Thread: How to bring in some revenue ?

I notice the traffic on the forum is growing and growing over the months. While there is no risk of the forum going down because of lack of funds it would be great if it actually produced enough income to fund itself. At the moment it's all out of pocket.

So, if anyone has any good ideas on ways the forum could bring in a few dollars that would be great. The current system is not making enough to even support the forum for a month.

No stress...we are not going anywhere.

Prostitutes?
Money laundering?
Racketeering?
Extortion?

Originally Posted by invert_nexus

Prostitutes?
Money laundering?
Racketeering?
Extortion?

Hey, can you get right on that for me. Make sure you do them in that order

You could add a "make a donation" button to the site, through paypall for example. I would make a donation.. well, in the order of a dollar or so

give us your homework and for a fee.... :wink:

What would you do with the revenue?

Originally Posted by The P-manator

Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein

Einstein obviously never heard of George dub'ya Bush, or Ronald 'Ray'Gun :wink:

Originally Posted by The P-manator

What would you do with the revenue?

Well for starters start to reimburse myself for the money I have spent getting this place started and keeping it running. It's a negative income at the moment. At the present rate of growth in a years time it will be a burden. Just planing ahead. At the moment it's not an issue.

Isn't there a way to showcase books with distributors like Amazon.com? The obvious is google ads, but I think with Amazon, it should be possible to highlight certain science related books, perhaps even encourage some of the more prolific members and moderators to write articles or reviews.

Reviews of others science related products backed by google ads could also be a source of income.

I'm just brainstorming here and haven't a clue on how either amazon or google ads work... but I'm willing to be Invert's pimp should it come to that.

edit: I just looked at the site with Internet Deplorer and see that there are google ads... didn't even know. I'm using Firefox and they don't even show up. Now that could be a problem since science nerds seem mostly to use Firefox (anecdotal evidence only -no study; n=?). I've been to other sites, including forums, where the panel ads appear on the right or left, in spite of my using Firefox. They don't particularly get in the way and, occasionally, I click on them if they're interesting or have a "punch george bush" game or something.

Yeah, they're well hidden: you don't really notice them.

I think if you relly want to make money here all you have to do is sell some of the threads to hollywood as sci-fi plots!

hey (In)Sanity, why don't you put the Google ads on top of the forum and see what'll happen after a few months...

I noticed you had the google ads on the bottom of the page, to bring in some more money you could start by changing those with yahoo publisher ads. I like google and all but yahoo pays based on my experience at least twice as well.

And a small two text ad like HERE, wouldnt clutter the site but would bring in a bit more revenue.

Also on average how much bandwith/ space does the forum take up?

Originally Posted by kingjacob

I noticed you had the google ads on the bottom of the page, to bring in some more money you could start by changing those with yahoo publisher ads. I like google and all but yahoo pays based on my experience at least twice as well.

And a small two text ad like HERE, wouldnt clutter the site but would bring in a bit more revenue.

Also on average how much bandwith/ space does the forum take up?

I guess I could put a couple ads next to the name...off to the right.

I hesitate to use other peoples ads as the google ranking right now is #1, I would hate to somehow compromise that.

Last months bandwidth usage was 3,932,337 KB or around 3.9 GB.

The forum uses about 200 MB of space. Not much.

You wouldnt lose your google pagerank by using yahoo ads. Googles spider is not biased like that.

Also if you only need that much space on a server your costs,
should only be like 30/year and thats including the domain.
And If youre willing to pay by post you could have no cost.
But for 30/year pbp isnt even worth it.

maybe allowing members to pay for ads on here... im sure this website has plenty of industrious people on it....... have them bid on a month's worth of ads would prolly pay better than google ads.



this is my 1st post in like 3 months im back with new website:www.sciencetheories.tk

If you feel like getting fancy, you could eventually start an e-commerce selling science kits to starters like me. Sell superconductor kits, stuff like that.

Now i dont know if there is any teachers on this site but if there are, you could simply sell them science kits for their classes.

So many possibilities, you have to look at them with different angles

Originally Posted by L.E.A.P.

If you feel like getting fancy, you could eventually start an e-commerce selling science kits to starters like me.

that requieres mass shipping which is hardly worth the hassle to make the product, i say just host ads for websites that sell these things, not acually have (in)sanity make them himself.

Well the Ad based models work. I just have to figure out a better way to implement them without disrupting the forum. I would switch to another ad provider if I felt Google would not reduce the rankings of the site. They shouldn't, but then you never know. We are #1, and I would like to stay that way.

(In)Sanity googles spider doesnt rank adsense carriers better than those without or with another type of ad. The ranking is based on links to and from the site. For example Lifelesspeople uses yahoos ads and has been for three months. but if you type lifeless into google the word lifelesspeople.com will appear automatically and is ranked first. this isnt because of the ads they carry its because of the massive amount of in/out links they have. Ill double check to be sure though.

Google even says that placing adsense on your page wont effect your pagerank good or badly.

A way you could make money from this forum is have users submit articles and other users can edit them and the best articles go on a blog, which is easier to place ads well on. Also because of the large userbase here, those posts could be dug to make sure they are seen. If you think this is a good idea pm me here or email me at kingjacob at Gmail.com

Cool idea, Jacob. We could even submit the articles to American Science or something like that. Or we could charge for downloads of the articles. Two bucks (CDN) or around that per article. If we give them a snippet of the article and they like it, they'll buy it.

Originally Posted by Pendragon

You could add a "make a donation" button to the site, through paypall for example. I would make a donation.. well, in the order of a dollar or so

I agree with Pendragon, many sites have this as their main income source.

And about Google. The way Google works is by checking backlinks and links from other pages. Originally (when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still researching it) it was called BackRub. So basically if your webpage has alot of links coming from sites relevant to the search, then the page is considered relevant.

Advertising is the only way, and it is a fact of life nowadays, if you charge a fee to become a member you will loose some members, alternatively you could ask for sponsors and indicate which members are sponsors on there posting details.

My advice would be that if you are going to sell something, like membership or gold access, then you should include the option "bill me" ie. send the bill home. Cause I don't trust the other ways. Seriously, I'd rather pay for a disk full of member access to forums rather then "pay pall" or any such stuff. So I would suggest that you make a pact with all the other science forums and release a "science members access-GOLD" disc. I don't know if you would be the first, but I don't think it would change things much. How about 9 bucks for a disk? 12 bucks? Perhaps it only should last for 5 years or something.

Did you like that idea?

Hmm, how much dose the site cost to run monthly? sorry im late for the bord meeting :P