Thanks for all the great suggestions everybody! It makes me feel good to know that so many people care enough about Boing Boign to share their thoughtful and useful opinions. We'll let you know what we decide soon! Best regards -- Mark

Thanks to Chris for demonstrating there why I wouldn't pay for discussion forums.

Meanwhile, seriously, install a gzip module on your webserver. HTML bandwidth requirements will probably drop to a 10th. This alone will probably only shave 2% on your bandwidth bill without optimising images and boy do they need optimising. 10 seconds with "Ulead Smartsaver Pro" and the Bush photomosaic went from 99k to 16k, without any visual quality loss. Optimise images and gzip HTML and your bill should drop by at least 80%.

You're going to be hard pushed to make me pay for your bandwidth if you're wasting it this badly.

You know, if you guys just set up a Paypal button somewhere on the front page, for donations, you could probably get a decent amount of money from that. People aren't likely to donate more than a few dollars each, but every bit helps and it is very unintrusive if done correctly.

You could adopt a Slashdot-style subscription method, where subscribers get to see the latest story sooner than everyone else.

Not sure if anyone mentioned those ideas yet, but I'm not going to read thru 200+ posts to verify ;-P

Okay, great, we've established that some people don't like the publicity and so forth. I think we can generally move beyond that.

how about a pledge drive once a year or so... you know, like PBS or that Jerry Lewis-a-thon.

http://caffeineslinger.typepad.com/les/

Edited by author 04-07-2004 05:33 PM
re: /m247 -- yes, it will. Dramatically. Because people click on the link, read the article, and then go back. Because BB doesn't have proper caching instructions in place, more often than not, the browser will download the page again. So reading 10 articles on BB might cause you to download the page 6 or 8 times.

bittorrents are distributed via http. perhaps what you mean to say is: corp's don't allow exchanges over anything other than ports 80 (http) and maybe 21 (ftp).

Corporate networks don't allow the additional software. HTTP is likely limited to ports 80, 8000, and 8080, and only the standard browser can authenticate itself to the application proxy that lets you get to the outside world.

Sorry, but standard browsers on port 80 is pretty much your audience. If you can apply CSS+RSS in that model, then that will be ok.

Uh, have you guys, like, asked your folks?

Edited by author 04-07-2004 03:38 PM
And another thing: BlogAds. I wrote a piece that came out this week for iMedia about blogs and their revenue potential. I mentioned how BlogAds has finally come into its own. By my estimates, DailyKoz is earning about $3,400 per week from BlogAds (or it was, anyway, until its recently political snafus that have cost it some ads).

Erg. Per my comment on micropayments, I meant to link to this essay of mine.

1) Micropayments. The key to charging for content is DON'T charge for everything, just charge for some percentage (10%; 1%, for example) of premium content.

2) "Recommended donation." Like a museum. People can give nothing if they like, but suggest what they should donate. Keep track. Make them register for more than the most basic form of content. Then cookie them and keep a running tally of what they owe. Say, 1 penny per page view. After they've viewed 50 or 100 or 500 pages, remind them politely (e.g., with a page intercept, a flashing notice in the corner, an email) that they are obviously a regular reader and you ask your regular readers for a donation. Sure, many, or perhaps most, will ignore it, but in all likelihood a significant percentage will give something. Some will give what you ask, some will give less, some more. In any event, you'll earn more than you earn now.

How about reducing the graphics and text on the main page? Rather than having full posts and images, have a bare bones front page with only headlines and links. Or display just one day's worth of links on the front page.

Then, charge people a yearly membership fee to look at archival posts.

I've seen two other sites faced with this problem come up with creative solutions:

http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com - during a time when finances were tight, they sold user-created banner ads. The ads were fun and became sort of a virtual wall on which people tagged jokes and opinions. They were so popular, people were sorry to see the ads go away after TWoP secured steady funding from Yahoo.

http://www.geekculture.com - Geek Culture decided to sell "Super Fan" subscriptions to offset increased bandwidth costs. Super Fans get their own private forum, larger icons, and get to be drawn into a Joy of Tech comic. Perhaps allowing BoingBoing sponsors to comment on posts would work?

as it turns out the idea I had of combining bittorrents with files/RSS is the latest craze.

BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution -December 14, 2003
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1413418,00.asp

Speed Meets Feed in Download Tool - 02:00 AM Mar. 15, 2004 PT
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,62651,00.html

to correct my previous statement: the BT system uses http to download the torrent file. the 'final file' that is delivered is orchestrated via a tracker that usually runs on ports other than 80, using TCP.

while I could be callous and state that if your company prohibits you from downloading material from other than port 80 *http* maybe it's cuz your company thinks you should be working instead of downloading non-work related material? call me crazy...

on the other hand:
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware...=show&ixPost=121796
deja vu
Tuesday, March 09, 2004

...some trackers do in fact seed on port 80, rare though they may be. You can look for those. Also, most clients (Azureus for one) allow you to specify the incoming port to use.

so hope may be around the corner for you office monkeys, i'll be looking into it.

Effort.
I can't help but think of effort required in all of this. Cory, Mark, Xeni and crew already take valuable time to post notes and help me stay amused and informed through out my day. Subscription models, special content, and merchandise sales all seem result in extra work/management that will take the crew away from what they do best. The following seem to result in the least effort for the needed return:

- The tip jar suggestion seemed non-obtrusive and will probably work better than hoped for.
- I like the idea of delaying the posts 12-24 hrs to promote RSS usage.

I also feel BB represents a refreshing approach to the current state of things. Interesting people don’t always have to charge to share their views, ideas, and things they like. I guess any attempt to limit this, sort of hits against some of the values (real or imagined) that I have associated with BB.

My thoughts on ads seem to be thoroughly covered by others. Suffice it to say, they are negative.

Edited by author 04-07-2004 11:14 AM
Marlon: bOING bOING began as a print 'zine, back in 1988! More on that here...
http://www.zinebook.com/interv/boing.html

-pesco

Deleon: [edit]And a torrent is a bad idea. torrents are fine for downloading linux isos and porn, but not for a website. corporate networks don't allow that stuff, it has to use normal http.

bittorrents are distributed via http. perhaps what you mean to say is: corp's don't allow exchanges over anything other than ports 80 (http) and maybe 21 (ftp).

otherwise, the homepage of this site could have a link to download the torrent file via http. once a bittorrent client is open, it is using http to communicate and download from trackers and users.

the advantages to this system are obvious. the bandwidth is spread out among many users. file distribution of legal product is absolutely safe and has no logical objectionability.

Edited by author 04-07-2004 09:26 AM
Subscription...

http://drhome.digitalriver.com/livehtml/newsite/pr_307.html

Opening links in a new window will not affect bandwidth usage.

Since this thread runs to well over 200+ posts I doubt my idea will be all that unique (or even read!) but I am a casual reader of Boing Boing and feel partially responsible for its current state.

First off I have to say charging for content is not going to work, unless your goal is to reduce the number of readers you have, as people are accustomed to getting high quality content for free.

But sometimes I see two 'ill's and wonder why they can't cancel each other out. I think Boing Boing should go 'print' and fill the vacuum of literate / geeky magazines which is left on the newstands today. Since Wired went corporate there has been nothing to replace the voice of the fringe in print. I really lament the great magazines of the past; High Frontiers, Mondo 2000, Omni, and the early run of Wired.

I think Boing Boing has that cohesive stickiness that other sites lack. if someone sents me a link to a Boing Boing story I already know I am going to read it before I even click the URL.

So I guess I am saying there has to be a publisher out there willing to take on Boing Boing and make it a brand with all the good (server space, really wide readership, really big glossy pictures and articles which you can read on the bus) and bad (corporate influence, crass promotions, loss of creative control and huge new egos for all the Boing Boing contributors ) that that implies.

Sell Blogads. You'll be in a network with some of the most interesting blogs around: DailyKos, Talkingpointsmemo, Atrios... and hundreds more. Good for you, good for them. Some political advertisers crave BoingBoing's audience, and a bunch of tech advertisers are lining up too. Should make $2000-$4000 a month. Give me a call @ 617 395 0176.

I'd simply add google adsense. With your hit levels and if you put them in the right position, I would suggest you could more than cover your costs. I've used this strategy on my sites and found it to be very effective. You won't be able to retire from them, but should be able to cut some costs.

Also as others have said - your front page is pretty massive - perhaps use extended entries more...thumbnails for pictures...whatever it takes to cut down bandwidth from that end.

Good luck and keep up the great work.

Edited by author 04-07-2004 04:17 AM
Freenet and its ilk run over port 80, encrypted, just like SSL (or ssh if config'd thus). Snoop-proof to all but the extremely motivated (Flowers By Irene), and therefore invulnerable to firewalling and other such impediments.

Freenet runs on Java, and IIRC, there's a version of it out there that comes complete with a standalone JVM, so it'll run on lockdown office-drone PC's. (It's how I play Battletech at work... a fan-developed, network aware bootleg computer version of the classic board/miniature game. Runs on my Mac and Ultra2 at home and my nazibox at work.)

I'm sure something dreary like a subscription or epilepsy-inducing flash banner ads will be implemented instead.

Edited by author 04-07-2004 01:45 AM
actually, as I recall, the comments went away when an influx of twits came to see the guy from rotten.com in the guest bar, and near the same time, for some bizarre reason, images were enabled in the discussion forum... so we had goatse left and right til the comments were removed in their entirety.

[edit]And a torrent is a bad idea. torrents are fine for downloading linux isos and porn, but not for a website. corporate networks don't allow that stuff, it has to use normal http.

Mark, David, you've already received a good number of solutions... optimising your code and images and opening links in a new window would probably cut your bandwidth to 1/3 the current amount, and changing to a new host will remove the worries over excessive bandwidth. (and if the host prices listed thus far are too high, you can get 500 megs of bandwidth at 1and1.com's lowest end dedicated server for only 49 a month). The assorted ideas for raising money are good, but cutting cost is much more valuable than raising money (tell that to the government) though of course both can be helpful.

Adding comments back in would be nice, but leave the images off. And keep in mind that comments will greatly *increase* your traffic, especially if you dump quicktopic and host them yourself.

Edited by author 04-07-2004 01:15 AM
simple answer: autogenerate a torrent with the current html/gfx of the site every hour or other predefined time.

forget turning into a paysite. offer one torrent as 'the archive' (needed only to update this once a month or so) and one as the 'news of the day' or 'monthly news'. put it up on suprnova.org/other or have your own tracker site hosting the torrent file. this would work because the content is fresh and would have many seeders/leechers at any given time.

you could take this further and develop an app that runs in your html page that acts as the bittorrent client and once the download is complete, automatically displays the html and graphics.

Why not charge for the latest content... for instance, if you are a paying member (I'm thinking $1/month) you get up-to-date content. Penny pincher's get yesterdays with teasers. Just a thought.

boing, boing, boing...

http://www.filmrot.com

Warren wrote:

"And that there is why the commenting system will very likely stay gone."

One would hope not. That would be a pretty lousy reason for not having a commenting system -- does one or two comments by trolls really negate the other 200+ comments? Before, the comments were a large part of the reason I and others visited the site.

Otherwise it's just Gizmodo for weirdos (in the best possible sence of that term). It's a bit incongruous to see people license their works in a format that would allow someone to do much worse than that comment to Cory's book, but for Boing! Boing! itself to be a one-way street. The comments and suggestions by other visitors were half the fun -- why let the occasional idiot troll hold that hostage?

Although it may have already been mentioned, why not establish mirror sites. It works well for Cryptome.

I haven't read through all 200+ comments, but surely someone must have already suggested that links open in a new window? That alone would cut your bandwidth consumption considerably.

Edited by author 04-06-2004 10:38 PM
Ha! Good one Ramon.

May I add that your blog and novels are quite impressive in their nullity?

I've asked myself that question about Cory's novels and the answer was, "Yes. Yes they would."

But don't let the fact that you didn't understand the novels stop you from reading! There are quite a few great books waiting for you at your level.

