[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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