[theforum] Financial situation
David Kaufman
david at gigawatt.com
Mon Sep 7 00:13:59 CDT 2009
Hi all,
Regarding our finances at present, I just transferred another $300 from
our nest egg (the pile of donations in our Paypal account) into our bank
account, to cover the next two months' hosting charges. And the pile is
getting smaller -- the Paypal balance is now $755. If we continue to
run two servers with the trickle of revenue we're now getting from the
Google ad on beo, we'll run out of money in like 8 months (so like May
2010).
In short, evolt has all of the of the two types of cash flow problems:
expenses that are too high, and revenue that is too low.
Fortunately, on the expense side, all we need to do is get off our butts
and move weo, leo and beo (www., lists. and browsers.evolt.org) from
tempest, the old server, onto tron, the new one, in order to finally
decommission the older and more expensive tempest box, and so lower our
monthly costs by more than half:
tempest is $69/month
tron is $45/month
(tron is also newer, and has twice the storage)
On the revenue side though, there's good news and bad news. The bad
news is that we still are not earning enough from the Google ad, like we
did for several years, to cover even one server. Not even enough to
cover tron, the new, lower cost server. This year so far we're seeing
just $28 a month on average from Google, instead of the $100+ a month we
saw like clockwork, from 2004 to 2007.
The good news, though, is that the news is not all bad: In addition to
Google, we also have a bit of recurring donation revenue that would keep
us just slightly, theoretically in the black once we have just the one
server to pay for. But that's assuming the $28/month average of ad
revenue from Google does not decrease further, and that the generous
monthly donors don't become unemployment statistics and cancel their
subscriptions.
So, I'd like to everyone thinks about adding another unobtrusive Google
ad, this time to the mailing list archives. There's plenty of *room* on
these pages, so the ad could actually *be* very unobtrusive, for example:
http://lists.evolt.org/archive/
http://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20090831/thread.html
And, since the mailing list archives get about 4 times the traffic that
beo does, (and assuming that traffic translates to revenue) that could
give us the extra cushion of income we need for the future.
-dave, ducking and hoping the flames don't burn his ass *too* much...
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