns about $5 per day. That's it. I don't think many people understand how low earnings are for most sites. Lots of publishers have been adding more advertisements, and trying to block users with ad block enabled, and it's not because they're greedy, money grabbers, trying to steal all of your information. Most of them are just trying to stay afloat as the ship sinks. There is not enough money going to content online. How much do you donate to HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and hundreds of other sites and services you use on a regular basis? I donate $0, and the majority of other people do the same. That's a problem, and we need a solution. |
My best example of this is a very nice painted webcomic that updated once a month, and viewers reached his 4.5k goal so he could hire an additional person to help make it two comics a month. It makes the implicit contract between viewer and creator explicit, and readers would instantly know why and who to blame if the comic went back to only update once a month again.