In case you were wondering about the Ads on the site

13 Comments

Comment by Ed on July 4, 2008 at 12:16am

OK—a couple questions.
1.) Is there a way to donate to the site?
2.) Regardless of what ads are showing, does the simple act of clicking through to the advertised sites help pay for the site? That is, can people "donate" simply by clicking on ads?

Comment by Holly on July 4, 2008 at 12:29am

Jeb, bring back the Paypal tip jar.

Comment by Jeb Banner on July 4, 2008 at 9:23am

Holly and Ed- I will be bringing back the Paypal donation link soon. I needed to clear everything out for the LonPaul donations. I felt if I posted it again too soon after that it might be confusing. Thanks for the reminder. Also, if you click on the ads, they aren't running yet as of this post, it will support the site but I don't want to encourage that since it is essentially click fraud if you have no interest in the ad and just want to support the site. Not that I would turn you in!

Scott- the only plans for re-posting content would be in a MFT Zine but that would be with permission from the member first. So if you have something posted on the site we would ask before using it in the Zine. Most likely it will be fliers or pictures that we think would be cool to feature in the Zine.

I've also considered doing fund raising drives, like NPR, twice a year where we give stuff away and kinda get everybody on board with donating whatever they can if they can. My desire is to keep the site free for all users and just support it with ads and donations.

But I'm sure you can all appreciate that this project is becoming pretty time consuming for me and my company- Small Box. We now devote 20-30 hours a week to MFT related project (the community, the archive, album releases, shows, Broad Ripple Fall Music Fest where MFT is a main sponsor, etc) so it would be nice to get some income to offset the expenses. My business partner has made clear he would be much more comfortable with the time we spend if there was was some income. I can't blame him!

So your thoughts are much appreciated, I agree with Scott, I want the Honeymoon to continue and I think we can make that happen with ads and donations.

Comment by Molly D'Eath on July 6, 2008 at 9:57am

I like the idea of the twice yearly fundraiser. And what about a premium membership like Salon.com - pay 20 bucks for no ads?

Comment by Molly D'Eath on July 6, 2008 at 10:00am

Also, what about an affiliate program? I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon - could that help MFT?

Comment by Frankie Camaro on July 11, 2008 at 1:21am

How about google ads? It's a start anyway. Maybe you could charge a small fee for downloads, like per song, or a monthly or yearly membership. Maybe you could work out something with the bands to split some of the download income. Also keep doing shows and releasing compilations.

I like the paypal donate link as I think at least some people would give now and then.

Comment by Frankie Camaro on July 11, 2008 at 1:23am

When motomusic.com's traffic got up to a few thousand people a day for a while because of a similar site in China, I was making a few hundred a month. Use some of the money to promote the site with Google Ad words and drive more traffic.

Comment by Jeb Banner on July 16, 2008 at 11:19am

Hey everyone, thanks for your feedback. I've tried Google Ads and haven't found them to be very profitable. Might be worth another try. We've considered having a profit share with the bands but then decided it would be super hard to pull off and also it would probably mean less exposure for bands in general.

I am leaning towards the fundraiser idea. That is the reason I haven't added the Paypal link again since I am considering doing a fundraiser. Probably a Fall fundraiser. I wanted to put a good deal of distance between that and the LP memorial donations so that there wouldn't be any confusion.

Comment by Jeb Banner on July 16, 2008 at 11:23am

Also, we have tried the Amazon affiliate program but it hasn't worked for us. That was before the community though.

In terms of shows and releases, they are almost always money losers! Maybe we are doing them wrong or maybe being too generous with bands but I have never seen a profit from those ventures. We are invariably left with tons of CDs (you should see how many CDs we have here!) and the shows aren't really a way to make money since bands need to get paid. I still do that stuff since I think it serves a bigger purpose but it is almost always a money loser.

Comment by Ed on July 16, 2008 at 12:45pm

You might be able to sell some of the CDs on the site (esepcially if it was made clear that buying them helped support the site), no? And I think you could have both a donate link and fundraisers.

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