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London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
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@Velocio
I have no sponsors, but should I ever need any I'll be sure to mention it.
For ages it made about $1 or $2 per day, and then steadily rose to a nice peak around August of around $5 per day. Since the credit crunch hit the revenues have slid and the exchange rate works against me so it's down to an average of $3 to $4 per day but worth less than it was last time it was $3 to $4 per day.
Outgoings each month are static, but in dollars... what this means in pounds (exchange rate fun) is that I've seen costs rise from £90 per month in June to £116 for November. If you do all the boring maths you'll see that for a brief moment in July and August, AdSense revenue crept close to actually covering costs... but then before it made it there it fell away and costs rose.
My lovely Buxfer spreadsheet of all incomings and outgoings since way back, shows that the forum currently has about £300 "profit"... but as adverts are heading South and T-Shirts have ended... it's only going to cover until March/April 2009 before it's dried up.
Perhaps sponsorship will be the way to go, who knows. I definitely enjoy believing we're fine even if that involves a head-in-the-sand point-of-view.
The worst scenario for next year is plausible, it's that the money does run out, donations or additonal revenue streams aren't forthcoming, and that I am made redundant around the middle of the year. Should that happen... well, I'll be up the creek and the server will have to close. As long as I stay employed I'll fund the place, but the question has always been how much each month has to come from my pocket? In the good months (adverts and T-Shirts) the answer has been none, but in the bad months (latter part of 2007) the answer was most.
Back then my view was that it's shitty to expect me to pay most of the costs when you guys actually use it more than I do (though I love running it).
That brings me nicely onto who does use the site the most, and the answer is guests... anonymous users, not the regulars. In fact, Google Analytics says 66.46% of the last months traffic came from new sources, mostly Google. So my view was that if the people who use the site most should pay... guests should have adverts.
It works pretty well, but here's hoping I don't become unemployed next year.