Now, I am going to return to Mark's topic and continue to read it with interest.

(Edited to point out that Mark's original post never mentioned a subscription model.)

And that there is why the commenting system will very likely stay gone.

Hey Cory, I wouldn't fuck around with your Boing Boing publicity machine because no one would ever buy another of your shite novels if they had to pay to read your self-promotions and advertisements.

You're a terrible writer with great publicity. The moment people stop reading your blog, your career as a "novelist" will disappear. You only have to ask yourself: "Would anyone read my novels if I weren't constantly flogging them on my blog?" "Can a blog with little original content and nothing value-added survive on a subscription model?" The answer to both questions is no.

Edited by author 04-06-2004 09:44 PM
Mark,
I seldom visit the actual Boing Boing site, I read the excellent RSS feed, and unless you change your feed to force me to visit the site (like, for example BLOGDEX's annoying redirection) I won't see the site, Ads won't "help [you] pay the bills and make enough money to re-invest in Boing Boing."

How about focusing on ways to reduce the cost

One idea that comes to mind is that your site, posts, archives and all (except the graphics) is in Google's cache, once Google has crawled the site, if you change your links to Google's cache, when Google next crawls the site the links will point to the google cache. This is just an off the wall thought which could save tons of bandwidth and only suffer the nuisance of the Google cache header (which one might consider an Ad.)

(umm, don't change your RSS feed though, Bloglines is kind enough to cache it in total for easy low tech searching.)

Mark, I know you're being thrown a lot of stuff, but I think Jonnay's ideas are REALLY GOOD. A blogging workshop, for example ... and the link lottery? I'd throw my hat in that ring! Definitely a possibility ...

Evidently my friends, the pronouncment of the demise of LSD is very premature, I can assure you that vials of liquid LSD 25 are available at the very University that published the report that Mark quoted......HAPPY TRAILS TO YOU

I'd be happy to pay for BoingBoing. I get a lot of brain food out of it. $20/year via PayPal?

My $0.02.

Many bloggers would LOVE to have the same problem boingboing is having. Or at the very least, they think they would love to have the problem.

Let them put their money where their mouth is. Allow 10-15 paid-for links. For extra points, the BoingBoing Crew could go through the links to see which ones were cool enough to pay them the 25/50/500 bucks for their monthly link. (Ohh, a Pro-Bush/Cheney blog, with lots of spelling mistakes, and a horrible sense of design? That'll be the special-friend price of $1,000. Thank you come again!)

Have a 2 Dollar Blog Link Lottery. Your Blog linked on Boingboing, for a month, no "Cool-Qualifications" necessary, if you win. Make them answer a skill testing question to boot.

Blog Workshops. We all know these guys wrock. I betya many people would pay money for some kind of online-workshop to see how the hell they rock so MUCH.

Of corse, all this is AFTER working on the bandwidth issues. Getting some good HTTP headers, and CSS goodness is job 1. (As plenty of other people have mentioned).

What if you did a boingboing re-design contest with an entry fee? Your bandwidth-friendly design featured on boingboing. PLENTY of graphic artists and designers would love to have the ego stroke of being the boingboing designer.

Perhaps http://www.gizmodo.com offers a good model (although I don't know how successful they've been with it) - the ads on that site seem to work pretty well with the flow of the blog.

Was it Yahoo? AOL? that was auctioning off the spammer's car?

Kidnap a spammer (promise to buy the vi@g@r@, but only in person, and charge $25 a pop to shoot it with BBs.

BBs!!! get it?!!!




never mind.

If you do a TotalFark type thing, I suggest you go with the name BoingBoingBoing.

Edited by author 04-06-2004 06:19 PM
i'm going to sound like a broken record, but here's what i suggest....

move to a dedicated box
if i recall correctly, boingboing is hosted with a whole bunch of other sites at your standard, everyday webhost. there are plenty of hosts out there that can offer a colocated box with 30-50gb of transfer for under $100/month.
updata: andy pointed out to me via im that servermatrix has plans that offer 1000 gigs of transfer on a colocated server starting at $89/month. that's freaking cheap!

optimize the code
seriously, i don't know how many times the font tag needs to be used on a given page. i understand that y'all are writers and not web designers but that shit has to go.

text ad supported rss
apparently, mehack has been doing this. i'm not sure what sort of success they've been having with it, but it's a start. i'm sure there are plenty of mt hackers that would be more than happy to help you bang something like this together. it also opens the gateway for...

paid services
described best as "the livejournal model", it shouldn't be too hard to offer other services like discussions and ad free pages/rss to people who pay $5/month or $50/year. have a password protected vhost [paid.boingboing.net] that offers unrestricted access for subscribers. it's as simple as having movabletype output the ad-free files to a seperate directory and working out an .htaccess based authentication system.

- boogah
- http://layerone.info/

Edited by author 04-06-2004 05:34 PM
Jeremy, that's a really fun idea! Not sure it would raise the kind of money we need, but it certaintly wouldn't hurt. My pal Terre just designed one of the shirts for The Wire and really enjoyed the challenge.

(And thanks to everyone who is contributing to this forum. We really appreciate it.)

-pesco

Yea lowbrow.com is an example of how NOT to fundraise.

After some consideration, a decision was made not to subsidize lowbrow any longer. It's not that important to us. If it's important to you, do your duty. For those of you that have contributed, we'll keep it running for the length of time that your contributed funds cover -- at this point we're looking at the mid point of April.

whatever you do, don't be like the assholes at lowbrow.com

i've never seen a more snarky approach to fundraising

I'd suggest you follow the model used by "the agonist", http://agonist.got.net/.

Not sure how they're doing it, but they have managed to grow their site quite successfully as it has become more popular.

Or you could be like that n'er do well over at textism (www.textism.com) and just beg for paypal deposits! :)

good luck boing boing!

Edited by author 04-06-2004 04:19 PM
.

Problem Solved!

Use Thumbnails:

Users can then click on the image to view it in its original resolution.

You can use higher resolution pictures since images will not automatically load.

I am a dial-up user and will love you for faster page loads.

Example: That Bush Cheney image on the front page is 27K. You could bring that down to about 3K with optimized and thumbnail and people can still see the picture.

Bush Cheney Slogan (3K)
http://www.evmo.com/text/frm/getfeed.aspx?feedID=1003

BoingBoing Not Optimized Bush Cheney Slogan (27K) http://craphound.com/images/sloganatorpassover.jpg

Other people have said "merch" and I think this is a good answer. Lots of people with excellent design skills read Boing Boing; do a T-shirt series, like UK music mag The Wire is doing. Offer a "standard" Boing Boing T-shirt but also offer a new limited-edition T-shirt designed from a different hip designer/cartoonist/friend of Boing Boing. Sell a subscription to the T-shirt series for those who want them all. Etc.

All of your html pages are non-cacheable (no last-modified set, no expiration header set (/m58 I believe mentions this)). Every time google or someone else reindexes your site they fetch the entire contents of each page rather than check to see if it's been updated. If you're building the pages dynamically using php or something else, just add the appropriate HTTP headers to the page.

Also might look into gzip-encoding the pages if your server supports it.

Make images links instead of direct images.

Apply for a government grant or an endowment for the arts.

I noticed that the EST book is still 38K. When are you going to optimize it?

Edited by author 04-06-2004 02:26 PM


Mirror:

A few people here recommended mirroring and P2P solutions. It looks like EVMO has mirrored BoinBoing here.
They also appear to be using thumbnails which makes the site use much less bandwidth.


BoingBoing
Mirror:
http://www.evmo.com/text/frm/getfeed.aspx?feedID=1003


Hope
this helps

Edited by author 04-06-2004 02:12 PM
run an annual/semi-anual pledge drive that is all over the site. similar to how PBS stations rely on listener (or in your case viewer/conusumer) supported donations. Don't be greedy, just get enough to cover expenses and donate the rest to charity.

Other ideas:

• optimize code base
• leverage sponsored links
• leverage amazon's web services to contextually place products
• get a business plan!
• pull some weight when signing a contract w/ your web host company (everyone loves a popular site--use your logs to show your value!!)

Good luck!

-jason

Edited by author 04-06-2004 02:11 PM
Seems to me if you started using bittorrent to distribute your webpage, people would immediately hack bittorrent to put goaese images on your front page.

---
hinterlands.cc

/m207 if the RSS-feed directs back to the blog entry, the bandwidth savings of RSS are gone, again.

Or the Mark-cam. I just suspect that wouldn't be as fun. Nothing personal, Mark.

Somebody suggested charging to have Cory dedicate a chapter in your name.

I think we should take that one step further, and we pay to have Cory insert us [product, website, item of choice] into the novel/short-story.

Yeah, I know--artistic integrity and all.


And would I be willing to pay? Am I really that vain?







ooooh, yeah!

Other possibilities include Mark doing caricatures, David doing nano-signatures, and the Xeni-cam.

And, hey! Macki was the one who suggested BB pay-for-play in the first place!!!

Cory should stop giving away books for free and instead use the profit to pay for the bandwidth.

I mainly view your content via your rss feed. The "articles" all have a 'Link' link in them which takes me directly to the site/story being referenced. If you go with content relevant ads (ala AdWords or something) you may want to remove that direct link and instead have users go through the website version of the story to access the actual referenced site. Not as convenient but if it is the difference between continuing to exist and not, I think it is a small price to pay and potentially will increase your revenue. If this doesn't make sense, email me at jonatwork(at)hotmail.com

Edited by author 04-06-2004 01:37 PM
I agree that reducing the size of the page and perhaps finding a cheaper deal on bandwidth are logical starting points.

I don't know how many hits you got from the RSS feed vs. direct page loads, but if it's significant then you could reduce load a bunch by having the RSS links pull up single item pages -- not the entire front page. I realize this would require a change in the site's backend, but I think that's probably inevitable anyway.

I like all the creative ideas below, but given your traffic I think the simple addition of a little advertising would generate significant revenue with almost no work. A Commission Junction ad for NYT subscriptions will net you $25 per (or did when I last used them).

Expanded merchandising! I know plenty of high traffic sites which exist on their merchandise earnings. Oh, yeah, and I want a boingboing T-shirt before any of my kids!

make discussions pay only!!!! you can eliminate (or exacerbate) trolling and get a new revenue stream. People see cool kids talking about cool stuff and want IN . . . make it like twenty bucks a month, too, something ridiculously expensive, that's how "trendy" subcultures are built!

Didn't Camgirls solve this problem a long time ago?


Kidding.

Boing Boing is curated and frequented by lots of web-famous folks so why not use that to your advantage? Perhaps the readers and editors could donate things to auction or sell? While this may not be a long-term solution it could help boost things in the meantime. I know you guys are crazy busy so I offer these ideas merely to get you thinking:

- Auction a consultation with Cory for aspiring writers to get feedback on their work in progress. Or pay to insert yourself as the main character in a short story?

- Auction or sell your portrait as created by Mark Frauenfelder or other original art. Perhaps some time for artists to meet with Mark to get portfolio feedback, design tips etc.

- Auction a photo-adventure/tag-along with Xeni where the winner would shadow her on a busy day and document the adventure with a cam-phone for inclusion on Boing Boing or xeni.net

- David could auction off technology secrets or a mystery bag of gadgets and widgets culled from his secret stash of freebies while at Wired. (if this exists)

Auction off the guest blog sidebar for a while!

I'm sure other readers and users that have skills would contribute a product, prize or money to keep Boing Boing around.

Edited by author 04-06-2004 12:00 PM
Imho Salon's day-pass model is reasonable. As for subscription models, you could designate fresh and archived content as "premium"; i.e., non-subs see only content 3-7 days old. In this specific case I have no problem with paid subscriptions; BoingBoing's well worth a couple $/month. Heavy discounts for annual / lifetime membership, please. :)

"The first thing to do is definitely to just clean up the code, and reduce the number of items shown on the main page. I don't think I've ever seen a blog that shows 30+ entries on the main index! 3-4 would really be plenty, as long as there's an easy-to-find links for 'show more entries', or 'show the entries from the past x days' or something."

