Hey everyone,
Starting from, well right now you may see some Google adsense provided ads on some of our pages. This is an experiment to see howmuch of our server costs can be covered by these ads.
Over the summer we may experiment a bit with this or other means of revenue, but I do promise that we will keep this at a bare minimum to keep the site usable.
Greets,
Timothy
I was freaked out for a second there. :o
heheh, they don’t actually look too bad, but what if you put them only in the different forum sections instead of each thread? I think that would be a lot more convenient.
edit: just realised it uses the keywords in the threads to come up with the ads, scratch my idea. 
What are your server costs?
Great idea, and not too much of a nuisance 
Google ads are pretty discreet. I’ll make sure to click some every day.
hi there!
What about adding a “donate” through paypal button or similar service on the home page?
Just a suggestion.
Cheers,
TW
We have had a donate trough paypal button before but that proved to be rather unsuccesfull. Since then however we’ve grown enourmously so we are thinking about organizing a donation campaign this summer / fall.
That campaign will have a clear target goal and we’ll probably organize one every year to cover all of our costs during the year. If a campaign like that proves to be succesfull the ads will disappear.
As one of you stated the google ads tend to be rather discrete and I actually find them usefull at times! Unfortunately I can’t click on the google ads on elysiun myself and neither can I tell you guys to do so.
We’ll just see how this works out.
I would like to be as open as possible towards you guys about the earnings we get from these ads and how it is spend. So I’ll be sure to post with more news on that in a couple of weeks.
Currently the server costs are $100 USD per month and then there are some additional costs like domain names, server support, etc
Timothy
Had some fun clicking some ads. Came across this:
http://72.41.12.178/
Alias Maya 6.5 Unlimited
which retails for $6999 now for only $50
((backup copy,digital files only))
Meaning pirated %|
Surprised ads like this make it through.
hehe, right now the ads are talking about adsense…
ill click a few every time i get on.
Noted that the clicks are not opening at all in IE with me. Only able to get them with a right click and open in new window.
Works fine in mozilla.
Chimpoid
Honestly, I had to look twice to see the ads. They are not bothering at all and do not denaturate the site. I think it is a good way to go if you can make some money out of it.
Cheers,
TW
Ditto for me. No skin off my nose to “contribute” with a few clicks a day! You guys do great work here, and it needs to be supported!
Please let us know how this works from a financial perspective. It would be good to hear if this is really an effective program (for possible inclusion in my web projects.)
Well today it seems to be working great, $27 sofar but we’ll have to take a look how this works in the long run. In a few months we can actually say how usefull these ads are to people and how much money they make us.
If the google ads turn out to be too profitable we’ll have to think about what we’ll do with the extra money. Either donate it to the Blender Foundation or donate prizes and such to contest winners.
In any case it looks as if these ads have a chance of surviving here, since feedback sofar has been positive and earnings seem to be fine.
I’ll just note: dont tell people to click the ads to help elysiun. it’s againts the ToS of google and could result in no money.
It’s been added to elysiun, so if you see an adv you like /interested in: click it. In the end of the day there is somone on the other end paying for advertisement /possible customers not for people to click random links =)
Prizes sound like a cool idea. Pay for the site, build up a reserve for future upgrades, donate some to Blender Foundation and make the rest a cash prize for some modeling contest, or split it between a couple contests. Now that would be cool.
Hehe yes I’m pretty carefull with that I’ve already asked the moderators and other administrators to delete any post in which someone tells people to do that.
Nah we won’t hand out cash prizes, but stuff like manuals, or other books, t-shirts, etc
Or save up the money and once you have $1.5million buy one of IBMs super computers (blue gene) and set up a render farm… 360 terraflops of cpu power (360,000Ghz i think)…
Then, make money back from selling renderfarm use…
I wouldn’t worry much. With this kind of userbase, it’ll surely be a success. I’d be surprised if you don’t exceed that 100$ by at least 3 or 4 times.
One thing I’m noticing, Timothy, is that the links, when clicked, don’t open in a new browser window (target=_blank) like other hyperlinks within posts do (under IE, at least.) You might want to think about doing this, so users don’t click away from elYsiun, if you’re able to.
Google doesn’t allow to open these links in a new window I believe this is a common rule among all ad providers.