I am not a big fan of corporate fluffy words. I think most of you are adults and should be treated as such, so, I’ll be straightforward with you: We have to start generating revenue if we are to keep Voat running, open, and free.
Your generous donations have helped keep Voat afloat (and at times brought tears in my eyes) for far too long (looking back, I can’t believe I purchased voat.co domain back in 2014), and both me and @PuttItOut have agreed that asking for donations is not something we want to keep doing; It just doesn’t feel right. Voat was originally a side-project and I think that Voat has turned into something pretty damn amazing. As of March 2016, Voat had a total of 309.960 registered user accounts, over 800.000 unique monthly visitors, 125.281.033 requests, transferred 913 GB of data/month, a total of 918.886 submissions, 9.784.388 submission votes, 4.724.905 comments and 13.574.029 comment votes.
Voat has been mentioned in Wired UK, Business Insider, Time, The Verge, Marketwatch, International Business Times, Ilta-Sanomat, Washington Post, Forbes, The Guardian, Vice Motherboard, Le Monde, The Independent, Venturebeat, Mashable, BBC, Coin Telegraph, The Christian Science Monitor, Fortune, Daily Dot, CNET, Engadget… We have had interview requests from Bloomberg TV, Swiss national TV, BBC and about 30 other, all of which we’ve declined because we had to work hard to bring Voat back online and keep it running. Running and maintaining Voat takes time, a lot of time.
We also received a ton of inquiries from investors, but for what it’s worth, we never accepted any offers as most investors simply didn’t share our vision.
So, what is our ultimate goal and the point of this announcement? We want to be able to work full time on Voat. We love Voat, we love doing what we do and we want to focus all of our energy on Voat. We’ve spent a lot of time writing a new Voat API which will eventually help replace all existing logic and open the door to 3rd party developers to create fully functional mobile applications as well as allow us to implement new & meaningful features. This effort will also help us bring the costs of hosting Voat down, way down, but we don’t think that it will be possible to go lower than 5k/month in operating costs in the near future. We think there is a lot of room for improvement and innovation (we have a bunch of really weird ideas) and we’d love dedicate our attention full time to Voat and this community.
To this end, we will start selling sidebar ad space. Our ad criteria are very strict. Ads cannot have animations, ads cannot embed 3rd party scripts. We will not track ad impressions and we won’t track clicks on the ads. We will offer 2 types of ads: site-wide default ads, and single subverse ads. Demand will dictate the pricing. For more information about advertising on Voat visit https://voat.co/advertize
As a courtesy to everyone who donated, we will allow you to turn-off ads in your user preferences (pending a software update), but of course you are always free to block our ads.
So, what do you guys think? Are we doing the right thing?
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Shagoosty ago
As much as Voat hates ads this is the right move. Voat with an ad in the sidebar is better than no Voat at all.
And maybe give everyone an ad free version for like $7 a month or something.
FeelinFroggy ago
I've been through a couple decently populated forums in my day. Best ones I ever did join were possible through paid subscriptions. I say 'best' because the quality of the community just completely skyrockets once you take it out of the "Free" bin and slap a price sticker on there.
I'm not saying Voat needs to do this, just... food for thought.
boogieman_ ago
I agree. Even a super small subscription, like $1 or $2 for lifetime membership gets rid of a large percentage of shit posts and shit users. It's not about the money, it's just trolls will generally not spend money to be able to troll. I think it was Something Awful that did this back in the day and it made the forum a lot better.
The bad part is, a website/forum/whatever can make more money by being free and using ads.
A bastion of free speech and less circle jerk shit, SJWs etc. is worth not having a "YUGE" site. That said, no one can blame them for wanting to make their passion a full time job, that allows them to make a decent living.
jwk7855 ago
ads is bad.
onezeno ago
I'd pay a subscription for voat, fwiw. Just a small fee, $2 a mo or so. Perhaps voat should be open, but to vote, comment, post, etc you must pay the fee.
FeelinFroggy ago
That's a decent idea.
the-gerbil-in-my-bum ago
the fact that you have to pay though really does force you to hold your tongue abit as getting banned = wasting your money
TremorAcePV ago
There's a balancing act though. A community without activity is dead. Needs to be a balance between high quality paid users and users who create content/activity.
Lower bar to entry = more activity by nature, I think.
reeperpill ago
Can you name some examples? I don't know a single forum with a paid subscription.
Blackmage1024 ago
Metafilter.com is 5 dollars for a username
lucifirius ago
Something Awful is pretty great. Something for everybody there, and only :10bux:
RustlingDay ago
It's great if you like safe spaces, for sure. That place is one of the saddest stories of internet decadence: what started as a mockery of early internet freaks and a haven for pranksters and creative trolling (the site even had a section detailing every legal threat that people had sent them over the years) eventually turned into the place to be for the easily offended and cause-of-the-day slacktivists. Everyone there has to walk on eggshells, prefacing everything they say with a "to be fair" or a "in my humble opinion" in an effort to be as unassertive as possible.
When you have mods banning people for stupid reasons and asking them to pay real money for the privilege of being able of getting banned again, eventually you are left with sycophants and users with little self-respect, or just afraid of speaking their minds. And the ill placed feeling of elitism that they get for posting in a paid forum makes the users with the "right" opinions even more intolerably smug.
LimaTangoNovember ago
Not exactly voat or reddit but le metropole was a paid site that had great info, with quality users who have a great deal to contribute.
pyres ago
metafilter.com
if you want to post.
the well
are a couple off the top of my head.
FeelinFroggy ago
SA's forums were the place to be for a good, long while. There was another that was an art / graphic arts and modelling (with a touch of programming) one, the name escapes me. A few vBulletin, specialized forums as well. I think three in total, with SomethingAwful being the prime example of how the quality of the forum's content skyrockets once it switches over to a paid subscription model.