I will white-list the site if you run non-intrusive ads on the sidebars.

Like a couple of other people said - I wouldn't mind disabling my AdBlock for Voat, as long as it's not some videos with ads that would freeze my laptop for hours. If you set up the bank account so that we can donate through PayPal I will also gladly do that.

It's too bad there's no real way if decentralising entire websites (if there is, let me know) I might not be able to donate money, but I'd gladly donate bandwidth.

Is this what the 111 days thing is about? Is there an update on this thread?

Also, you the voat guys have any financial background? or good with finances? idk just asking cause if not, it would be good to find someone trustworthy to fit the duty

Its looking like it may end up being some type of donation system, like if everyone who loves the site would chip in a few dollars then maybe

Either your fedora is too tight, or you're just being absurdly wrong on purpose.

Yes: Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, and it's alternative, cash, is an actual currency.

Have a page where users can voluntarily click through and watch various advertisements. Add a section for Contribution Points in the user profile page, similar to Submission Contribution Points: Comment Contribution Points:, for Voat.co Financial Contribution Points. There can be trophies and other incentives for users to click through ads. If a user consistently earns Financial Contribution Points, a little icon can be displayed next to their user name when they post, so other users know which users are helping to keep the site running.

To take it a step farther, these Financial Contribution Points can be used to earn, or buy, downvoats. Users will have a "stash" of downvoats they can dish out; Each downvoat you dish out, one will be subtracted from your stash. Once your stash of downvoats is up, you would have to earn more in order to downvoat posts. You earn more by watching a few ads. This creates an incentive for users to watch ads and help support the site. Upvoats are free :)

I'd be ok with ads, or donating a couple of bucks.

That being said, I'm an IT Infrastructure Manager, so I'm coming from this from a technical standpoint. Could you host this site in house and have a significantly smaller bill? Not sure about the amount of infrastructure you have to run things, but that might be something worth taking a look at.

I'd be happy to offer technical expertise as well if need be, as I've built up infrastructure for large website's before.

Nice! Got a spot on the leader board. I'd like to move my position up, how is that done? I'm way more of a faggot keyboard warrior than any of those other casual faggots.

Why is voat bothering with it's own merchant account to sell stuff? Why is hosting costing so much? Seems like you are being ripped off. From the looks of it Voat is going to die due to mismanagement.

Create some kind of premium membership where you can give and receive actual money donations for the content or insight you provide. You take a 1% cut off all transactions.

Say I post my guitar tutorial channel and people dig it they can donate to me through you guys.

It incentifies quality content and gives people a new way to make money sharing.

Maybe something like $5 a month or something small like that. Voat merchandise would be kinda cool. Easy stuff like shirts, coasters, and small things like that.

From my understanding you are students from Zurich, why would you register an American company then and not one in Switzerland?

Patreon style crowdfunding perhaps? I know many of us would be willing to donate to keep this site alive ongoing.

Voat is now a registered Delaware company and me and PuttitOut are the sole owners.

A company needs to have a working financial concept to survive, see Twitter.

Because bitcoin is a joke.

i would love to see what free market ads look like ^^

even thou i already know it will be a bunch of young porn \0/

That's a non issue for two reasons. Even when paying taxes 'fairly', for corporations taxes are on net income. Imagine you only got taxed on what you had left at the end of the month after you paid for food, rent, insurance, etc. That's the deal corporations in America get. Beyond that Atko incorporated in Delaware which is a domestic tax haven. They have a well known legal exploit that allows corporations to pay minimal to no income tax. It's the reason the vast majority of, for example, fortune 500 companies are incorporated in the state.

Hey email me. I'm willing to invest in your platform.

Something like a premium service that is 100% beyond arbitrary.

Want a star by your name? - 1 USD. Why? Because you have a mother fucking star next to your name. What's it mean? You spent a buck. You are amazing you glorious bastard!

Want a smile by your name? 1.50? Why? Because I made it that much, that's why...

I don't know. I'm just thinking. Would people pay for customized account/id flair? I feel like this idea (Let's face it, I'm trying to apply Micro transactions to Voat... So that this would be the "MicroTransaction Subverse... Universe.) needs to consist of one time purchases.

