[theforum] google AdSense makes dollars (as well as sense)

s t e f evolt at nota-bene.org
Tue Jun 15 16:22:07 CDT 2004


<quote who='Lachlan Cannon' when='13/06/2004 03:10'>

> Like I pointed out in my other email, I can see plenty of uses for money 
> for other purposes around evolt and *now* too. Hosting expenses are not 
> the be-all and end-all of expenditure that we may be in need of. As 
> Morgan points out, SitePoint pays for (certain) articles now. They pay 
> for people to update topic-specific blogs for them, and it works.

Hi all,

Sorry for jumping in late.

There's a little point I have to add considering Sitepoint, which makes 
me think that they've lost some of the spirit that makes evolt.org and 
would maybe shed some new light on this whole debate.

I belong to pompage.net, a french non-profit whose job is to translate 
english-speaking articles. Of course it's like evolt.org all-volunteer.

The other day we thought we'd translate one nice article from Sitepoint. 
We contacted them for a preliminary authorisation, like for any other 
article we've translated.

They told us that the cost of getting the right to translate one article 
was $100.

Why on earth would we pay $100, considering we're doing it on our spare 
time, voluntarily, and paying for our own hosting, etc?

Now, I'm not criticising the notion of paying for copyrighted material. 
I've been an author, and have fought a publishing house to have my 
rights recognised. I'm just mentioning that I feel weird somewhere 
inside when I hear this kind of reaction when we were only promoting 
their high-quality content.

I don't know how they slipped from open and free community to paying 
content provider.

But I don't like their example to be used for what evolt could be. 
Please find another if you want to convince me.

Apart from that, I'm not saying anything yet about ads on evolt. I'm 
listening to what all of you are saying. You speak better english than 
I, and all in all, apart from some personal rants, which are bound to 
happen anyway, since evolt is a community with which people have a 
strong personal relationship, the discussion bears interesting points.

-- 
s t e f
personal: http://nota-bene.org/
org: http://evolt.org/
french org: http://pompage.net/


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