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I'm going to leave this conversation pinned to the front page for a week or so longer, because what we really need is to restore a stable income, which means encouraging people to donate as little as £2 every month.
I sort of understand why you want to move it, but OTOH its really not very intrusive, and if it nets you even one more £5 a month donation every month, then surely it justifies remaining?
On a related note, is there any way to see how much of the costs go on classifieds vs the rest of the forum? Would be interesting to see the split (and if the core membership here is effectively subsidising all the people who only sign up to sell sell sell)
branwen-
On a related note, is there any way to see how much of the costs go on classifieds vs the rest of the forum?
I haven't got any metrics or analytics set up to measure this thing over other things.
Yes people post the most in classifieds, but even the high level metrics I have still suggest that mostly guests look for "help! what's the best..." and active users live their life on the following page checking out which conversations they're involved in have been updated. I don't see any abnormal or high amount of traffic viewing classifieds, I think it only appears that way if you're on here because that section requires interaction to be of any value. You can read the other sections and those are valuable... but classifieds is only valuable if you are putting up adverts or replying to them, you actually have to interact there, but it doesn't mean more people are in there... it's just that elsewhere you don't have to interact.
Velocio
For those wondering... having this message up for 4 days means that we are fine. We've received over £300 in donations, which when the rest of the month and affiliates are taken into account means we are back in the comfort zone.
But... about £150 of that were larger one-off donations, £10 or over, with a £50 one in there too.
I'm going to leave this conversation pinned to the front page for a week or so longer, because what we really need is to restore a stable income, which means encouraging people to donate as little as £2 every month.
Small regular donations are the best.
Each time we've been in trouble (when I've thrown things on my credit card and the site was effectively in debt) it's been because the spiky nature of revenue... some months £100-£200 over budget, some months £200-£250 under budget... means that when we've fallen short in the past I've said, "This is normal, next month will be an up because this one was a down"... and then another down comes, and another down, and then I panic.
Our outgoings are stable, if our income was stable this place would just run itself.
So I'm not asking for one-off donations... just small monthly ones if you can afford to, want to, and aren't doing so already. One-offs aren't needed, just tiny regular ones.