Fastfission wrote:
Just a few thoughts on advertising:
* It wouldn't have to be banner ads in the obnoxious sense. Surely
there could be some sort of quality control and discreteness about it.
I'm sure we could find someone willing to shell out a lot of funding
for a small ad on the lower left hand corner of each page. If every
set of advertisements had to be approved by some small board of
thoughtful people, it would probably keep out the "You may be a
winner!" and "Mortgage your house online!" ads.
Agreed
* What if ad content could be controlled through user
CSS pages? Those
who are 'in the know' could outright disable them without difficulty.
People without accounts could never disable them. What's the ratio of
logged-in to non-logged in page hits?
* I think that "targetted" schemes along the lines of Google Adsense
are a bad idea. If we have ads, they should be as little connected to
the content being viewed as possible, as a matter of integrity.
Article content and article titles should have NO relation to
advertising content. If it does, we are not only inviting some raised
eyebrows about content validity, but we're inviting people to try and
game the system by modifying articles in oh-so-clever and minor ways
to get their specific advertisements listed first.
Good point.
However, current advertisement models show that the best revenues are
gathered from targetted advertisement.
* Perhaps there are other revenue models we should
consider first
before advertising. At the moment the only ones on the table seem to
be 1. selling hard-copies, 2. begging, and 3. advertising. I have the
business acumen of a pigeon but surely there must be alternatives to
these three.
Agreed.
Well, current appeal could be called "begging". As Mav explained
already, we are far from having enough right now to fulfill our first
trimester needs. And we finished the year on our reserves. So, "begging"
makes sense.
The problems associated with "selling hard copies" are
* making a partnership with a firm or organisation to "produce the hard
copy" and then to "distribute" the content. Or should we set up another
organisation to do that ourselves ?
* filtering content to put on the hard copy (removing copyvios... we
need many editors to get involved here)
* assuming all legal possible consequences (copyvios again), which
implies having financial reserves to assume this.
Other models may involve
* finding more sponsors (but, who will take care of this ?)
* writing grants (which is also a job in itself, with few people
motivated and experienced to do it)
We might have employees to do these two tasks, but again, we need to
"invest" to get these guys.
Ant
FF
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