At the very least, they could save a lot of bandwidth by only showing the last two days instead of the last three.

I'd pay for QuickTopic access. Just look how much this one link has engendered. I miss the extensions the community brings in.

Cutting code size is an excellent idea. There was an article out recently about how much Google has optimized (shrunk) their homepage code.

Also, how about cutting bandwidth costs? ValueWeb.com is offering dedicated servers with 1 TERABYTE of transit for $59/month. (I have no relation to ValueWeb, nor have I ever used them.) ev1servers.net is offering 700 GB of transit for $99/month (I've used them and they work fine). Even if the current servers are kept and the site is just mirrored a few times an hour, this should cut costs a lot.

cheers,
glenn

I suspect that with BoingBoing's level of demand and brand recognition, syndicating the content to magazines, websites, television news, and book publishers in return for royalties would be lucrative.

A number of suggestions on here are for things like opening links in new windows, having snazzy ads that 'drip down from the top of the screen', and things like that.

DON'T DO THESE. They're annoying, and tend to break in odd ways whenever someone tries to do anything interesting with the page (such as, say, view it in alternative browsers...)

The first thing to do is definitely to just clean up the code, and reduce the number of items shown on the main page. I don't think I've ever seen a blog that shows 30+ entries on the main index! 3-4 would really be plenty, as long as there's an easy-to-find links for 'show more entries', or 'show the entries from the past x days' or something. This is especially important since you've got so many pictures on the entries.

I'd like to see nicer xhtml+css while you're at it.

There's no need for ads or subscriptions. Just put up a PayPal donation link and maybe Amazon Honor System, and the whole thing will pay for itself. Bring it to people's attention maybe once a month.

I would pay $5/month if it meant bringing quicktopic back.

Seriously.

Best options:
• online donations: money via a PayPal link + bandwidth via mirrors
• subscription-donation hybrids

Other options:
• paid subscription
• Google AdSense
• sponsorship links
• trial subscription
• optimise your code
• premium content – pay for archives
• free content +content only for paid subscribers
• affiliate links
• organize focused events
• commissions on sales of reviewed (good or bad) products
• sponsor page
• banner ads
• sell something
• ebay auction
• newsletters: free and paid

The free version - tips and tricks; the paid version adds alerts, updates, downloadable reports, and archives, plus any freeware.

Expert advices:
Publishing: Free or Fee?

http://www.clickz.com/experts/design/freefee/archives.php
http://www.clickz.com/experts/design/freefee/article.php/3088241
http://www.clickz.com/experts/design/freefee/article.php/3088281


The World 2 come
http://divedi.blogspot.com

I like totalfark's model and pay for it every month whether I use it or not - $5 a month is cheap for the amount of time I spend at normal Fark.

I'd do the same for BoingBoing... I can't think of what you could do extra though :).

I just saw a cool idea the the GAIM site started using - auction off Boing Boing stuff on eBay! Things such as signed items from the writers or your old jeans... Of course, there is also the cafe press route as well... Good luck!

If you set your archives to daily or even weekly you would probably save a fortune on costs. If someone follows a permalink they end up downloading a month worth a of entries. I plugged your january archive page into websiteoptimization.com's doohickey and got this:

# TOTAL_OBJECTS - Warning! The total number of objects on this page is 125 - consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your external objects. Replace graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests.
# TOTAL_IMAGES - Warning! The total number of images on this page is 124, consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your graphics. Replace graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests.
# TOTAL_SIZE - Warning! The total size of this page is 2497953 bytes, which will load in 522.84 seconds on a 56Kbps modem. Consider reducing total page size to less than 30K to achieve sub eight second response times on 56K connections. Pages over 100K exceed most attention thresholds at 56Kbps, even with feedback. Consider contacting us about our optimization services.
# HTML_SIZE - Warning! The total size of this HTML page is 224181 bytes, which is over 100K! Consider optimizing your HTML and eliminating unnecessary content and features.
# IMAGES_SIZE - Warning! The total size of your images is 2273772 bytes, which is over 30K. Consider optimizing your images for size, combining them, and replacing graphic rollovers with CSS.
# SCRIPT_SIZE - Congratulations, the total size of all your scripts is 363 bytes, which is less than 1160 bytes. This will fit into one higher-speed TCP-IP packet.

How about someone along the lines of salon.com's daypass, though it could last a month. Based on ip address/cookie, and it would only popup after you'd been reading boingboing for a month, so it wouldn't put newbies off.

The rss feed would link to it once a month, and the site could even serve it to people who are visiting much more frequently (as a link with a bit of focus).

One of the most annoying things about the otherwise-superb Boing! Boing! is that the discussion group like this went away. I would gladly pay a premium subscription fee just to bring back the discussion board.

Actually, I'd probably pay a subscription fee regardless -- after all, we were paying for the excellent zine long before it turned in to the excellent blog.

BTW, I'm curious -- just how much bandwidth did you use in March?

Here are the revenue streams that seem (to me) to be least offensive and/or inconvenient for folks:

• Merchandising. We do fairly well selling t-shirts and the like. Allowing preorders can help defray printing costs if you're worried about that sort of thing.
• Premium subscriptions. Allow the majority of your content to be available to most of your readers, and let hardcore fans pay for a few extra bites or early access.
• Google ads. People hate banners, but don't seem to mind targeted text ads.

A combination of these should probably do it for you.

Have you considered using bit torrent to distribute your
rss feed? That would greatly decrease the bandwidth used
for that.

Why not abandon the website entirely and only post an RSS feed. Let other people "publish" your feed to the web on their own bandwidth. Let a thousand BoingBoing's bloom.

Ari

Amen FNR_Thomas - salon.com's ad-viewing for a day pass is genius.

I'm perfectly happy to pay a quid or two a month. One of my other favourite sites (popbitch.com) just asks for donations... And does perfectly well out of it. Mind you, most of London's media industry would collapse if we, like, had to do any work, and couldn't spend all day nattering about what the ****'s in the Beckham text messages were...

Perhaps you could make 'subscriptions' voluntary. Each month send an email 'reminder' to contribute. Also add a Paypal instant option. I would try voluntary subscriptions before any involuntary measures.

I like the way they do it at Salon.com. Pay a fee, or invest 30 seconds of your time clicking through an advertisement.

Edited by author 04-06-2004 09:19 AM
This is pretty much what everyone else said, but I'm adding my brass razoo's worth so you get the point! :)

Absolutely, optimise your code - it'll only take one of your mates an evening to clear out all the evil, evil <font ... > tags, and bang out a set of MT templates and a CSS file. I even saved the BB HTML code a fortnight ago and had a stab at doing this, though in the end I decided I had better things to do. And I know that there are other people who will stick their hand up and do a great job. Keeping the site lean is far more important than keeping its current look, but you can have both! That chunky "girl with the jackhammer" logo will optimise nicely. :)

As for the money aspect, hold a fundraiser week or fortnight. Bug the crap out of everybody for that period to give them your money, like a community radio station - you might have to think of some giveaways that won't defeat the exercise of raising cash - and then for the rest of the year just run the usual merch shop on the sid. Keep the merch cool and plug it like buggery! As long it's in tune with the site, and isn't tacky, people won't mind.

Parties sound like a keen idea too, though I'm not in SF, but it would fit the ethos of your site.

Text ads wouldn't be too bad, either, they'd have to be in a prominent position, but if you were pitching them to punters as a way of paying for BB.

And since you're expecting donations from the community, letting them participate by bringing back comments (perhaps when that Strangelovian TypeKey thing comes into full effect) should be considered. Screw the trolls.

Hi, Dave here, from blather.net. I'm in a similar position - I've spent the last six months kicking some life into the site, and we're now up to 100,000 page views a month. Bandwith isn't an issue, because what I've done is purchase a reseller account from my ISP (hosting365). For €50 a month, I can host a huge wodge of websites, some of them paying customers, others are friends and organisations that I host for free. Basically it means that blather.net's hosting costs nothing, and is actually making a profit.

That said, I'm not bringing in a fortune, and I'd love to be able to pay writers, or at least be able to spoil them a little!

The google ads aren't make tonnes of money, but it is trickling in, as are the t-shirt sales.

My next plan is to move things to a point where there's enough money coming in from some kind of income, where I can definitely afford to put X amount of timer per month into the site.

Not quite on the scale of Boingboing.net, but the post caught my attention, as brought concerns that I'd been having myself...

I think an FAQ about what methods you've considered and discounted would save a lot of the repetition in this thread. Maybe with sub-threads for people to endlessly go over AdSense T&C if they want.

Has anyone mentionned the LWN model? Pay to get stuff on time, wait a week to get it for free.

Cory,

<p>Most importantly your content is rich, is generated by an authentic, has a trusted 'voice', provides real value (tangible and intangible), and 'is' what it claims to be (a directory of 'wonderful' things. It's a compelling site - proven by the number of visitors.

<p>I would suggest a combination of tactics to fund the site. Any one solution will not appeal universally.

<p>Some ideas:

<p>1) Check out what's happening at TidBits www.tidbits.com - they're instituted a voluntary contribution program
http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html

<p>2) Work through a broker to take a piece off the top for anything that boingboing posts to a commercial link that leads to sales (you, or the broker, can decide which items - e.g. if it's a link to Amazon, or GM, take the $$$ - if it's to some fledgling business, make it a random act of kindness). Some will say this degrades the quality of the site, but I trust you to keep things 'honest'.

<p>3) Sell the boingboing concept - work it through a third party that YOU trust. All those hits are worth something to someone. If the right buyer, with the right sensitivity/resonances is found, everyone wins. I trust that you're capable of finding the right buyer, if you want to pursue this direction.

<p>4) Leverage the site to partially advertise your current hosting service's offerings. You may already be doing this.

<p>5) Try the Slashdot method. Subs get "ad free". Everyone else gets sees a few ads.

IMHOP a subscription scheme would decrease your readers too much - I personally find Paypal and the likes too unwieldy and not common enough to use as valid payment solution - using a credit card directly might afford too much trust on the readers side.
Try to sell off your guest bar - I'm not a writer, but I think a many of your fans would pay some to be able to add his two bits ...

I'm rather fond of MacInTouch's ad scheme...*

That said, fuck it. Client/Server is so reganesque. Move the blog to a feature-rich, censorship hostile p2p system, like Freenet or Entropy, and make the readers use their own damn bandwidth. Slack!

You'll need to abandon Greenspunian web dogma, tho. Also, don't trust the suit! They may look tame and friendly but they'll gnaw the face off a baby if they smell stock options on its breath.

"3. Distrust authority. Promote decentralization." - Steven Levy

SoupIsGood Food

 (* Which is a simple, plaintext link a line or two long, in a pale green one-element table between blog entries. It's caught my eye and gathered a click more often than the flash blinky-spinny-overdesigned baner and sidebar ads on every other site in the known omniverse ever have. )

I love Boingboing and other sites for their insights into a different world.

I cannot afford to pay for this. That world shuts down, Ok.. I regret it. That world is closed.

By by.

LJ-model: Pay for more privileges. In this case, the obvious one is commenting.

I suggest "donation subscriptions". I had a rather big site in the past, and I've reached the point where you are now as well. So I asked my readers to donate a buck or two, which went okay for a couple of days but then they forgot.

So I've introduced "donation subscriptions". Basically it was like $2 or $3 on a fire-and-forget basis. The money was transferred by PayPal once per month. I was astonished how many people would do that. Turned out they were willing to donate, but they simply forgot about it after a while. So, since they liked the site they were willing to help out, while not being forced to think much about it. Passive donations, so to speak.

It worked extremely well. You might wanna give this a try; PayPal doesn't ask for money for the setup, and it's really worth the try, methinks.

If you need help, drop me a line. My mail address is carlo[at]g-blog[dot]net.