I fear that too much of the "Renew monthly" platform becomes another form of a /r/ circlejerk. But say I screwed up my post title and want to resubmit. It says "Please wait 60 seconds (whatever) before trying again. Or click "HERE" to resubmit now for a .20/cent donation.) Could this open you up to spam posting? MAYBE but they would have to be some well off (Or well connected with the Darknet) spammers.

Have I rambled on long enough yet? (Or used enough brackets?) (Because I could do both, more...)

edit: How do you keep people paying who just bought lifetime flair? You come out with new flair images every once in a while. People like change.. They also like spending change, to get change.

Give me an easy way to donate where I'm not giving my cc # to some shady bitcoin site and I'll drop some coin. I'm sure many others share that same mentality. Figure out and implement whatever Wikipedia did to be able to receive donations through people's Amazon accounts.

Why not start running small amounts of ads but create a pay-wall for ad free? I and many others would gladly support a couple bucks a month without even batting an eye...but you have to make it an easy adder to something they are already purchasing. i.e. selling merch shouldn't be overlooked. This is partly because if you create the account to purchase merch you can make it easy for users to donate or purchase other services from you. There are companies that can handle merch logistics from a-z, so it can be relatively painless.

Voat really needs to lower it's costs.

I have been wondering, is there a reason for why bitpay is used for donations? As far as I could see it would remove the "difficulty" of using bitcoin, please correct me if I am wrong.

At a certain point native advertisement is going to come to voat. I think it would be better if we created a subverse where companies could pay to advertise themselves openly, and provide users with some sort of discount or coupon. companies could pay a fat advertisement fee or some sort of per click schedule.

Please not T-shirts. I don't wear them.

Non-intrusive ads would be great. Actually non-intrusive. I'm getting fed up of sites that ask me to turn off ad-block and promise their adverts and nice and then I get to see obscene Taboola clickbait.

Bruh, I'm the one who's requesting /v/vaporwave.

Also, that one specific phrase is part of a somewhat long inside joke on IRC.

@Atko if you go the ad route put a limit on the percent of ad revenue one person, company, or industry can buy. This prevent one company, industry, or person from influencing you financially.

Example 1: If Voat allowed Pharmaceutical ads that made up 70% of revenue, then one day the industry might decided they don't like Voat posting new articles critical of pharma drugs, so they say were going to stop advertising on Voat unless you start censoring your content.

Example 2: Domino's Pizza buy 50% of all the advertising on your site, your dependent on them for revenue, but then one day they say we don't like that Voat has a conspiracy, sub remove it or will stop advertising.

Example 3: Advertising company you rely on provides 63% of your ads, but then they say they want you to censor content about Muslim crime, or else they stop advertising. Which leave you in a bind.

If you limit the amount of ads one industry/person/company can buy to say 5 to 10% they won't be able to "twist your arm" into censorship.

A Voat Goat plushie/t-shirt would be adorable...maybe if you donate a certain amount or something? Non-intrusive ads are really great too.

USD$15,000/mo is a pretty high "Hosting" cost tbh, this site doesn't drive 1,000,000,000 daily visits, it's not an Alexa Top 10 ; there's no reason to need that many server(s) or extra service(s) unless the codebase is poorly optimized.

I run an Alexa 2.5m site for work, and we push 2,000,000 daily unique visitors on less than USD$1,400/mo worth of Amazon services. The site's content is entirely dynamic; and very close in format to voat (we use Teliscope, and MeteorJS ; a live data platform that uses much more bandwidth and CPU (server-side rendered) than a static platform (client side rendered) like Voat.))

• We take full advantage of CloudSearch / ElastiSearch for our service(s).
• We take full advantage of Amazon CloudFront to serve S3 through the CDN.
• We take full advantage of Glacier to store cold backups, and S3-RR for tmp-data.
• We don't have many forward facing (public) IP addresses, almost all bandwidth is internal.

