The combination of this site’s low ongoing operating costs, low clickthrough rate of banner ads in general and this site’s small membership base makes this form of revenue unsuitable for this site at the moment, especially when it comes at a cost of cluttering up the site. Our current operating costs are here: LA Times article about what happened to CH
Longer term financial model- we can think about it if/ when the site gets a little bigger. Unlike the early CH days, bandwidth/ storage costs have come down significantly. The site is all DIY with the software open-source and free, so the low operating costs is a strength. To maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio for this site, its very ok for this site to be smaller than CH (but larger than now), so I think the long term operating costs can still be kept quite reasonably.
With that said, since the site is DIY, users will probably have to self-serve amongst themselves more as the site scale if there are questions about how to use the site, features, etc.
One point around reg fee- at this point, I am not too big a fan because it by definition locks some people out. Its kinda like PBS locking people out if they don’t pay, it just doesn’t feel right to be not inclusive…
This reminds me that I should probably write something regularly to everyone on where we are, what we are doing with the site, etc. Have been just focused on site building and user base building…