Carlo

Edited by author 04-06-2004 03:47 AM
Here's an idea: Make the <link> element in your RSS feed point to the link that the post discusses. This way, whenever I read a BB entry in my aggregator and click on the entry heading, e.g. on the link with the text "Ganguro girls through a Black artist's eyes", I go directly to that site, bypassing the BB permalink page.

I realize that I could just click on Link to get the same effect, but many people (including me) instinctively click on the entry heading.

Get Cory's publisher to underwrite the site. Then they can write it off as an advertising expense. Use those corporate tax breaks!

Auction off: a special Cory Doctorow chapter in his next novel. Dediciated to YOU the BoingBoing auction winner.

Anotehr thing to auction off - a night on the town with Xeni - enough said.

There are LOADS of people who will pay just to hang out with you. Put that into your virtual pipe and ponder a bit.

In addition - How many page -views- are you getting per month? If you have 20 million or more, you can qualify for Google's premium service. More information available here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/?hl=en_US

If you don't, forget it. Nevertheless, I'd say going Google is the way to go, provided you feel it raises enough revenue. I'd dare say it does.

Have you taken a look at AdSense?

https://adwords.google.com/select/

- At the bottom - In general, I'm a huge fan of Google and their seeming commitment to raise money while giving customers the respect they deserve. You should consider that.

Print edition being an annual, or bi-annual glossy book...

Magazines- nope.

Another idea: host your own; rent a couple T3's and buy some Xserves. Host some other like minded sites, to offset Boing Boing's costs...

Sell cool stuff, Boing Boing mugs, hoodies, maybe look at going to a print edition. Context targeted ads make sense, too.

Yeah, isn't there are way to distribute the bandwidth needs between people who read you guys regularly. Like a BitTorrent for web sites?

ditto the 20 bananas per annum, it's the least i could give back to boing boing helping me fill out my timesheet every week :)

It's a good site. I would send you twenty bucks a year on a voluntary basis. That's where the supply and demand curves intersect for me.

RH

i manage my hosting bills (& rent) mostly through just merchandising what i do and avoiding all 3rd party ads. you guys could make some SWEET t-shirts if you put your minds to it.

mail me at clango at dieselsweeties dot com if you want info on my screen printer and the order processing guy who works for me.

two words... P2P web server. Distributed load and distributed content. Kick those Apache guys firmly in the butt and get them started on this. :)

Yeah, I remember seeing this one movie that advanced the careers of the actors and director, and it really pissed me off. Then there was this one book that I read that made the author really famous. I spit at David Eggers whenever I see him now.

Since I never said the advancement of the bloggers' careers pissed me off, I'm going to have to presume you're just being humorous.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 11:46 PM


looks like BoinBoing is mirrored here for PDAs


http://www.evmo.com/text/frm/getfeed.aspx?feedID=1003 -link



..

I wouldn't pay for a subscription to BB, although I have no problem whatsoever with advertisements - seeing how so many of the posts on BB are already ads of a sort for the Boingers' various projects and appearances. Asking for subscriptions to a site which is used very heavily to advance the careers of the site's contributors strikes me, frankly, as rather disingenuous.

Yeah, I remember seeing this one movie that advanced the careers of the actors and director, and it really pissed me off. Then there was this one book that I read that made the author really famous. I spit at David Eggers whenever I see him now.

If you had five posters to BB, it would only cost $20, and the notoriety/whuffiejoi de vivre might be worth that, I dunno.

I agree. I'd gladly tip you via PayPal, etc. I read your site daily, so it's worth the $ to me.

Count me in for a donation to the tip jar.

$100/month sounds like the right deal for the kind of b/width usage you're currently seeing and should be coverable with a periodically appearing tip jar. (And I'd suggest making it periodic so that readers don't get funding drive fatigue.)

I really like BB and would probably subscribe but wouldn't have done so in the early days when I first started reading it before I got to love you so much. So, I think subscriptions are a bad idea.

No ads if they will in any way limit what you can post.

I'd recommend against getting too hung up on optimizing your page. Someone else said it below and I'll reiterate - don't let optimization get in the way of creativity. Unless optimization is your creativity, of course.

My favorite pR0n sites pay 50% of all revenue gained through referrals. Just add a couple of those links, and your set for life.

Just to add to the choir - I read BB primarily through the Atom feed and would be happy to see ads in that feed as well.

I'd also probably pay to subscribe but that would likely drastically cut down on your readership. Would be nice to have a way for people to read for free, especially since it does obviously have other benefits for all of your other activities.

why don't you just create a sponsers page and charge to post text links to sponsers websites?

ALso, ev1 will give you 700GB in traffic per month right now for $99:

http://www.ev1servers.net/english/value_series.asp

If you need more you can always speak to their sales department.

*no, I dont work for these people

I wouldn't pay for a subscription to BB, although I have no problem whatsoever with advertisements - seeing how so many of the posts on BB are already ads of a sort for the Boingers' various projects and appearances. Asking for subscriptions to a site which is used very heavily to advance the careers of the site's contributors strikes me, frankly, as rather disingenuous.

i'd be fine with paying a subscription fee...my guess is that it would work better than just a Paypal box for a reliable source of revenue. i'd be ok with advertising, too, but i have no beef with paying for a page i visit every day.

If you had a PayPal tip jar, I would hit it. If you had a paid subscription model, I would subscribe.

I'm sure the tipjar wouldn't lower your traffic, but requiring a subscription would dramatically lower your traffic. Maybe you could try the tipjar, see how it goes, and if that doesn't do it you could try subscriptions.

Ole

Political ads are hot right now and I know more than a few of you would love to see Bush gone. The dems have now realized that blogs can bring a whole new wave of fundraising.

> This will be less of an issue with a less expensive host.

Doesn't work. Bulk hosts serve clients whose sites have minimal bandwidth requirements. The problem here is that bb's bandwidth requirements push the site into a whole different category, where expense is inherent.

If 10% of your readers paid a voluntary subscription fee, what would the fee need to be for a year? $20?

I'd gladly pay, and I wouldn't care if my neighbor that parks his RV in front of my house didn't. Maybe if he reads boingboing enough, he'll get smart enough to understand why he should pay.

Its just like public radio. I don't have to pay to listen, but I do, because I benefit from it. (but please don't do the subscriber drive)

Offer a voluntary subscribtion, and forget about the banner ads.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 10:32 PM
Why don't you just put up a paypal link for a few days and see what happens? A lot of us like your site. We don't want to see it go away. (Hey, if nothing else, you'll get a few bucks out of me!)

I guess I'm thinking of paypal as sort of the PBS pledge drive approach to fundraising. Every once in a while they stop what they're doing and say "Hey, if you want us to keep doing this, fork over some cash!"

Edited by author 04-05-2004 10:26 PM

Wouldn't shrinking the images use less bandwidth??

I access Boing Boing through here:

http://www.evmo.com/text/frm/News.aspx#General

^the Boing Boing one.



My friend showed me that site b/c im about to get a Smartphone but I actually use it to come here anyway 'cause my dial-up takes forever ...

Anyway, maybe you can try something like that ?

Switch to a cheaper host, like the one I use: HostPC.com. This will be less of an issue with a less expensive host.

Sell something. Sell something and plug it. Forget all this talk about "models" find something cheap and sell it for more than it costs. Right now, no one is paying for advertising space on the net. Someday this might change. But until it does, we know that subscriptions don't work, we know that "sponsorship" eventually degrades user trust. So sell something. There is nothing wrong with pure capitalism. Find some kind of merchandise, product, whatever . . . something that you would buy and then sell it on your site.

I don't think you should have to pay out of your own pockets to provide free entertainment. I hope you'll heed the advice of the experienced webmasters and sysadmins about ways to optimize the content:

- smaller images/much higher compression...use thumbnails that link to the larger image if needed

- optimize your code (they weren't kidding about the font tags, talk about adding unnecessary size LOL I don't recall font tags being in the templates when I used MT lol)

- WAY less front page entries, take advantage of your mt archives (I'd think individual and daily would be your best choices...it's my opinion that the monthly archives are wasting a LOT of bandwidth)

- link your css and javascipts so they'd be cached on our pc, rather than having them load with each page

Ads are perfectly fine with me...while I don't always enjoy them, I see the need for them in cases like yours. I'm sure you'll choose GOOD ads that don't drive people away =^)

I wouldn't be able to subscribe at this time if it meant payment$, as I'm sure others wouldn't be able to either. But if you considered a subscription for archives older than 1-2 months, and for comment priviledges, perhaps that would make everyone happy.

I like what Weather Undground does, $5 a year removes any ads and gets you radar loops during the day.

I'd happily pay $5 a year for boingboing. I'd just ask that the site not show me the subscription button/ad until my time was up. (I hate tipjars on sites, I can never remember when I last gave and should give again.) If boingboing started showing ads, then the subscription would remove the ads too.

Re: advertising / ad-free subscription

"Pay us and we'll stop doing something annoying" / "pay us for access to the site." I'm underwhelmed. It goes against the whole creative commons spirit. We can do better than this.

To put it in economic terms: The boingboing team are able to provide a useful public service. There are a (large!) number of people who want that service to be provided. Can we not arrange things so that this team is paid for services rendered, without locking it up or making it annoying or otherwise breaking it?


Personally, i enjoy reading reviews of Cory's books, and similar personal items. I like that boingboing is just some people writing about what they're doing and what they find wonderful.

How about using a distributed model where other people with blogs (mine's at sean.typepad.com) host some of your articles? Spread the joy, spread the pain!

I would not subscribe to Boing Boing.

I would donate, especially if there were reasonably-spaced reminders.

I read via RSS, so ads wouldn't affect me.

I don't know how much bandwidth comes from the pictures on the RSS feed--but if that's a hit, go to no-HTML RSS (and switch to MT so you can have individual-post archives when people click through to see the picture).

I second the concepts of discussion comments for subscribers, ads for non-subscribers,& keep it at or under $1 / month. Of course, if you can get 1 Terabyte transfer for $100/month, do that and don't get greedy.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 09:12 PM
Make it a subscription model... Make it a SIMPLE subscription model. I will pay as a lot of other people.

For people who wouldn't like to pay (because they think the internet is free) just install an advertisement service that they have to watch. The best example are german/europian web sites. A flash is just rolling down from the top of the browser window... and disappears after 10 seconds. The other method would be redirects on OUT-links. :)

Btw. The internet is free! It's just that the computer, networks, administration, and electricity cost money. Let's help this prestigous web site by helping to pay for all the things that allow the internet to be free.

/oliver/

The optional subscription model appeals to me. Look at what SlashDot does: you can view for free, but you'll get big banner ads; cough up some dough, and you can surf ad-free. They've got a nice twist in that you don't subscribe for a period of time, but for a number of ad-free page views.

I have no clue if /. is actually making money from their subscriptions, but I've sent them some...

I like the Sluggy method. People who pay for a sub get ad-free viewing and bonus materials. People who don't get ads.

Charge for a damn subscription. I pay for Salon, I'd sure pay for a subscription to Boing Boing.

BlogAds are quite lucrative. Compare your traffic with some of the big bloggers on there-Kos, LGF, Instapundit, etc and see what they're charging.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 08:30 PM
Using bittorrent as is probably not be feasible. However, it strikes me that this is an increasing problem with many of the popular blogs, therefore it might be worth having a conversation with Bram Cohen to see if a version of Bittorrent could be developed that would work with blogs in particular rather than simple files as the current version does, i.e. to turn it into a P2P equivalent of Akamai

ev1 and various other places offer 400+gb a month of transfer for $99 a month. so just do that and quit the public begging.

Very easy instant solution: keep the site free and possibly ad-free. Delay instead the RSS feed 24 hrs for non-subscribers, charge a nominal for subscribing, paypal is probably ok for most. Subscribers also would have access to archives as someone else is suggesting.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 08:23 PM
I post a lot of images on my own weblog, hinterlands.cc, so I know that a lot of your bandwidth comes from that.

I've discovered that if you just load the image up in The Gimp and then select "save as", it will reduce the file-size by as much as 20-50 percent. It doesn't even change the resolution! It looks exactly the same to me, and that's without me even touching any of the quality settings.