All that being said, I hope Voat doesn't go anywhere, and you guys figure out some more ways to optimize. I heard the codebase was Open Source, so I'll be having a look at exactly what is unoptimized, and will feed back there (be it GitHub Issues or otherwise.)

Thanks for all your good work!

I'd be happy to do a yearly or possibly monthly subscription.

Yall trust bitcoin to hold up n stuff still? Looked real promising at first but now idk whats going on with it or where its goinig and they talk about it being regulated soon. Was thinking about getting into it but it seemed like it was a waste of time mining bitcoins because it takes so long?

Idk Im trying to still wrap my head around it all

Idk if the voat team is just atko and putitout but it would help if u split people into separate teams in different categorys ie. marketing, merch, content creators,average voat person, etc. That way ideas are organized.

I see this thread has 432 comments and thats gonna be a bit to read O_o and there were good ideas I saw in here when u first posted but I guess we're assuming everything is gonna be voated to the top too.

sell shares and make it community owned :)

How about bank transfers? I don't have paypal, nor bitcoing and would just like to donate money trhough a bank transfer. You could also establish some sort of possibility to pay a monthly fee for voat, which would allow some bonuses for those users who do.

Create a fresh bank account, link it to a bullshit LLC that the owners can create in any state, call it Vandalay Enterprises or something vague, and have Voat pay that company for "content aggregation" or something like that. Tons of large companies do things like this to get around liabilities and red tape. If you want to bullshit with the big dogs, you can play right along with them. When Paypal catches on 6 months to a year down the line. Close out the LLC, rinse, lather, repeat.

I'd happily pay $1-2 per month to be able to voat, comment and save posts. It would also help with spam.

@Atko, don't know if you're going to read this, but here it goes:

• NOW THIS IS KIND of an odd idea tbh. I seriously propose that Voat has their own subreddit with a crowd fund that will help fund a bitcoin mining machine. Yes, you heard me. We could donate to Atko/PutItOut so they can build a bitcoin mining enterprise. It would be the best thing so they can be self-sufficient. The subreddit will have biweekly updates on the number of videocards, the amount it costs to run, problems, etc. (Kind of like an odd video game). P.S. I don't mean something in grandma's basement. I mean literally a warehouse (small one to start) solely used for bitcoin mining. It's been done before. There's a guy that makes 8$M in bitcoins a month. We could also finance solar panels, etc. We could also help with choosing which are the best AMD cards for mining (Temperature, price, etc.) and whatnot.

• Voat Goat for comments (same as Reddit Gold really tbh, I know we're copying but admittedly it works pretty well)

• ad space in subverses that allow it as well as ad space in default subverses

• volunteer subscription fee to become "VIP" which will remove all ads from the website and give us a badge (if we keep it for more than 6 months)

• donate button that shows the amount donated (or not) - possible elitism that comes out of it though but that might actually help the website survive. The donation will show how many Voat Goats you gifted, if you're VIP, and a special rank depending on how much you donated in total. The rank takes into account subscription and Voat Goats. EX: (0, 10) = Citizen Goat, [10, 20) = Patriot, etc, etc. VIPs are allowed to have next to their username an pre-established icon of their choice on any subverse on the website (country's flag, a goat face, etc.)

• Simple Voat merchandise (not clothes): Magnets, laptop stickers, BIG (like 16 oz) ceramic mugs with the voat goat on it, etc. Clothes work but let's face it, I'm not going to buy it and I don't know many that will. I'd totally buy little simple stupid things like laptop stickers, cool Voat posters (community contest for the design anyone?), etc.

P.S. We should have merchandise with this.

• Point 1

I agree with the others on allowing ads. As long as you don't go down the slippery slope of picking and choosing which content is appropriate you can simply say "We are just a platform that endorses no opinion but supports free speech much like the Internet and the United States at large. We don't stand behind opinions of voat subs or users we only provide a platform for open dialogue"

I think this puts advertisers in a place where they aren't forced to have to justify their decision to support the website. This is the same reason bittorrent is still around because it's just platform. This worked for reddit for a long time until they started filtering some legal content and at that point they became responsible for all content that was not removed sending them down a never ending path of "why is X removed but not Y?" as there will ALWAYS be someone offended by something once you go down that path.

