Let us say that one of our members, who is a known and relatively liked publisher (small-press publisher) on here were offering to host the site for free, in exchange for putting up banner ads about his games.

Would people want that? Or would people prefer to do a donations drive to raise money every year in order to pay the server costs for the site?

RPGPundit

I can live with some advertising for the sake of alleviating money issues.

If the banner(s) is (are) unobtrusive, and turning a prift doesn't become your goal, that's fine.

I'd be more accepting if the ads were of more than one companies' games.

I'm sure if I knew who the publisher was, it'd be somebody I liked even if I'd never tried their games. But independence of viewpoint is important, and IMO it's going to be difficult to maintain when you have an arrangement like that.

I'd rather the site go with a more open advertising model, preferably with some kind of "clean room" division between the people handling that side of things and the people handling moderation. If somebody thinks it's worth paying to advertise to us numbskulls, let them, whoever they may be. Then we can rake them over the coals in discussion.

I´d appreciate a sticky in the general forum:

"Our advertisers are:...."

With transparency like this in place, I don´t have anything against ads.

A personal hint to the Pundit: People will attack you for being a hypocrit when you take money. You either ride that out, or you post the amount of money into the sticky.

Maybe with fixed prices and categories in the first post, so one can calculate how much is generated each month.

Tranparency is paramount if you want to keep the moral high ground.

The advantage of letting someone host it in exchange for advertising is you avoid any money actually changing hands.  Sure, there's value exchanged, but Pundit can avoid anyone saying anything about him getting money. The disadvantage is that you run the risk of becoming that publisher's site (nothing against any publishers here).

Putting up generic advertising space has the opposite effect. Money changes hand, so Pundit will have to address that; but it will not be limited to one publisher so perception can't be that it's that publisher's site.

Lastly, If you go with the generic advertising, you probably want to have a plan in place to respond to the critics - depending on how much that bothers you.  For example, post not only how much you make on the advertising, but how much it costs.  Explain what you'll do with any net profits - will it go in your pocket, pay the admins a bonus, perform charity work, etc?

Just my 4 hay-pennies...

Utter transparency makes many of the issues involved managable.  This means a discussion of the financial matters involved.

For the record, I would pay $100 for a years worth of banner ads on theRPGSite. I thought someone had said the break-even on the site was around 200 so you would not have to sell much more advertising space to get there.

The plus, you remain off a company's servers which can be difficult to extricate your site from if not technically savvy, exposes you to the risk of "if the company folds or does not pay their bills" and opens you up to security issues.

So, I would counter propose offering company sponsorships where advertising and promotional programs are offered. This way, the community benefits from the participation of companies (hopefully in the sense of promotional products or the like).

Just a thought.

Bill

I'm agree with Hinterwelt on this one.  I'd rather not put the server's hosting into company hands for a variety of reasons.  However, I'd be more than happy to see some discrete advertising by some of the companies here, such as Flying Mice's and Hinterwelt.

At first I didn't have a problem with it at all, but I think that Bill makes a good point.  Having a company provide the hosting potentially opens you up to a lot of hassle, no matter how ethical and cool the company in question is.  

I would recommend selling a limited amount of ads and/or promotional programs to cover the costs of maintaining the site, perhaps supplemented by a system of donations through PayPal.  My faith in human nature is such that I don't think that voluntary contributions would cover the whole cost, but I think that the members of this community are invested enough that it might cover a portion.  To be honest, the less advertisements the better, IMO.

In any case, as already has been mentioned by several people, I think that transparency is the best course of action.  Hell, even *if* you want it to be a personal money-maker  (and to be clear I am not saying that it is the case) it would be better to be up front about it rather than the rather unseemly way those issues are handled at tBP.


TGA

I support keeping it separate.

Quote from: Bradford C. WalkerUtter transparency makes many of the issues involved managable.  This means a discussion of the financial matters involved.

Quoted For Truth.

I agree 100% that the transaction should be transparent.

Yeah, its a complicated issue. Its a good offer, but there are some of the problems.

What I'd more clearly like to know is whether people would generally prefer to have advertising going on here (as in, either this kind of arrangement or general ads), or would rather this place remained ad-free and we paid our way through donation drives?

RPGPundit

I don't think it's wise to host therpgsite on some company's server. Companies come and go, and moods of owners change. We want a stable and reliable server.

I think advertising is fine. I would just be clear about the amount you'll accept. I understand you're not aiming to make money with this? You still might want to accept advertising in value greater than the cost of running it, in case of price hikes in the server space in future, or drops in bought advertising. It's good to have a reserve.

Just don't go for those intellitext green hyperlink adverts, those are annoying. Stick to the good old banner adverts.

Yeah, speaking for myself, banners are no problem, and I think I prefer them to membership drives. (If someone has a good argument on the other hand, I'd like to hear it.)

If someone's on a dialup connection...well, maybe some of our avatars are already a problem...but I'd still want to set limits on the bandwidth load imposed, and discourage any fancy animated junk, especially if it uses Flash or whatnot. Advertising should support the site, not the other way around.