Just something to think about. If you try that, along with the CSS rearranging someone else mentioned, that might take a nice hit out of the cost for you.

My recommendation is that you use a technical solution to reduce the badnwidth requirements. Optimised HTML code, mod_gzip, bittorrent, MPEG4 images, whatever. Anything you do to reduce traffic requirements, I'll support.

(BTW: I don't think the comments feature is really necessary for my enjoyment of bb.)

This has probably been mentioned already, but what about adopting the SomethingAwful model of just charging $10 for lifetime access to forum posting? If you were to use phpBB for your comment engine this would be relatively easy to set up.

I have no connection or experience with any of these people; I'm just tossing out ideas.

MarketBanker appears to let you sell text ads, which eliminates Google's text ads and lets SuicideGirls in (hey-o!).

And Spring Street Networks does the personals sites for pretty much everyone; maybe there's money to be made in connecting bOingers...

Mirrors.

There are lots of loyal readers, many of whom would probably be willing to donate bandwidth. You could redirect requests to boingboing.com to a randomly selected mirror.

Another alternative might be email. I wonder how much a spammer would charge to distribute an equivalent amount of boingboing emails?

I thought rather than post some advice, I'd just buy a BB t-shirt insted.
long live boingboing!

I have one niggling complaint about doing any form of ad-selling on bOINGbOING: I don't visit the site anymore! Granted, I read it every day, several times a day, but I do it through RSS (Bloglines, to be precise) so I would never get any ads that weren't either explicitly posted into the RSS stream (which, in my opinion, is not a bad idea) or made part of the text of the page itself (like sponsoring links -- but I'm hating the so-called "Embedded links" that pop up a small ad when you rollover them).

There may be something to be said for those adult sites that post a little sponsorship link at the bottom of each post, (I.e. "This post sponsored by PornCash") with a little link to the sponsor. You could do something like that at the bottom of each bb entry. I'd see at least one sponsor per entry, whether through RSS or on the site, and, if you did it right, you could target it to the entry. Maybe start categorizing entries and sell sponsorships to the categories with the potential of multiple sponsors per category.

I don;t believe that would kill the spirit of bb, but it may very well limit the contributors a bit. I can just see you scratching you heads over an enrty -- "Now, which entry would this fall under?" Then again, you may already be doing this.

Just my $0.02.

Rob Z.

--Torrent--

Can someone explain to me how this would work? A lot of people view your webpage at work. Most people are behind filters and firewalls. With that in mind they can't really use torrents.

If you'd really consider torrentz (in the way that I know of them so far) you might as well remove all of the multimedia items and make it text only.

So with that in mind, please explain.

I am guilty of admitting that i would probably pay a small monthly fee to use the archives.. I'm constantly looking for "that thing that was on boingboing last week".
I def. wouldnt charge to see front page content, everysite that I used to visit that has done that has another site that might not be as good, but the content is still out there in enough abundance that if i cant see the robot sock monkey that belches in icelandic on boingboing, then the robot dixie cup collection on that other site will get me thru the day.
go with the google ads as well, and look for services that could possible use your findings as their content as well. but then what do i know.. im a websurfer, not some marketing kid.

ebay auction: an original Mark drawing, a signed copy of EST, leftover copies of bOING bOING, a copy of the Grey album, 15 minutes of fame on the guestbar, 100 "limited edition" bb bumper stickers in a dutch auction, remix the bb logo contest with a 5$ fee to vote for your favorites, Lessig on your outgoing answering machine message, change bb's background color for a day, etc. Set dollar amount or percentage goes to bb upkeep, the rest to the EFF.

Let us set up a torrent for big stuff: e.g. the .5mb "boing! boing! easter window" image hosted on craphound must have eaten up a bit of bandwidth.

FOAF donated-to tags? bb YASN? An "I donated to boingboing" links page? offsite RSS/Atom feeds?

Paypal tip jar: put it up for 1000 pageviews, see what happens. I'm broke but rss boingboing daily: I'd kick in a couple bucks because bb has been an important part of my day for multiple years. Love this place.

--jim

Paul I think that Cory mentioned that Google's policy for websites utilizing AdSense is that you can't display any material. There are restrictions to the content that you can post.

Does this cost you money too?

Short answer: text ads, probably Google. Don't know if it will actually pay the bills, but it is harmless, and I suspect that some of them will be relevant enough to cause click-throughs.

http://dexworld.org/boing/

I made a mockup of a CSS/XHTML version that reduces page size a few K (and that doesn't take into consideration cacheing of the CSS). Further clean up of the code (it doesn't validate at the moment, and I've gotta run) might result in even more savings.

I slightly rewrote some of the underlying page structure, like removing the extra span tag for the RSS entries. Overall it's fairly faithful to the original, and would probably not take a lot of modification to MT to accomplish.

Don't Google's AdSense terms of use subtly restrict the advertiser from bashing the service? I haven't heard anything new about that for a a few months not, but I don't recall hearing the matter was resolved.

I think it's amazing that BoingBoing's having bandwidth problems -- it's one of the lightest-weight sites I visit.

I agree with the people who suggest cutting back on the size of the main page. Most people visit the home page then leave, and most who visit the site regularly already know 80% of the stuff there, so there's no reason to keep sending it, and all the pictures contained on it, to them each and every visit. That could hold off the dogs for a while.

But ultimately, if BoingBoing's readership is really growing that fast, then no number of optimization measures will solve the problem completely. You'll probably have to find a solution that's related to the number of visitors you're geting, like AdSense or user-hosted mirrors.

I've sometimes thought what we need is some sort of peer-to-peer client for the distributed hosting of websites. Let your readers become your mirrors, that sort of thing.

Raymond thank you for repeating what has been said. A recap is very useful.

The issue you're facing is one that -- ultimately -- every successful destination such as yours faces. And the irony is that the very thing that allowed you to grow to such success (the fact that you offer interesting and unique content worth checking out every day FOR FREE) has to be somewhat compromised in order for you to manage the load it's brought you. A good problem to have, and something that I feel you can address without truly compromising what you've got going. Here are my top 5 recommendations, in order of ease of implementation:

1. Sign up w/Google to offer contextually relevant Google Ads.
2. Sign up with PayPal or Amazon to offer a tip jar.
3. Create spin-off products based on your content -- someone mentioned an annual "best off BoingBoing" -- what if it was a PDF for $10?
4. Consider a "members only" area or a "membership" that allows access to even more interesting stuff or gets you into a "club" that meets twice a year at BoingBoing sponsored parties and/or get-togethers...options are pretty limitless.
5. Redesign your site using standards compliant XHTML/CSS.

Now, given any of the above changes except for #5, you will have to be more careful about plugging/cross-promoting your wares. I think that as long as you put stuff in the side bar where the tip jar, google ads, etc. will show up, it'll be cool, but don't put plugs (like Cory's new book releases, etc.) in with the content since that will slowly erode your editorial integrity. It's OK to do that when you have clearly no strategy for making money, but as soon as you employ one, the line needs to be drawn.

Finally, believe in offering options. Someone may not like Google Ads, others may not like tip jars, but if you listen to everyone, you won't be able to do anything...it's impossible to please everyone, so the best thing to do is offer people a choice and let them choose how they want to support you.

And even more finally, don't be ashamed that you have to pay the bills -- it's a fact of life and anyone who expects something for nothing is not living in the real world. As much as I'd like there to be a world where you get something for nothing, the world hasn't presented itself to me in that manner just yet.

:)

Best of luck -- love your site, and want to see it continue to thrive.

- Raymond Pirouz

If bandwidth is the problem how about encouraging people to use the web based aggregator bloglines.com?

I feel that BB has lost something since the discussions have gone away, but I also find the trolls quite annoying. I'd be more than happy to pay a subscription rate to allow posting to a discussion board, only allow paying members to post to the discussion board. Its doubtful that many trolls would be willing to kick in something like $24-$36 a year to be a pain in the ass. With that, just about everyone wins. Boing Boing stays open, enhanced community and discussion, and better signal to noise ratio than in the "free" model. Plus, those that aren't willing to pay, still get access to the main page and comments, they just can't post.

Have you ever tried to host a webpage via a HTTP upload/download manner? It's very very difficult. The editors of Boing Boing don't have time for that.

I'd suggest that you don't suggest it anymore. They need something smooth that they can access through FTP or Movable Type. Clearly hosting pictures on others websites won't work.

I'm not trying to be a flamebait but I'm just appealing to you that you should think about it. :P

Edited by author 04-05-2004 06:45 PM
scary to even think this way - BUT - what about the "reader supported model" a la NPR?

go with fund-drives when needed (based on hits?) and use simple fee contribution - $5.00/mo $50/yr and maybe $1.00 per day-pass? no login - no subscription - just like the radio (where you can listen and NOT contribute)...

if jackasses pay off middle-class white girl's credit card debt in 30 days (the girl with $30K on her amex who bought too many prada handbags and then lost her job)...we would hope to hell there are some great, balanced folks who love and appreciate BB and can contribute.

as to ad space - go with WIRED magazine and various other "smart" ads - including media similar to found on AICN - but please be wise and avoid the crappy crap crap found on most pay-ad sites...

best of luck - love BB - been blogged by you and we loved the experience...

Have a bake sale - let people donate cool stuff, auction it off, and have them ship directly to the winners. I'll donate a kidney.

I don't think anyone will begrudge BoingBoing for selling adspace. Just do it.

You could ask your readers for their web space for your files. I bet thousands of people have free webspace with no intention of using it for themselves. You can then store files on many servers and spread the load.
Hope this isn't too sensilble
John

--Dedicated Server -- excellent solution
--Switch to a very basic CSS design (no reason to go overboard)
--You're already using gzip -- add in something to crunch all the whitespace down to nothing and you'll shave off another 2-3K per page
--last 24 hours per page or latest 3-5, whichever is easier
--optimize all images to the point where they look ugly.
--Definitely open all links in a new window. You can name the window boinglink or something instead of _blank to prevent people getting a million windows open, or leave it and let the reader decide.
--set +1 year expiry dates for all the images
--use cache settings for all archive pages
--implement a good search solution, not this google crap that only indexes the top half of your gigantic archive pages. Then we won't have to search through big archive pages with control + F looking for something posted last year (I love google, but it limits to the first 470 or so K of a page and the bb archives are much bigger)
--Google ads... I like those. They often show things you wouldn't have expected to see or thought of that work well with the content posted. And they're not nearly as restrictive as they used to be. They revised their TOS after places like boingboing publicized how bad they were.
--Have Cory and Mark pay a token standard commission on all book/artwork sales made through the links on boingboing. (though they likely already are using their own funds to pay for hosting)

Cut down the size of the opening page for starters, but then again with a steadily increasing audience this is only a short term fix.

Sell e-books and printed books of the best of 'Boing Boing', great stocking filler that I reckon quite a few of us would buy for the washroom.

A combination of revenue from all types of 'Boing Boing' merchandise i.e. flesh out from t-shirts and some 'context' sensitive advertising charged at a premium. Personally, I think advertising revenue is always a last resort but it keeps the pipe smokin'!

Re: other posters... Is the RSS feed really less bandwidth-intesive than regular HTML pages? Feed readers ping at your doorstep more often than a human would...

Anyway, if RSS really is lighter, you could do all you can to get people to use(up to and possibly including an automatic redirect to) http://www.bloglines.com/ to read your .rss output. If half the people started using bloglines instead, well... you'd just be shifting the cost and problem to bloglines... but users would also get a better experience because they'd be able to view their favorite blogs in one spot.

One aside though: please please please don't reduce the number of images you're posting in your stories. It really helps to convey certain stories, and frankly, it's almost something that makes BoingBoing unique.

"I disagree with all the people saying optimize the site. You want to be able to play around without worrying about cost, if you're constantly worrying about optimization it could kill the spirit."