I think there are advertisers that are willing to buck the safe space nonsense and advertise here.

• Point 2

Something I have brought up in the past with reddit is many times publishers will write a clickbait title and do a poor job of writing an article, load the page up with ads, and then way for people on reddit to drive piles of traffic their way and corrections and useful information ends up being in the comments rather than the publisher webpage which is often time some shitty block rather than the direct source. This seems like an unfair division of labor since social media users are doing a lot of the actual work and the blog writer is collecting the lions share of the ad revenue.

One method to get around this is to create a monetized publishing platform where people can create page layouts and attach images, monetize the article, and then submit the entry to reddit or voat rather than just filling out a text box. It gives people who curate and submit a lot of content a way to make money for the website through ad revenue on the article and maybe a way for the website to share back some revenue with those users as a reward if their content brings in a lot of revenue.

I was thinking about blogging on some topics I am into but I haven't decided on a platform to host it. I don't want to be a paid writer for someone but it would be cool if I could publish articles a month and get like 20% of whatever ad revenue my articles bring in. I would be doing it more to inform and educate than to make money but doing buzzfeed style "Top 25 reasons dogs are better than cats" type of articles would be really easy to create on such a platform.

Most articles that get written are done by professional writers that need to make money but as a hobbyist writing about things I am interested anyway it doesn't matter to me if I write a few articles a month and only make $20 a month. Sometimes sitting down to explain things in a blog post is easier than explaining concepts to multiple people individually on forums anyway.

It would be like an imgur for articles and some of the popular authors could probably bring in $1,000/month (or probably more) in ad revenue.

Just throw some ads in. You guys deserve it.

i'd have no issues disabling adblock on this site as i have done now, and see a few ads, wouldn't be an issue providing they are not pop ups or invasive, sidebar would be a non issue

Hey @Atko,

I don't have the time to read through all the comments so I am not sure if this was said or not. But what would really be nice once you get that merchant account in place is a subscription option. Have a recurring payment that the user decides from a drop down or something (3,5,10,20,25,50,etc,etc). This way, people can "subscribe" to the site by donating monthly without having to remember to do so.

For busy people like myself, this would be awesome.

Edit: make the default $5, a little over 1000 people subscribing at that number will cover most costs.

Can we do a 3 dollar monthly thing happen? I'll happily pay that amount.

I see you are well trained in the art of rap.

Don't you miss the days when an ad showed a beautiful mountain view with a guy riding a bike instead of a disruptive add with a boring picture of a bike.

Sell me a subscription using Amazon payments.

Can we get a paypal donation page?

Well, maybe a badge, but no special powers.

I would be more than happy to cancel my TotalFark subscription and move that payment to this site. I agree with the ad free subscription idea and really think it's worth following up on.

-> #5 voatcams.

@atko pay $.50 to never see posts from this user again! [button]

If the SQL license expires soon, it is imperative to get that postgres up so that cost can be mitigated.

I don't mind non-intrusive advertising, especially text ads. I always loved text ads.

Wow! I had no idea it cost this much! @atko I would be willing to pay a subscription fee. I know that's a double edge sword. Depending on how many hundreds of thousands of users you have, 99 cents a username per year is pretty fair I think. It would also add a sense of legitimacy to this site. People who are flocking just to troll probably wouldn't take the time to signup and pay 99 cents. However, people who have been here for a while, and those who want to produce quality content would. This would also take away the advertisement trap of controlling content to met advertising demands. This way it truly is users who control it.

Edit: I would pay more than 99 cents BTW, I would probably pay $25 a year honestly. But you would need to do a cost model to figure out pricing points and at what point you are just shooting yourself in the foot.

Thanks!

I would sell my soul for goat plushies.

My idea was 'paid' subscriptions. They would be free for a year but then you had to pay to renew it. You could always just grab another free subscription if you had too, but could keep your user name by paying for it.

Do you have any tips on where to start? I know you can generate your own bitcoins, but not many at a time unless you have very powerful hardware. If you want to buy them, you either have to put up with the red tape or buy them person-to-person, and finding someone you trust that's into bitcoin can be a stumbling block as well.

That's true, and I wonder how many people have bitcoin set up from the early days before the regulations came down, and just don't realize what's changed. I only tried two, but both places wanted my photo ID and access to my banking account.

Voat's implementation could be completely anonymous, just sending a PM to the user without visually distinguishing their comment in any way. It would flip Reddit's "look at me" culture on its head by motivating people with the good feeling you get by supporting charity and Voat at the same time, even if you don't get a special badge indicating your action.

Please don't go ad supported. I'll gladly pay a few dollars a month to keep Voat going.

@atko @puttitout I was thinking this the other day. The biggest thing will be to street away from reddits trap they got into that regular people may want to re-create (as that's what's defined Reddit in the end).

Idea board:

Create a zeen/repost of top articles in a cheap ass news print that people can subscribe to. Even if it's just sending a post card for $9.99 a month in the beginning. You can figure it out and order per-country shitty post cards to be sent. I will do that as long as it isn't linked via direct account.

Allow paypal donations? Edit: create shitty voat store called notvoat.co for downloading digital goods like shitty drawn horses

Use the /v/anontalk idea @fuzzywords_undeleted created for doxxing to make a secrete Santa shitty post//donation store? Almost like gambling a delivery system @ some user name post pic/idea to thread /v/idonatedagift (pings user anonymously and posts what ever they decide). So $2.99 a discussion, $3.99 a picture.

Create an idea board subverse for raising money. I'm sure you will get some crazy good ideas there.

How about a polo shirt with a goat silhouette instead of the polo logo?

I donated through PayPal before they froze Voat's account, then tried to setup a bitcoin account to donate. The difference was like night and day. I tried Coinbase and one other competitor (maybe Circle?) and both wanted more information than I was comfortable providing. Linking directly to my existing bank account, uploading a scan of my photo ID or license. I understand it's all information they're required to obtain for regulatory reasons, but it's definitely not as simple as it gets, especially when other payment methods are as simple as keying in a credit card number.

I'd like to suggest avoiding inline ads, "intrusive" or not.

Advertising is inherently intrusive, and it's also a fickle business at the moment. There are many factors involved in setting this up, all of which open you up to potential problems. At a certain point you have to ask if the overhead is worthwhile.

One thing people forget is that ad networks are a security risk. Additionally, the proliferation of scripts that support them slows down websites and ruins the user experience. Finally, I'd expect that your userbase isn't a terrific target and won't be generating much cashflow for clickthroughs because we're not a bunch of retards.

I'd like to suggest PAID ACCOUNTS. But make it totally optional - and offer no additional features.

First of all - you have to decouple the payment process from the account, of course, as has been discussed prior. Someone makes a payment and selects the account they want to pay for and throw the records out.

Next, these accounts would be indicated in some way - a simple different color for the poster name would be fine. Offer these users absolutely nothing else. Naturally this would create a tiered user status, where inevitably people will consider "paid users" as more serious than random accounts, which may more easily be shown as trolls and sockpuppets.

Paid users should cost like $80/year, and be paid annually with no saved payment data so it has to be manually renewed. Keep a visible, running list somewhere showing all paid accounts and the date they paid, to guard against a data loss on that.

Finally, no fucking warranty. Pay your money, consider it a donation to Voat.co, and you get a pretty color on your username. If you lose your password or your user account goes to shit, tough luck. Non-transerrable.

The key is that you're offering NOTHING of substance. This way you have no expectation for delivery, no power users with any actual powers. It's glorified donations, and there are a few hundred of us that would probably sign up immediately.

The annual payments generate a large cash-flow, to be supplemented by random donations you'll accept for smaller amounts (no payment plans, no customer service - if you want a "paid" account you pay up front in full). Additionally you need to sell awesome shirts and coffee cups and such mersh - the design is key and as others have stated it should be understated. I'm picturing a cup with a darker shade of your default blue and a gray, faded out goat head. Rip-off the Lasko Pivo logo, man! PBS has done well for decades by throwing in a merch item for annual donations - if you need to reward paid users do it this way. I'll totally buy an $80 voat coffee cup.

