It has been my goal all along to keep Turns All Year free of advertising, but I've been reluctantly coming to the conclusion that it may be necessary to start carrying advertising after all. I will explain below why my thinking is headed this way, but I'd like to get feedback from the community on this before doing anything rash. For everyone who posts here, this is really your forum, not mine. I try to keep it running smoothly and adjust it when needed, but it is you, the people who post, that make the forum the resource that it has become. I expect there will be a wide range of opinions about adding advertising to TAY, but I'm hoping that we can reach a consensus, and also that there might be some new ideas that could let us avoid or minimize advertising.
A short history of TAY: For the first six years (2000-2005), TAY was operated as a "hobby". I absorbed the yearly operating costs until people started making donations (late 2004), which were enough at first to cover those costs and a little beyond. In the seventh year (2006) TAY was changed from a "hobby" to a "business" (an LLC) for several reasons, not including getting rich; despite donations, TAY lost money that year (more expenses for a business).
Donations have been decreasing over time, mainly due to less people donating (a big thank you to those who donate every year). For this past year, 2007, sales of CDs produced enough income over production expenses, when combined with donations, to give TAY a net profit for the year. This profit, though small, is important due to IRS "presumption of profit" rules. A profit in three out of five consecutive years is presumed to indicate an operation is a "business" and not a "hobby". For me to keep operating TAY it is important for it to remain a "business", and therefore it is necessary for TAY to be able to show a yearly profit, however small.
So here we are: donations have been decreasing for two years and at this point CD sales have slowed considerably. Although I do plan on getting back to work on promoting the CD, it's hard to predict how sales will go. Commissions and royalties on t-shirt sales are minimal. TAY needs enough income, the more reliable the better, to be able to show profits in the coming years. I don't care if the profits are small, just that they happen (though I wouldn't mind being able to pull out my initial investment in TAY as well). This is why I have been thinking that it may be necessary to start carrying advertising on TAY, despite my long standing wish to avoid it.
How much income could advertising produce? From what I've read, there's really no good way to know without trying it and seeing what happens. Even though I'm still open to workable alternatives, I decided to sign up with some advertising networks so that all of us could get an idea of what TAY would look like with advertising. I've integrated some of this advertising into a parallel forum which I maintain for testing purposes.
There are different categories of advertising which require different actions on the part of the viewer to generate income for the publisher (TAY in this case):
- Pay per click: these are the Google-type ads where the publisher is paid for each time a viewer clicks on an ad regardless of whether a purchase occurs. I inserted some Google pay per click ads in the testing forum - not sure how many will come up relevant to our audience.
- Pay per performance: the publisher gets paid only when an ad-click leads to a sale. This is how the typical "affiliate program" works, with our already existing Zazzle t-shirts as an example. Zazzle sales earn up to 17% of the purchase price for TAY, but most affiliate advertisers pay in the 5-8% range. The testing forum has this kind of ad from several advertisers (REI, backcountry.com, altrec.com).
- Pay per impression: in this case the advertiser pays to have their ad displayed, regardless of any clicks or sales generated, based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM). I haven't looked into any details for this, but I suspect that it could be of interest to local stores/shops, and sites like ttips probably have ad contracts directly with the gear companies whose banner ads are prominent near the top of pages there. Rates most likely depend on the placement of the ad, the quantity of impressions purchased, and the number of unique visitors to the web site. I don't have any of these ads to place in the testing forum, but I have marked a place in the page header where a banner ad could go.
How would our forum look with advertising? Take a look at the testing forum and see. Many aspects of the ads you see can be changed: placement, type of ad, advertiser, etc. Be sure to scroll down to get the full effect. Please post any comments here, on the real forum, and not on the testing forum.
Testing forum (you don't have to use the separate links below - you can navigate the forum as usual):
home page
monthly board index
individual thread
As I said above, adding advertising to TAY is
not a done deal, and in fact I'd still prefer to avoid it, but there needs to be a somewhat reliable income stream that I can count on to let TAY show a yearly profit. Here are some of the things I'd like to find out from TAY users:
- What would you do if you were in my position?
- What do you think about the possibility of advertising on TAY?
- If we were to add advertising, which kinds of ads would you be most likely to respond to in the necessary way to generate income for TAY?
- What ideas do you have that could let us avoid advertising but produce the income that TAY needs?
The floor is yours...
Topic Author
killing two birds with one stone, ending with a bbq somewhere else that night.