I think people mean things like tidying up the table code and font tags in the backend; simply cleaning up the bits and bobs there could considerably cut down on the average page size. CSS is your friend!

The PayPal tip jar idea has been used with varying degrees of success, as someone pointed out. There's a bit of a conundrum, though--if donations get too high, you start feeling guilty, and pull the plug (at least, that happens some places). Then, of course, there's no donations, and eventually costs rise, and....

So, what I think, is a visible indicator of how the donations are coming along AND how the expenses are faring. So, if you're coasting along in the green, it's unobtrusive, people see it, and think "hey--things are going well." But, donations slack off, then the gauge looks worse, and you chip in to pay the bandwith bill. That way, the worse financially it looks, the more users are encouraged to help the situation. And vice versa--don't solicit heavily if there's a lot of reserves.

*shrug* Just a thought. Should probably optimize, too. ;)

Don't underestimate the value of cleaning up the HTML/switching to CSS, compressing images better, and encouraging the use of syndication.

You can save a ridiculous amount of money on transfer just by switching to CSS. I didn't think so until I did it on a couple of my more popular sites. The result was striking. Do that tonight.

Ditto on images. A few years ago, on one of my sites, there was a 44k image that wasn't useful, just a design thing. One of my site users compressed it down to 11k with little loss in quality. We did the math, and the site saved something like $300 a year.

When I saw this story on Boing Boing a few minutes ago, I downloaded NetNewsWire Lite, and figured I should bite the bullet and start using RSS/RDF/Atom. You know what? I love it. I've used it for 10 minutes, and I think it's great. It will save me a lot of time, and it will certainly save you some bandwidth. Strongly encourage the use of syndication. It's good for the Internet, it's good for individuals, and it's good for your bandwidth.

1. GoogleAds - They will work on your site, because your content is so diverse.
2. Short & Full RSS Feeds - Use short feeds (title and first couple sentences) without ads, and full feeds (entire post with images) with ads.
3. Reduce Page Size - Don't post a bunch of large images, and use text only and CSS as much as possible.

I do all of the above (minus the RSS feed with ads), and I easily make 10 times the amount of money from GooglAds than what it costs me to host my site each month at Pair - http://www.pair.com/

Here's my site: http://www.familyresource.com/

Some quick math, assuming today's page is representative and only counting the HTML + Images hosted at boingboing. (Many of the images currently on the page are hosted elsewhere.)

3.5 million visits for March
bandwidth per page: 143kb

500GB/month of traffic.

You can get 1000BG/month from Server Matrix for ~$100/mth and you're on a dedicated box to boot.

I suggest asking for free hosting from one of the following:

- ibiblio.org
- archive.org

On Dave Matthews Band fan site nancies.org, which gets quite a bit more traffic than Boing Boing, we have enjoyed great success with Google ads and our own in-house text ads. Google ads provide a more or less steady revenue stream, although I suspect Google would have a difficult time targeting ads to Boing Boing. In-house ads allow those interested in supporting the site to do so in a manner other than charity, plus potentially get something out of it. Of course, those in-house ads are also good for people whose primary interest is advertising, and understand that they can reach a good audience through your site.

I'd just set those up while figuring out what to do.

I think most people are like me and visit BoingBoing daily.

You could save a significant amount bandwidth by having www.boingboing.net show only a single day's worth of posts.

To see the entire month, the user would go to the archives.

Ideally you want to reduce the size of the front page so as to cut down on the amount of bandwidth you use and then make just enough money to cover the (reduced) costs.

My two cents worth for what it is worth (*ahem* probably about two cents...). Mostly these are design issues that should cut down the size of the front page and shouldn't be too hard to implement.

For a site that celebrates tech and design-related stuff it is a bit of a mess (although the content is great)! Recode it (to cut down on size), then redesign the front page to make it less cluttered

If it isn't a popular feature remove the guest sidebar/blog - or at least move it off the front page and include a link for those interested in it. You could then have a post each time there is a new guest editor to drive interested people to that section.

Have less posts on front page. Although it is great that there is so much content, I counted 31 posts on the main page when I last checked, which is arguably too much.

As has already been noted, cut down the file size of the photos. My vote is for not removing them if possible as they are normally a nice teaser for what you are discussing.

If possible, don't have advertising. Pay Pal contributions should be enough to cover costs and I don't think that people would be offended by it - or by the occassional (monthly? yearly?) prod to maybe cough up some $$$. With the amount of traffic you are getting, even a small percentage of readers contributing should raise funds.

If you have to advertise, limit the number of advertisers to a handful at most and please make them relevant! (And no personals if possible)

Unless you are willing to put in serious effort - or have a supplier who can - then I don't think merchandise is the way to raise money given the increased cost and fulfillment issues. Of course, if the existing stuff has been very successful, then arguably there is room to expand. But IMHO I love to read BB - I don't really need to wear the t-shirt or drink from the mug...

Although I am currently enjoying reading some of Cory's work online (and hopefully will track down hard copies in the near future) I think having ads up on the front page is probably not necessary. Maybe have a separate "About BB" page with bios of Mark, Cory, Xeni, etc and have the ads/promo for them there? Or course, you have every right to promote yourself on BB as it is your site! If you cut down the size of the front page or meet the costs in other ways then leave the ads there. They got me reading at least and I am sure they have worked for other people.

Also, have your own server. It is not particularly demanding from a technical perspective and can save you $$$. I am sure if you put out a call, you could possibly even get a server donated for the cause. I think having mirrors is also a good idea to help distribute load.

Finally, and on a somewhat unrelated issue, I think you should bring back comments. As someone who has been following BB since after comments were banned I didn't miss them personally, but there have been a lot of positive suggestions here and I think bringing back comments would help to create more of a BB community. Clearly the goodwill is out there for BB, so it might be nice to enable some feedback from those that read you. If you are worried about trolls, just set up a free registration system and/or have volunteer moderators.

Sorry about the length of the post, but I want to make sure BB is around in the future and not killed off by high costs. Keep up the good work.

I'd gladly pay into a Paypal account for the content on BoingBoing. Set it up and post the link...

I've always been rather satisfied with the Google/google-esque text-only ads, as they are (usually) topic-related and seem to get the job done of providing income for a site. But please, anything but annoying blinking banner ads.

Nobody's going to want to subscribe or donate very much considering every 4th blog entry is an advertisement for products you or your friends are trying to sell.

Just write the bandwidth costs off on your taxes as a business expense.

A custom advertising solution that is not so constraining may work. Check out http://www.pheedo.com.

I'd be happy to pay for a BlogAd or a text ad on BoingBoing.

I'd like to second the motion by Brendon J. Wilson that its time to find some other to distribute than the classical single host multiple connection model.

Mirroring of Boing-Boing doesn't appear to be too complex and a DNS set-up that distributes a different address to each request (with a published fall-back central server URL) would have (disadvantages, perhaps) but significant advantages.

Serving costs don't scale, but P2P does.

If you do want to do the ads thing, text ads are not intrusive and I don't suffer the Google paranoia that appears to have arisen of late.


http://Hamish.Blogware.com

Two Words (or is it one word?): Blog Ads.
http://www.blogads.com/

If you put up a tip jar, I'll donate. Paypal. Or BitPass, which can be set-up for donations as well as pay-to-view.

I disagree with all the people saying optimize the site. You want to be able to play around without worrying about cost, if you're constantly worrying about optimization it could kill the spirit.

There's millions of people viewing boingboing, there has to be some rational way for them to support it!

I'm still hoping someone somewhere will use RSPP... http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/rspp ...kinda hard to run though... More generally, donation is a coordination problem: one donation will not save the site, but if many people are donating it is easy. You need to establish common knowledge: I want to know that i'm not the only person putting a tip in the tip jar, I'm more likely to donate if i can see other coins in there as well. I want to see how many people have donated how much, and how far off the target you are.

I was talking with Brad Neuberg about what he termed "the tragedy of the dot commons" - community sites that strive to get popular, only to collapse under the weight of their bandwidth bill.

The way I see it, the time has come for community-based sites to invest in the development of some form of distributed, P2P-based hosting solution. That way the bandwidth *available* in the community supports the bandwidth *required* to support the community. Imagine if hitting www.boingboing.net actually did a DNS lookup on a P2P and returned the IP of a peer capable of serving the latest content - then the people who set up the community would only need to handle the cost of the source peer. This "free culture from the edge" solution sounds like something the EFF or OSDN should be investigating (Cory, I'm looking in *your* direction, EFF-dude).

Or, in a pinch: couldn't we hack something together based on Bittorrent?

Brendon
---
www.brendonwilson.com

Those Google ads are relatively painless, and sometimes score really high on the "serendipitous pointer to something interesting that you wouldn't think to look for" scale.
On the other hand sometimes they are funnier than anything you could do on purpose.

My offer is still up for Colo or for managed hosting. I know a bunch of webhosts and bandwidth providers.

Where are you located primarily? You don't have a server right?

Boingboing is where a lot of people go for their crack-pipe like links.

Salon can get away for charging for content, well mainly because it has content. BB is more of a contstantly updated directory of niftyness.

Start charging people for access and watch your hits go down horrifically. People will start submitting links to other sites, and the readers will migrate.

Charging for content also drives away new readers.

Optimize your page. Kill redundant images. Put less content on the main page.

Encorage a bit more paypal. Trying to change, when it's a bit of a "plugging" site for the authors seems also a bit ironic. "Buy of stuff that tells you to buy our stuff".

(Aside: The last time I read the bb sidebar with interest was macki.)

Billmon over at the Whisky Bar had a similar situation last month. He decided to put up a PayPal tip jar. He writes:

"You've probably noticed the tip jars are gone -- or maybe you never saw them there at all. If you blinked, you may have missed them. That's because over the past 24 hours Whiskey Bar patrons have put just over $4,000 in those jars, which is about three times what I had hoped to raise over the coming month."
http://billmon.org/

It's pretty simple to try it. If visitors donate enough support through sporadic appearance of a tip jar - nothing more complex is needed. Certianly wouldn't hurt to trim the fat a little on the images and such though.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 05:03 PM
subscription model: doesn't fit the ethos of the crew
webhost sponsored: eligible option
join a network: unnecessary
get your own server: affordable option
google ads: too constraining
mirrors: complicated
encourage RSS/Atom: might help a little
redesign: cuts weight of page and bandwidth
paypal fund raiser: possible yearly solution to hosting fees (only need $1200 or so a year, right?)
Limit Self-Promotion: self-promo posts and associated images add to weight and add to unneccesary bandwidth costs

Nobody at BB should have to foot the bill for the site. While it probably doesn't need to be a cash cow, it should, at the very least be self supporting. I don't think you'd have any trouble raising enough money to fund a couple years of BB. Didn't Kuro5hin pull a similar fund raiser a few years ago?

Re: Cory, et al plugging their own stuff.

I actually think it would be better and cool if there was a separate sidebar (like what's done with the guest bar) in which Cory and the BB team plug the latest stuff from them and their colleagues. It would keep things separate but also highlight these items in their own section. I'd read it still as I'd imagine most who visit the page. But many times I've wanted to read "BB stuff" separate from "Cory's stuff (or Xeni's, or Mark's, etc.)" and vice versa.

Shoot me down in flames if I'm being a silly newbie, but would it help to make your Links open a new window, instead of using the current window? That way, the BB page doesn't have to be reloaded a dozen times if I want to look at all dozen links you've put up in the last hour.

I agree with some of my fellow posters. BoingBoing could do a better job of making its code foundation agree with its advocacy of technology and standards, and I would think that there are plenty of talented coders here who would love to overhaul the presentation layer for you. XHTML and CSS may not shave a great deal of bandwidth from what you already have, but at least you'd get rid of those nasty FONT and TABLE tags ;) And of course being diligent with image weights is very important.

The Poulan Weedeater™ Boing Boing Quick Topic Discussion Board.

Fark a relevant model? It sells space and still manages to make its content the focus.

