Good day everyone! I would like to apologize for being so late on this but with the large amount of announcements and news this month we wanted to hold off until we got those announcements out of the way.
So some good news, we saw an uptick of support on our patreon which is helping us to offset out costs a bit more. I would like to thank all of those new patreons who decided to help support us along with the older ones who have been sticking with us. It really does help us keep the lights on!
Here is the details for those interested, and if you like what we are doing and wish to help out more directly make sure to check out our Patreon!
I use adblocker on every site by default, but after seeing your report, I switched it of, only to see that there’s still no ads. I’m not sure how much of a difference it would make, but have you considered adding ads to this site?
Also the funding for this site surely doesn’t just materialize out of nothing. You don’t really sound concerned about the financial situation atm, but losing around 2.5k per semester + occasional game jam prizes should be quite heavy on your shoulders, no?
First, thank you for wanting to try to help out by turning off your ad blocker since every bit helps Now onto your question, yes we do actually run ads on the forums we are just not very aggressive about them. They are usually on the top and bottom of the post like this:
That being said we dont make very much on them. Even though we get about 6 million page views a month with about ~126,000 unique users a month we only make about $150 on ad rev as you can see in the statements above. The main reason for this is our content is not very ad friendly so google ads does not pay us very much. For context we where making almost $600/month on just 1 million page views before they hit us with that. The problem will also be further compounded with the main site since we expect most of our traffic to be heading there after the switch over.
We are considering allowing users to run ads much like FA does since that is much more cost effective, but to do so requires us to setup some systems to handle it that we dont want to deal with until the main site it is out.
No, you are correct. Running the site is a fairly heavy burden for both @kilif and I in both terms of money and time. We are both lucky enough to work in fields that are in demand and well compensated but we can’t shoulder the burden forever. We do hope that once we allow users to begin selling their games through us it will more then cover the sites costs and the support of our generous patreons helps lesson the load on us until we can get there.
That being said unless something drastic happens (like me loosing my Job since I am responsible for 90% of the costs) we are confident we can keep everything going until we get the full site up and running.
Now onto your question, yes we do actually run ads on the forums we are just not very aggressive about them. They are usually on the top and bottom of the post like this: