General rant about funding

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General rant about funding

Postby joepal » Mon Nov 02, 2015 2:06 pm

I've been researching ways to get some minimal funding for maintaining the community sites. As you may have noticed, none of the makehumancommunity pages have any ads. One of the reasons for this is that makehuman content seem to get instabanned or disqualified for being porn in the eyes of american marketing companies. My guess is they never even visit the site manually, they just let a robot scan the images and look for keywords in the text. It's the curse of hosting content which is too realistic.

Last ad network I got rejected from was media.net, for "not conforming to the ToS". It's a pity, since their ad offering seemed generally unintrusive and discreet.

Before I give up: Is anyone aware of a CPC or CPM (or even CPA) marketing network which a) is feasible from a funding point of view and b) not prone to run around the room screaming upon the mere mention that people are, in fact, naked under their clothes?

Alternatively, does anyone have a decent suggestion on how to get some minimal funding (I'm talking about a hundred euro / month or something) from a website which has 100k+ page views per month?

I didn't even try google adsense, since people have gotten not only their adsense account but also their gmail account and g+ profiles locked for random reasons that cannot be appealed. I already know in advance I'd be breaking the ToS since you're not allowed to have even drawn images of bodies on adsense-sponsored pages (it says explicitly in the ToS).
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Re: General rant about funding

Postby badwolf » Mon Nov 02, 2015 9:58 pm

another problem with ads is

1 folks that (like me) block ads for security reasons
2 folks that will dump a product for hosting ads/ being in an ad


of course you might want to ASK folks that profit from MH to send a cut back to the MH project


other than that maybe do Crowdfund type things to get content/subsystems sorted out??
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Re: General rant about funding

Postby Fred Astair » Tue Nov 03, 2015 2:12 am

Put a "Donate" button in the upper right hand corner of the community (forum) pages. Put it up beside the search box and do not make it sticky (always visible even though you scroll). Make it so that it stays with the search box when we scroll so that it is not "pestering". Make it so that someone who wants to donate from time to time can do so at their convenience and without being pressured to do so and can easily find it without it finding them. Make it large and friendly and simple and green. The people using the search box in this forum are likely the ones using MH. There's no point in putting it on the main page because regular users don't go to the front page of this site except perhaps if they're curious to see if it's changed lately. Most regular users, the ones most likely to appreciate this free program enough to donate when they can, head straight to the forum to see what's up lately and who's talking about what. I'd suggest also putting it on the download page too, in the same non obtrusive way, like upper right hand corner to catch those downloading nightlies if they happen to feel like contributing to support the download they're getting at the time.
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Re: General rant about funding

Postby joepal » Tue Nov 03, 2015 7:35 am

It is not that easy. Formally, the infrastructure is handled by DCAB (see https://www.datacollection.se/en/content/Our-services), which is a commercial entity. Ok, in practice DCAB is actually me, but legally it's a commercial juridical persona. DCAB owns the servers, the domain name and so forth.

The upside is that I can deduct expenses when calculating profit tax, which theoretically means I can cut 30-50% of any cost compared to if I made it as a private person.

The downside is that I cannot accept donations. It's against both PayPal's ToS (which actually says you have to be a registered charity if you put up a donate button, or risk being banned and have all your paypal asset seized), and against the law (which says you have to declare all income, pay VAT and provide recipes and a paper trail, as well as actually giving something back in exchange).

To accept anything looking like donations, it'd have to be something more akin to a sponsorship deal where the returned offering would be to have a name or slogan prominently mention. I guess that's possible, but it's a somewhat larger apparatus than just putting up a donate button.
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Re: General rant about funding

Postby SaltyCowdawg » Tue Nov 03, 2015 8:41 pm

joepal wrote: It's against both PayPal's ToS (which actually says you have to be a registered charity if you put up a donate button, or risk being banned and have all your paypal asset seized), and against the law (which says you have to declare all income, pay VAT and provide recipes and a paper trail, as well as actually giving something back in exchange).


How does Blender Foundation "get away with" accepting donations? They're pretty in-you-face about it too.
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Re: General rant about funding

Postby learning » Wed Nov 04, 2015 1:32 am

joepal wrote:It is not that easy. Formally, the infrastructure is handled by DCAB (see https://www.datacollection.se/en/content/Our-services), which is a commercial entity. Ok, in practice DCAB is actually me, but legally it's a commercial juridical persona. DCAB owns the servers, the domain name and so forth.

The upside is that I can deduct expenses when calculating profit tax, which theoretically means I can cut 30-50% of any cost compared to if I made it as a private person.

The downside is that I cannot accept donations. It's against both PayPal's ToS (which actually says you have to be a registered charity if you put up a donate button, or risk being banned and have all your paypal asset seized), and against the law (which says you have to declare all income, pay VAT and provide recipes and a paper trail, as well as actually giving something back in exchange).

To accept anything looking like donations, it'd have to be something more akin to a sponsorship deal where the returned offering would be to have a name or slogan prominently mention. I guess that's possible, but it's a somewhat larger apparatus than just putting up a donate button.


Why don't you make a donation system in Bitcoins? It would both help with funding and with keeping those pesky government rats from getting their noses into your business. There may be some overhead in terms of converting BTC into your government money, but nothing too complicated and it's certainly easier than a whole sponsorship heist thing.
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Re: General rant about funding

Postby Scorpion451 » Wed Nov 25, 2015 5:06 am

Re-read the donate button thing carefully-
There is a specific way you have to do it, but it is completely acceptable for things like webcomics and open source projects to have a donate button.
The reason for this is that it is not actually a donation: It is a tip jar. You are providing a service, for which people can pay money if they so desire- paypal's invoice system is the paperwork trail, and the service provided is makehuman.

A large number of sites and projects pay for their operations this way- heck, the guy making Dwarf Fortress makes a living wage off donations, and the guy who writes the webcomic Goblins paid for his house this way.
It is completely legal under international law, so long as you go about it properly.

Another option to look at is Patreon, which allows people to pledge a certain amount per month or based on project milestones, with small rewards for patrons. Here, you might let patrons request targets or clothing to be added, and let them vote on one or two a month to get made.
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