I'm all for the Salon day pass or subscribe model like xradiographer pointed out. Of course, Salon isn't the ideal example of the proverbial cash cow, but they seem eat regularly these days. Google/text ads arent horrible either, as long as there's the option for those super sensitive people to turn them off.

Perhaps posting a synopsis of your current and projected costs would help.

Or, you know, you could just start sucking. That seemed to work for K5.

Removing those FONT tags may save a few dollars on bandwidth ;-)

There is already pleanty of advertising on BoingBoing every other day Cory posts self advertising abount book signings, selling stuff in his apartment, etc. T- Shirts for sale, etc.

So either allow others to advertise for pay, or get the self promoters on the board to fork out a bigger portion of the costs.

see, you bring back the discussion, and the troll:serious ratio is no worse than 1:4 or 2:3... [is there an antonym for "troll" ??]

how about a salon-day-pass-sponsor model? view the multi-page ad once, look all day for free (& have the sponsor pay for it). Of course, that presumes an design & sales department, as well as people patient enough to look at ads to get free content...

I'd chip in a few bucks; also don't mind sponsors, etc.

sponsers that are displayed in text only, like the onion, are useful and not too intrusive.

A few people have been suggesting you get rid of the guest blog. I don't agree. While sometimes I have no interest in a particular blogger, most times, the guest blogger is a great addition to the site. Keep the guest blogger on the front page.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 04:13 PM
* Find volunteers for mirroring
* Encourage users to use RSS/Atom feed (I do)
* If push comes to shove, I don't think that Google's context sensitive text adds are the worst thing in the world
(Hey, what are all those rent-a-prayer adds doing here? Perhaps Google's context sensitivity is not quite what it is hyped to be - or BoingBoing's situation is worse than we think ;-)

Mark, BoingBoing is a popular enough site that you might even want to bring the heavy-duty tech geeks' advice in by posting an article to Ask.Slashdot.Org, and seeing if they publish it. Not that you'll get bad advice here, but I imagine you might get some really interesting advice there.

Encourage users to use the RSS/Atom newsfeeds instead of just hitting the site half a dozen times a day (guilty).

Encourage people to use your RSS/XML feed. It's much lighter on the bandwidth, and is easily mirrored.

If you go to some kind of "premium content" model (which I don't like very much, but admit that sometimes it's needed), it might be nice to let people make their payment by agreeing to mirror the RSS/XML feed.

Personally, I don't see why a service like this really needs a web page, but people seem to insist on it. You can turn an RSS feed into a sharp-looking web page with a trivial XSLT transform and a CSS stylesheet. So... just provide the live RSS feed, and offer a few stylesheets so people can set up mirrors really easily.

Let me see if I understand this correctly. You're asking for money from viewers so you can keep publishing BB, which is mostly full of Cory's latest personal self-promotional articles and advertisements. Why don't you just get Cory to pay for it?

I ran crumb.jpg through ImageReady. Went from 36 kb to 12 kb. The weird thing is, the full size image on crumbproducts.com was 20 kb. Then I shrank it using ecto, and the smaller file jumped in size to 36 kb! I need to tweak the settings on Ecto, I guess.

Thanks for all these ideas -- keep 'em coming!

I'd post an edit to my message but QuickTopic doesn't like me.

A quick runthrough of ImageReady for everything on the bb homepage results in a 220k savings. Combine that with some judicious HTML editing and I think you could get a 250k savings -- from over 440k per pageview to under 200k per pageview. That cuts your bandwidth in half.

I don't know much about this here Web stuff, but I visit BB several times a day, looking for the Fresh. On other sites that are updated frequently, I will use my LYNX browser to send a simple HEAD request. The sites that allow it have a line such as:

Last-Modified: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 19:29:00 GMT

If BB were to allow the posting of this info in a HEAD request, I would only visit after updates. I could even write me one of them scripty things.

Yeah, I think the first thing to do is to optimize the pages. Have only 20 entries per page, for example.

Devise a uniform size standard for all pictures used to illustrate an entry. They should be small and not go over a specified file size.

Go to CSS.

And establish mirror sites.

I switched off of EV1 (network) to ServerMatrix (network), haven't had problems w/ either's bandwidth (the former has withstood a /.ing, nearly zero downtime over 2.5yrs, the latter i've gotten 25Mbps+ on a a single host transfer). Paying $110/mo for 1TB/mo of transfer. Would definitely recommend either (for their network, can't recommend EV1 anymore because of the SCO thing).

But other options:
* Freecache or other more esoteric bandwidth distribution schemes.

* page-level optimizations, throttling

* getting mirrors (wouldn't be hard, i'm sure you'd have tons of volunteers, also you could also get free ibiblio bandwidth if you cc the content)

Optimizing the site is a key component of reducing the load, but it's still going to be a problem as more people visit the site.

Boing Boing is currently using mod_gzip.

I'll second suggestions to drop the HTML soup in favor of XHTML/CSS.

Reduce image sizes. The most recently posted image "crumb.jpg" is 32K. A simple ImageMagick `convert -quality 60 crumb.jpg crumb.jpg` produced an image only 5.6K that looks every bit as good as the original.

Currently, the front page of bb is 65kb. By changing all references of the font tag to a span, we're down to 61k, a fairly sizeable reduction.

I also agree with the image optimization. The R.Crumb photo is 32kb! By spending 3 minutes in ImageReady/Debabelizer/etc the image can be shrunk to 6k without any noticeable change in quality.

Assuming that the front page was just the html source and the R.Crumb photo, we've gone from 97kb to 67kb, reducing your bandwidth consumption by almost a third. And that's before mod_gzip takes care of the html.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 03:11 PM
Move the images elsewhere. One good place to put 'em is on an AOL screen name's free Web space, if you happen to have an AOL account around that you're paying for anyway. You don't get much space and it's a pain to upload stuff (you can't use a regular FTP program), but it's not metered and, being AOL, their servers have excellent bandwidth. I've used the technique many times to cope with unexpected bandwidth needs.

Like everyone else is saying, optimize your page. If that doesn't work, just publish it on Freenet. Your site will be cached Freenet-wide and you won't need any hosting whatsoever.

Very simple... set up mirrors...

...and also see if http://www.communitycolo.net/ has any spots for you...

Edited by author 04-05-2004 03:09 PM
1) Move the Guestbar off the page (make it a Guestblog?)
2) Move old topics off the page sooner
3) Optimize your images. The image for the Eastern Standard Tribe book is 38K -- why? It should not be more than 15K. The picture of Alan is 19K -- why? It's B&W, and should not be more than 8K.
4) Lose the <font> tags in favor of CSS -- but don't go crazy!!! The beauty of BoingBoing is that the design is so perfectly simple. A big style sheet is as wasteful as tables and font tags -- I've seen developers create huge, csszengarden.com-esque CSS for https sites and bandwidth costs blew threw the roof.
5) Review your web caching strategy. Let browsers and proxy servers cache your page and images. See: http://www.web-caching.com

Reduce the size of your images by 66% and move content off the page sooner, and you won't have to be an ad-whore like the rest of the world.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 03:05 PM
you get what you pay for.. not all bandwidth is created equal. A terabyte for $100 sounds like pretty shitty connectivity to me. That's porn site quality hosting (laaaame). What exactly are BB's transfer stats anyway? How much is needed? Would be a lot easier for people looking to donate hosting services, if they knew how much boingboing needs.

Are you using mod_gzip?
It's an apache module that compresses on the fly, and does not require any client software, modern browsers decompress the content transparently.

If Boing Boing goes to a subscription model, then I will immediately be going to a Bye Bye model.

It's not like we have a shortage of blogs.

Read it for free, OK. Read it for money, sorry, I'll choose one of the other 2 million blogs out there.

Edited by author 04-05-2004 02:57 PM
I'll second Matt Haughey's recommendation. You should never be paying additional fees for bandwidth with your hosting plan. At ServerMatrix, $100/month gets you your own dedicated server with 1 terabyte of bandwidth monthly. If you don't mind the SCO debacle, I can personally vouch for EV1 Servers, which comes with 700GB transfer per month.

Unless you start hosting large amounts audio or video, you'll never come close to those limits. How much bandwidth is Boing Boing using monthly, and how much are you getting charged in over-usage fees?

errata: I said gizmodo parties, but I meant BoingBoing parties of course. It was a mis-edit from when I was shifting stuff around. bb parties would be so much better than gizmodo parties, anyway.

Anyway, SuicideGirls might be an interesting sponsor for the personals. Salon's another option.

Google Adsense and or another affiliate that could provide money are simply the ways to go. If the visits are nearing 1 million a month, there's an affiliate that would be definitely interested in serving ads on BB.

Here's another thing, and it's borrowed from the shady world of bittorrent: Have people volunteer to put up mirror sites. Thus, whenever boingboing.net is accessed, it will randomly go to one of the mirrors. Whenever the main site is updated, the mirrors are automatically updated within minutes. However, those willing to put up mirrors would probably want to have the right to put up ads on their mirror pages. An agreement would have to be made as to the kind of advertising which would be allowed on the BB mirrors. Thus, these BB mirrors would be "franchises".

To be honest, I have never heard of a site being able to support itself via merch alone. Nobody I know who run sites for profit or to pay just the bills makes off of T-shirts, stickers and such shit...these are mainly items created for vanity reasons rather than to meet a demand. Homestar Runner is perhaps the only successful online merch story.

And the discussion boards would probably have to come back in some fashion to provide another incentive for readers to pay something. Advertising could be served alongside the message board (like it already is with this QuickTopic service). As for the trolling, frankly I never thought it was that bad back when the boards were up (or maybe it was and somebody was deleting posts that I never got to read). (Hell, in my professional writing life, I've had people say pretty nasty stuff online about what I wrote -- and I never was offended, really somewhat surprised and amused. It's not like I'm a political writer -- mostly cover videogames.) The solution I would suggest would be to have at least 3 volunteers edit the board. (I'd be willing to do this -- especially for a free BB T-shirt. :-) )

--H

Take a page from Howard Dean's recordsetting Wisconsin fundraising weekend. He set a specific financial goal, explained why he needed it, asked people to help him get there, and made sure that the totals were revised every hour. (Well, not HIM, per se. But you know what I mean.) So say you need $80,000 in a week. Essentially, do a telethon.

Alternately, I think I'd heavily look at the Slashdot and TotalFark models, along with perhaps private inquiries to the site maintainers (with promises of confidentiality) to ask them how well those systems are working for them. A TotalBoingBoing might be interesting ... and although I find myself unwilling to pay Slashdot (at the moment) for what they're offering, I enjoy BoingBoing enough that I'd do it.

Heavily promoting responsible use of RSS feeds might help ...

hold a yearly pledge drive. if 50,000 of your most devoted readers donated a dollar, you'd have plenty of money to host your site.

Unfortunately even after years of reading bOING bOING I'm still not quite up to speed on the latest in blog technology, but I'd imagine there should be a way to lessen the load through the content provided by RSS feeds and such. Many more people use that technology now and if you could provide the same content, text-only directly to someone's computer, it might lessen the load. Or I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I don't think donations are abhorrent, but I don't think you're going to get much out of such a scheme.

While having your own server would ease things on one end, you're still going to have to provide the bandwidth somehow. I'm unsure how well-versed any of the four of you are in running a server, either, nor do any of you seem to have the time to do so.

Parties: Definitely.

You might also want to consider limiting or ending the guest blog. I don't know what kind of numbers you have on it, but personally I almost never read it, so when I log on, loading that for me is a waste of bandwidth for you. Quite possibly you could have bOING bOING be customizable, like the www.my.yahoo.com pages, so that each user could limit or expand the content to their own desires. Some people, like myself, would take a bare-bones bOING bOING and others might keep all the content. The net effect may be zero, but it could save you some bandwidth if it turns out more people like less "extraneous" content, and I use extraneous for lack of a better term.

Hope some of that helped.

The overall thing that Boing Boing needs to do is two part, reduce the load when a user views the page and then get a better cheaper bandwidth provider, which BTW can be seperate from the webhost.

