Never ran something like this, but always wondered: why not have a visible counter saying "this is what it costs to run, please donate!" and let people donate to keep it up? Some kinda big progress bar somewhere or whatever.

How do you know it "doesn't work with community donations" when you have no measures to help deal with the tragedy of the commons?

I ran a content forum and blog that needed $6k at cost back in pre vps days and raised it several years in a row off community donations.

I refused to show ads because they were all ticket brokers / scalpers.

It is actually kind of a pain and takes work to raise money this way. For me, I had to do a personal appeal, email drips, and I even added membership status indicators to usernames and gave access to “exclusive” content.

It did work though with the thermometer thingy and some pluck.

Yeah I suspect it could work with some savvy and pluck. I have some ideas that will probably lead me to face off with this issue myself, I'm kinda looking forward to it.

Or with that, a visible running revenue counter with a probability that ads will show. If the site generates $3k/year and costs $15k/year 20% of the page loads would be ad free.

I don't blame GP for wanting to make some money - they're certainly putting in some otherwise unpaid hours. But a "Target 0" system could work well for some communities.

If wikipedia is any indication, it doesn't work without plastering the top half of the screen begging for a donation.

Have you ever worked at a nonprofit? I have, my whole career, lots of them. Don't say this. Nonprofits use strategy after strategy, tested and untested and rational and intuitive, to increase donations in every way they can. They know what they're doing. Do they get it 100% right? No. Do they do it all day, every day, and know a ton about it? Yes.

I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me "why do you guys send out those letters? Everyone just throws them out." Do you know why? Because we see how much they cost, and how much they make, and it's worth it.

This guy is actually running a community site that's paying for itself. Do not question him, especially by proposing one tiny little strategy among the thousands that might work.

Yes, I have, but didn't deal with this issue.

I don't think this advice of "if you haven't done it you can't criticize or ask questions about it" is very good. It would bar me from commenting on and criticizing Michael Bay movies, so no thank you.

I'd also like to know if the guy shuts off the ads when he makes more than is needed for maintenance costs.

No, I don't shut off the advertising.

1. That's my bill for hosting and bandwidth expenses. I obviously need to consider the cost of my time which is not included in that figure. The more money the site generates, the more time I invest in it. So, if it were to generate $150,000 from advertising, I wouldn't shut it off, but I'd start pulling my time out of other projects, and moving it into this community site to add more of the requested features.

2. I want to save for a rainy day. Online communities don't last forever. It would be short sighted to shut off advertising simply because this years expenses are met, and then two years from now I need to close up the site because advertising is falling short. When the site hits a rough patch, I want the savings to either push it through or pivot. Coasting on maintenance costs would be a dangerous road with an abrupt end.

How much do you need to save for a rainy day?

I've heard that line from people raking in several hundred thousand a year, while they still callously heap ads on their audiences.

If you have no target, neither for your site nor for your personal ambition, it seems like the veneer of "I tried to avoid them but couldn't" is really quite thin.

Do you serve the ads yourself or do you defer to third party ad networks? I have no problem with the former, but with the latter I think it's very hard to control what gets displayed, and you're also opening your users up to various attack vectors.

There has got to be a niche available for somebody to do plain old non-evil advertising???

EDIT $15,000 a year sounds like a tremendous amount of money to run a web site in 2019 ...

He said user content so that might be users uploading images, audio, or video with the associated storage and bandwidth costs not to mention workers for generating thumbnails.

I'm the grand-parent poster and not the parent, but yeah, my user-content sites don't cost anywhere near that much. Storage is probably the biggest cost, and that still doesn't cost much. I'm not really sure how a site like that could cost that much unless you're getting absurd amounts of traffic, or are using some poorly optimized software; though I also don't know the nature of the site or the content.

If my costs were anywhere close to that I think I'd have no choice but to suck it up and place some ads as well. As it is, community donations cover our costs just fine, but pretty much 100% of that revenue - which is all of our revenue - goes to infrastructure cost. We don't make any profit, but that was never the intention when creating the sites.