Supporting and maintaining si-community, donations and so on

[owei]

Hi there!

First of all I would like to tell you, that the "Donate" button an the bottom of every "si-community" page was an extreme success. I´ve installed it last year in July, if I remember correct, and guess how many guys did a donation?
NOONE did donate a single cent.

Until now si-community has been free of advertising, but since our users seem not to care much about an "ad-free" forum, this will change in the near future. You have decided ;)

I don´t want to earn money with this, to be clear, but the annual costs of this site should be covered somehow.

cheers,
oliver

Moderator edit: edited a typo in the title - HB

[Hirazi Blue]

I guess many of the si-community users weren't aware the "Donate" button ultimately decided if the forum could be kept ad-free. In this direct manner this hasn't been brought up before as far as I can recall.
That doesn't ultimately change the facts, though...
;)

[xsisupport]

I'd never noticed the Donate button.

Maybe I'm cranky because it's 5:22am here, but why didn't you guys post an appeal first instead of resorting to sarcasm immediately?

Or move the Donate button to the top of the page so it's always visible?

[rray]

I agree about the exposure - I think putting it prominently on the "reply" and "new thread" page would help also - I got an increase in donations for rray.de after putting the donate button inside the "local download" popups. Although the last few months it's been really quiet.

I would add ads in any case, maybe doing some form of "rent-this-space" to get very targeted ads only.
For Adsense I don't think there's enough traffic yet. I tried Adsense for a few weeks on rray.de and got 0 clicks.

[owei]

Hi!

OK, thanks for input´s and sorry for being harsh that early in the morning ;)

In first place, I´ll move the donate button to more visible location and we´ll see what will happen ;)
Though, if you read a thread from top to bottom, it should be visible for everyone...anyway.

@rray
...yes, I´m open minded to something like this. Would be great if you could do some more research on that?

cheers,
oliver

[rray]

I was just thinking literally about a "your ad here" banner that you could sell directly per-month or something, along with some sort of agreement upon rebates depending on how many ads are being displayed in the same spot.

For something more sophisticated, the system which xsibase is using seems to be quite good as well (Saw some of Erics's ads). It's from realmedia

[xsisupport]

In first place, I´ll move the donate button to more visible location and we´ll see what will happen ;)
Though, if you read a thread from top to bottom, it should be visible for everyone...anyway.

I'd think so too, but now that I'm paying attention, I notice that because I use the mouse scroll wheel to scroll through a post, I usually stop before the Donate button becomes visible.

And when I reply, I scroll down only enough to see the Submit button ;-)

[owei]

OK. Here is the new DONATE button at the top right side of every page. Still needs some tweaking with the margins...Though, I hope this will help a little ;)
Thanks to you guys, who donated the past days!

best,
oliver

[Hirazi Blue]

While not needing to now the specifics (the amount of money involved), but did adding the extra button actually substantially increase the number of donations?

(And if there is "enough" money coming in through that channel, maybe we could start paying people to post again some more...)

[SamHowell]

What's wrong with a bit of advertising?

[Hirazi Blue]

Purely speaking from a personal view, as owei is the one to decide on this alone, when it comes to the question of adding advertisement to the si-community or not, I'd say, there is nothing wrong with a bit of advertisement per se, if it's done right. And there the troubles start. To find a way to incorporate advertising in a way that doesn't disrupt the "look and feel" of the site too much, while still being visible enough to actually be interesting enough for advertisers to actually use it as advertisement space isn't all that easy to achieve IMHO. If advertising were to be incorporated into the si-community, a general overhaul of the overall layout might be needed, again IMHO.

And to comment on an earlier remark by rray about the system XSIBase utilizes: let's not forget this remark by 3DTutorial. It is unclear to me, if this was a problem @xsibase or @realmedia. No matter, it seems something to check/keep in mind before (if/when) an advertising system is eventually finally chosen...

IMHO IMHO IMHO (added for emphasis)

[SamHowell]

A bit of Google AdSense along the top of the forum wouldn't be too much trouble?

[Hirazi Blue]

I really know next to nothing about this kind of stuff, but I guess it all depends how much you can tweak the advertising content deemed appropriate for this site. Softimage is after all "nothing but" a well-known "companion to Maya", so Google might send anything "Autodesk related" this way, which wouldn't necessarily send the right message to the users of this community.
But I could well be totally mistaken...

P.S. The "companion to Maya" comment is meant to make a point,
not to entice another riot...

[SamHowell]

Yeah I think with AdSense and other similar advertising services you end up with fairly vague adverts that are prompted by key words on the site. So you probably would get anything within the sphere of "computers" or "graphics" or "animation". I'm sure you wouldn't end up with anything like mail order brides or penis enlargemnt services. ;)

I don't really have a a problem with this kind of advertising myself. It's a fact of life on the web and it's only going increase in the future. The user base is getting something for free, somebody or something has to pay for it. I know most people appreciate it when things are done out of community spirit and are not tainted by the sinister hand of capitalism but unless the user base is prepared to step up and help then some small sacrifice has to be made. In the case of advertising this is a thin strip of forum real-estate with some flashing pictures and words that 99% of people completely ignore anyway.

[iamVFX]

I found this idea interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrMlEEWBgY

http://flattr.com/

[Hirazi Blue]

That's an interesting idea indeed...