Subscriptions aren't really beneficial. If you delayed content you'd see a number of people going to other blogs like Gizmodo or any other number of quality blogs. What does BoingBoing really do? They blog blogs and they blog more blogs. Really blogging is essentially copying material in an effort to bring data to the masses, if you take that away you take away the masses. They'll go somewhere else.

I can see merch and donations being a great idea. Merch brings another issues into hand, cashflow. To make merch you need cash, then you need bw and server to sell it. Do you see where I'm going with that? It's adding to operating costs.

Another idea is to move older items off of the page sooner so that it doesn't require as much to load. Furthermore they should get rid of the garbage on the right side of the screen, it's just adding to the HTML code and cluttering the view.

They should look into the practices of other blogs too and adapt some similar ideas. For instance having comments but only being able to see and load the comments in another window, again saving bandwidth.

I love Nate's merch idea. With all the extras on BoingBoing's right-side column, ads would confuse me a tad more. If you must run them, I assume you'd go with Google ads.

But merch sounds so much cooler. I'd like to see a wider variety of BoingBoing merch. Few of the current designs interest me. Maybe something with photos of the Big Four, next to the BoingBoing logo...I think I'd buy that.

And as wretched as it sounds, premium content can really help out. Cory, you know Scott McCloud; he's had a great experience adding BitPass content to his free site. No one has complained, since he's still offering the same fresh free content, and even doing it better. You could set up penny votes for entries; anything gimmicky but dirt cheap to each single user becomes entertaining and profitable on the grand scale of several million hits a day. Look at Scott's Morning Improv and the left-side penny votes here: http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/mi/mi.html

And, of course, your books must owe a lot of their profit to the links from BoingBoing.

In summary:
1. More varied, brandable merchandise, possibly subscription based
2. Cheap (x | x<$1) premium articles
3. Dirt cheap (y | y<the price of a Swedish fish at the old-fashioned pharmacy that got run out of town by Rite Aid) voting (for articles? for other content? I've no idea)
4. Just throw your own money at it because it's practically driving your careers

How about putting a 24-48 hour delay on updates to non-subscribers? The blog stays free, just not as fresh. Thats with comments back on, merch, and parties - with pancakes and a cherry on top.

I'm also a fan and would pay a subscription fee, but I think it would be interesting to attack the problem from the other side.

Your front html page is 66k right now, more when you add the images. Distribute the load! Put up a BitTorrent link with a snapshot, I would be happy with a daily set of bb posts.

It might not prove popular, but it's free and easy to try!

pay to view a blog? I vote "no". sorry nuhuh.

I think that there should be the ability to post

I like the donation model, I would be first in line, and I think independence is good.

I also think the party idea is a good one, and would even help organize a regional party if need be.

Boing Boing merch would be lower and ads lowest on my vote.

I like parties -- bring back the salon!

Merch is good too, but make it membership merch: charge $30/yr for membership, give a free t-shirt. Can sell them at parties too. CafePress handles the work.

I know some people in the D.C. area who'd love to do some gizmodo parties for you ... :) We could do other events too, like hash house harriers style flashmobbing, lan parties or other local "chapter" events. f2f is the new internet.

Personals seem to be the latest craze, and a proven money maker. Not that I'd date anyone who reads bb.

At the time I'm posting this, all of the Google ads are about Prayer. "Prayer Request," "The Power of Prayer," "The 7 Great Prayers."

(Maybe they picked up Warren's mention of the Devil shitting in one's breakfast?)

Perhaps this is the way forward. Hire a out-of-work televangelist to host a Praise-a-thon public access.

Yeah, that would work.

I like the pay-to-post comments idea. I'm not sure how large that market would be though. Then again a paying troll might be worse than before, but there would be less of the random anonymity that made QT crater before.

You could also just post a need-o-meter graphic every 6 months that goes away when enough cash is raised. But I do think people would pay for a "community" with some sort of interaction.

I would agree with a subscription model, 12 bucks for twelve months (the going rate for magazine subscriptions) provided that the coment forums came back.

As a longtime reader, I'd be more than happy to donate to the cause. I gave some cash to MeFi when a new server was needed, and was pleased to see that I wasn't alone.

I would, however, be a bit saddened to see BB lose even a sliver of its independence. I realize that sponsorship, or an arrangement with an entity like weblogs inc may be the only way to go, but I'd hope you'd consider that as a last resort.

Perhaps you could try a donation based model and see how it goes. Combined with a grant or two of some kind, it might prove more than sufficient. If NPR can do it . . .

I'd gladly pay another $5/1000 page views I pay /. to keep bb here and advert free.

Rent parties. A few options:

1) Posting the PayPal donation link once a day for a week. Distasteful for some, but needs must when the Devil shits in your breakfast.

2) Actual physical parties. KITCHEN SINK magazine in Oakland makes substantial revenue towards production costs by quite simply throwing pay-at-the-door parties in an available gallery space with live bands (I went to the first one, with Erase Errata and Young People, who were terrific). Two boingboing parties a year could put a significant dent in your costs.

Merch? grouphug.us ran into bandwidth issues due to its (unforeseen) popularity. They sold branded swag (t-shirts, etc) via cafepress to waylay some of the costs.

boingboing!... you've saved many a dull day through my dot-com BSing, web-surfin', and plenty of time-killing ala 'oh whats going on over THERE today..." if anything, just wanted to say THANKS for all the fun stuff over the last couple years (as long as i've been tuning in...), and if anything, please bring back the discussions... it was always part of the fun!

JE

I used to pay for totalfark but discontinued after a few months after I realized it was a lot of crap links, with a few boobies posts threw in, and then a slew of links to the same thing when anything remotely newsworthy happened. Ive been reading boingboing for about 3 years now and although have never connected to anyone on here have always felt some sort of community-ish feeling through the discussion posts. After they were taken away It was more passive voyeurism for me again, I would hit the page, scan a few articles click anything that looked nice and then go away. There isnt a community anymore. Just a gripe.

As for ads, I dont mind them much, I also like what aintitcoolnews.com has been doing lately with reviews and commentary and such. Anytime a movie is mentioned they usually link to an amazon page to buy it, no doubt giving them referral cash, Ive bought a few things off boingboing recommendations before, namely the photographic book inferno recently, and fun things like the magnetoids.

--skrike

Why not apply for a grant. This site maintains the open dialouge many Universitys and other institutions stive to maintain. I would recomend the annenberg centerl for communications, http://www.annenberg.edu/ , as a starting point. I'm sure they would be very excited about this sort of thing and also have the kind of capital to solve the problem. If not, they could most cetainly offer assistance in finding recourses.

The cost of bandwidth is what you have to pay to do all the advertising and promotion you do of your own products and services.

I hate to agree with "Mr. Ed," but as a longtime BB reader, I have to admit he has a point.

I have no problem paying for subscriptions to Fark, Slashdot, K5, and a few other sites. I don't demand any particular warm-and-fuzzy "community" vibes, but I do expect interactivity, in the sense of "the privilege of being heard."

BoingBoing responded to a very few trolls by disabling reader-response posting, thereby letting the trolls dictate how the site was run. That turned BB from an interactive forum to a pure-vanity site run of, by, and for Cory and his cohorts. That's fine; I still read it, and still find it interesting. But it's not something I'm willing to pay for. If I can't contribute my thoughts, I won't contribute my cash. (See? Cory's not the only one with an overdeveloped sense of vanity around here.)

Paid ads, yes. I'd be very interested in those. Donations or subscriptions, no.

Donations, sponsored hosting as Chris mentions, or pay-per-impression ads (as opposed to per-clickthrough: speaking for myself, I never click).

Edited by author 04-05-2004 01:33 PM
I kind of miss the discussion aspect of boingboing.
Rumor I heard was that it got turned off due to massive
trolling or some such... I figure you may be able to
cut that out by having some sort of pay-to-post[1] account
system, while at the same time returning the bidirectional
(site<->audience) nature of information flow to BB,
and bringing in some cash. A pricing model like livejournal's
might be a good starting point.

Thinking of LJ, one kind of wacko idea would be moving from
a standalone site to an LJ community. I think the fundamental
flavor of the site could be retained, even if some formatting
and such would be lost.

[1] edit: (i mean post comments on stories)

Why not just apply the Andrew Sullivan donation model? Have an annual fundraising week and see how much cash you can generate. If Sullivan can get $80,000, can't BoingBoing earn enough to cover its bandwidth costs?

I'm a huge fan, and part owner of a web hosting company. A "hosted by" link/pic/etc. ought not be too offensive, and depending on what kind of bandwidth you are using now, might cover it completely. Mine will surely not be the only offer of this kind - I expect a lot of folks would be delighted to be associated with Boing Boing.

This site has begun to suck more and more since the discussions have been taken away. No 'community' exists here. It's mostly just shameless self-promotion. I'm won't be contributing to any efforts. BB should take some lessons from Sensible Erection.

The solution is pretty simple: Get your own server. Places like EV1 (which I would have heartily recommended until they paid SCO) offer you root on your very own leased cheap box that you can do anything you want with. It's only $100 a month for 700GB-1Tb of data transfer. Unless you're sharing lots of mp3s or movies, you're not going to get anywhere close to those limits with a blog.

Much as I like Google's ad service, I don't think I'd be willing to use it on Boing Boing, given the ridiculous content restrictions Google places on sites that do GoogleAds.

I just remember Haughey's article on how text ads have helped with http://pvrblog.com, so it *seems* like it might work as one-prong of a multipronged solution (ugh.)

Additional PRONGS might include going to subscribers, but that never seems to work. I'd pay a couple of bucks a month if there were some sort of discussion forum.

I am just rambling, but another possibility might be to develop some sort of bittorrent/cola-ish distributed load solution, so that each click is distributed among a thousand mini-servers. Nothing like that exists, as far as I know.

Getting rid of all the photos would help, but would hurt the appeal of the blog.

Also, finding a white knight to donate bandwidth, or selling the blog to someone but retaining control might work, I suppose. Someone write a letter to Mitch Kapor or someone who reads this thing. Become part of the Gizmodo network!

I am curious what the monthly bill is for the blog. That would help us brainstorm solutions. Is it >$1000 or <$1000 ? What is the projected rate of growth?

Has anyone mentioned Tribalfusion yet?

I used them when I found myself in the same position. Too much traffic and not enough money. Their revenues cover the cost of my traffic at least and provide a bit of extra money for server upkeep

I think that Google ads would be fine. Also look into different webhosts. Perhaps a bandwidth provider (a major one) like AT&T, VW, or Level3 would offer you deep discounted BW with a nice ad. Look at the format the Slashdot uses too.

If you need help contacting one please let me know I have a ton of contacts in this industry. I might be able to help.
-Scott Shinn (shinns1118@yahoo.com)

Fark.com's classified ads are a good idea. Don't know how much they actually help with paying the bills, though. For $10 any user gets an ad put in rotation on the right sidebar of the page. You could drop something like this below, above, or in place of the guest blog.

I know they don't get clicked too often, but I am not personally offended in the least by PayPal donate buttons on blog pages. And I agree with John and Stefan, if Google ads would help keep bb afloat, then I'm all for them.

SuicideGirls would love to advertise on or sponsor in some way BoingBoing, let me know if you guys would consider taking our slightly naughty money.

man, it sucks that the only reason you need to make money is to pay for bandwith. couldn't BitTorrent be used somehow to distribute the load? if not, could someone make bittorrent do that? in the long run, many wonderful sites have folded for this same reason. its about time technology address it in the letter and spirit!

We would host BoingBoing.net at Weblogs, Inc. in exchange for our blogroll on the side. We would also sell the advertising at cost (i.e. just the cost of the commission for the sales people).

That would take away your bandwidth bills, keep the site editorially sound and perhaps even bring in some money.

all the best, jason

I agree with Stefan. How much would Google ads help you? If they were sufficient to keep the site going I can't imagine too many people would be upset by them.

The context-sensitive ads used on Mad Professor are visible but non-obtrusive. Something like that would be cool.