
Don’t monetize to cover costs - MicahWedemeyer
http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/25/dont-monetize-to-cover-costs/
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morisy
It's a good essay, and while I totally agree with "don't just slap adsense on
there," for some people monetization _is_ the hobby, or at least part of it,
and even if it isn't there's nothing inherently wrong with putting up ads.

Being prescriptive and saying "don't try to cover your costs" is a little like
saying "don't click coupons" or "don't shop at sales" if you're buying stuff
you like but don't need. To go back to your baseball analogy, sure, you won't
put ads on your jersey, but you very well might agree to store the bats and
helmets at your place in exchange for the team waiving your fee. Why is it
wrong for people to take a generally accepted method and save a few bucks if
they want?

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
A good point. In my experience, if you're going to do anything more than
AdSense, it will require a decent time and effort investment. Building the
infrastructure to allow people to give you money is surprisingly difficult. If
you're only trying to get a couple bucks a month, then the ROI may be
worthwhile for learning, but horrible otherwise.

Browsing and clipping coupons takes maybe 20 minutes. If you can get a
monetization scheme set up for your site in that time, then it's totally a
great idea. I'd kill for something that could be monetized that fast.

That might make a good article: How to monetize in less than 1 hour. I'd
definitely read it if someone were to write that up.

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greenagain
I think that people use "covering (negligible) costs" as a euphemism for
trying to businessify their side-project. Covering these low costs would be
the first, modest goal in trying to convert the project to a business anyway.
If they instead told their friends or web-colleagues that they're trying to
grow their web-trinket into a viable business, they'd probably be criticized
and made fun of and ultimately talked out of the idea. So instead they talk
about "covering costs," and it's pretty much a low-investment, no-risk way of
experimenting with making something a business.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Yeah, I can see your point. Covering costs is definitely a milestone that I
look toward when monetizing, but only as a first step on the climb toward
profitability.

~~~
greenagain
Likewise, I don't disagree with your point that some things should remain non-
monetized side-projects.

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jeff18
I agree with the general sentiment (don't deface your hobbyist site with ads
until you want to seriously monetize it) but I disagree with his solution. He
basically advocates "just suck it up -- $100 / month is not that much."

To many people that is a ton of money. A better solution would be to

a) switch to something like Google App Engine which will not charge you a dime
until you are serving millions of pages a month.

b) ask a buddy to let you put the site on one of their under utilized servers
(this is what I do for my startup, even though we run through terabytes of
bandwidth per month)

c) ask a company to sponsor you. Many companies have a plethora of unused
servers and would be happy to donate some of that to someone in need.

d) ask the community for donations. I bet you could scrounge up enough to
cover hosting, especially if the community realizes that the alternative is
ads.

If all of that fails, then go ahead and fallback on adsense - at least you
tried.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
I've updated the post to include your ideas, except for the App Engine one. My
only disagreement with it is that it only applies to Python and Java, right?

Anyways, thanks for sharing your ideas.

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vital101
"The only reason to monetize a web project is if you intend to make serious
money."

Err, or maybe you just want to break even. If user's find what you're doing
interesting or useful, they'll put up with an advertisement or two.

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minsight
I have a bunch of sites, and I don't think that the world is owed them on my
dime. If they get free content, they'll have to learn to cope with a small ad
at the side of the page.

~~~
eru
And the guys who really care have an ad-blocker anyway.

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Xurinos
The author here is responding to my comment in another thread:

    
    
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146091
    

I was asking how I could approach making money with my group's hobby MUD, at
least to cover server costs, and I had various concerns about how that would
affect our team of volunteers as well as our players.

I think the response is reasonable, but I also agree with other comments here
that said that the "covering server costs" is the first milestone towards
hauling in some more serious money. If we can get at least that far,
indicating that the Dark Mists community has interest in supporting its
growth, we can then look into some expansion.

For example, we are in need of interested developers who are not about to run
off with the source code to host their own MUD or use for their characters'
and friends' characters' benefits, as has happened to us in the past on
several occasions. A little legal support would be nice.

I recognize that the trust factor is its own ballgame and indicative of the
management as well as the community. Every online project has to figure out
how to handle these kinds of issues. I am not sure if it is harder with the
project being an RPG, since you have to keep a large number of secrets in
order to allow your Explorer player enjoy the game.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
I was unaware you had a larger goal than covering costs. If you want more,
then it's a different ballgame. Just don't be afraid to own up to your goal of
making money. It's OK to have a hobby that makes no money, and likewise, it's
OK to have a project that you want to monetize.

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tomkarlo
Even with very moderate traffic, if your website has the right audience you
can use Google Adsense to cover your hosting costs quite easily, without
ruining the experience. I have a _single page_ web site (driven by a Rails
service) where I am able to cover all of my hosting costs, across several
providers, because AdSense returns a $3 CPM for me.

Could I afford to keep the site up without it? Yes. But why? Having AdSense on
the site takes zero incremental work after the initial setup.

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uggedal
You could find alternative ways to cover your hosting costs. I'm covering all
hosting for <http://wasitup.com> with referrals (245 pending at the moment)
I've gotten for people signing up to Linode after I wrote this performance
comparison of VPS providers: <http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-
comparison>

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
That makes perfect sense for wasitup (which I use and like, by the way). Good
idea.

