Ads in online docs and/or project website

beeware / paying-the-piper

A project for discussing ways to fund open source development.

343 stars 14 forks source link

Ads in online docs and/or project website #35

Open cvrebert opened 8 years ago

cvrebert commented 8 years ago

One way to get revenue is to include ads in the project's website and docs. For example, each page of Bootstrap's docs has 1 (fairly tasteful) advertisement at the top of the page.

Upside: "Free" money!

Issues:

Ad blockers
No matter how tasteful, some (would-be) users will hate any ads just on principle
Being at least tangentially involved in the odious web advertising industry
Finding an ad network with non-annoying ads while still offering a decent payout
This strategy isn't applicable if you don't have online docs or if users don't consult the website/docs frequently enough
At least theoretically, this creates a perverse incentive to make the software trickier so that users will read the docs more
I'm not privy to the full numbers, but extrapolating based on my share, even for Bootstrap, despite its popularity and the "here are tons of snippets to copy-paste" nature of its docs, the current ad revenue wouldn't be viable as a sole funding source for the team.

nanuxbe commented 8 years ago

I am, personaly, not in favor of this kind of funding but it does bring some "beer money" and can be helpful. When providing a website with advertising on it, there is also always the other revenue linked to it which is "subscribe for a fee to get rid of the ads". The subscriptions may sometimes bring more money than the ad revenue itself. I personally don't like this approach either (although, if some people want to go this way this is worth mentioning), maybe I'm being sort of an utopist here but I'd rather have people "subscribe for a fee" on their own free will and not to get rid of ads.

nanuxbe commented 8 years ago

Still in the same idea but which might be better perceived by the tech community is "sponsor links" rather than resorting to an ad network. Sponsors being companies somewhat related to the project providing funding and getting a link back to their site without notion of views or clicks

cvrebert commented 8 years ago

It's substantially more than beer money in Bootstrap's case, but obviously the amount varies greatly depending on the particular project. The technique is definitely far from perfect, but I thought I'd post it for completeness.

xordoquy commented 8 years ago

Still in the same idea but which might be better perceived by the tech community is "sponsor links" rather than resorting to an ad network. Sponsors being companies somewhat related to the project providing funding and getting a link back to their site without notion of views or clicks

I love that idea

wolftune commented 8 years ago

https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/existingmechanisms#third-party-ads — general problems

https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/honor-projects#third-party-advertisements — how to do better or worse if you do this

nayafia commented 8 years ago

@janl has experimented with sponsorships for Hoodie, maybe he can share his experience.

I think this is a reasonable idea but not a long-term systemic fix.

janl commented 8 years ago

sponsorships tl;dr: you need a person dedicated to selling sponsorships and as long as you are not a really high-profile project, there is probably not enough volume to warrant the effort.