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.

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

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!

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

i've never seen a more snarky approach to fundraising

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.

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

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/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 ...

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.)

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.