I also really like the idea of letting people pay $10 to have a special sidebar post for a period of time. This would be hilarious, even if it was just a running banner saying "Nigger" for days on end. They're paying the bills, it's not integrated into the main post-flow, and we can have a designated /v for making fun of them, appreciating it, etc. I suspect you'll find far more serious posters who want to be heard than trolls if it costs money.

Are there a thousand people willing to pay you $80/per account to keep this site running? There just might be.

The medium is the message, and you've shown that you understand this well. Keep it that way - a site with no google analytics, no fucking ads, no special status for people with money. A lightweight site with no heavy scripts and no advertising business plan makes a statement and is a better place to spend one's time.

@Atko and @PuttitOut

Here are some ideas, some of these are going to be repeats of the other suggestions here.

Cutting Costs

1. Own your infrastructure, create core technologies. Rewrite your applications in low-level languages (Yes, C - C++ level shit). If you can squeeze performance out of your servers, you'll need fewer servers to support voat.
2. Identify how costs grow w.r.t number of users. A service that costs you $x per page view is more expensive than a service that costs you $x per session. Cheapest is to be able to pay for a server instance. I recommend AWS

Revenue sources

1. User subscription model. Similar to wikipedia I suppose. I would be willing to pay $2 a month for keeping voat free. Some of us here are also able to do the same. Set up a survey monkey questionnaire and figure out how many users are prepared to contribute monthly and see what portion of your costs this will cover.
2. Voat market place - Add a way for subverses to sell wares and charge a commission. If Cocacola can make a sale from Voat, ask for a commission. (Note: Please, I beg you, do not just let these subverses flood our front page)
3. Voat education. I don't mind spending 2 hrs a week teaching someone programming and charging 5$ for it if you can claim a 2$ cut from it. Seriously, if users can buy/sell to each other using voat APIs, there's a ton of money to be made. However, please find a way to ensure financial interests of users don't kill the community.
4. Let me buy voat merchandize to gift users who make a valuable contribution. Reddit gold is useless. I would rather pay $15 more and have a voat mug shipped to a commenter who made a valuable contribution. Let this be marked - x voat credits earned. etc

If you have further questions, please shoot me a PM. I'm happy to support you guys in any way I can.

Edit: Can you talk to CrunchyRoll and Pornhub and see if a voat-gold like service can be redeemed for points there. They take a cut, you take a cut, users are happy both gifting and receiving. Everyone wins

because it's not?

I have no problem with non-intrusive ads. Also, Voat merchandise would be awesome.

Unless they linked to phishing sites, but those would (hopefully) be rejected.

I'm ready to make annual donations

Id donate a ton if there was a real block user option

Just as long as it isn't required. I think ads for free users and a subscription to get rid of ads is a decent compromise.

One of the largest websites on the net, Wikipedia, manages to get all it needs and more with quarterly donation drives. I feel confident that this would work for Voat. The users here have a vested interest in seeing it thrive. Ask, and they will give.

Don't complicate it with merchandise or "premium" accounts or other shit like that. Not necessary. Tell us what you need and keep up the transparency. Asking will work.

Goat + Trump tshirts

http://www.billygoattavern.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Goat_Trump.jpg

Voat gold, and add ads. Just code in a reminder to remind us ad blocking folks to add to whitelist.

Create voat.ad it would be voat.co full of ads. Kinda puts the whole adblocker debate into perspective.

Maybe we can start that partnership thing, eh atko? I would love to drive up activity with some new, spooky & spicy memes.

This is why we can't have nice things.

I think many users like me have a hard time contributing financially to Voat be it due to financial situation, difficulty with payment methods or even ideological issues against donating money or already donating to other institutions (maybe more honorable than a website, even if I love Voat!).

So my question would be - how can we help you in other ways than financially? You have a lot of willing manpower at your disposal if you ask for help - anything we can do to reduce operational costs, for example? Something that could be easily developed in Javascript, Python or whatever that you could easily adopt later on (especially after the new API comes out)? Anything in special that could be contributed to the core C# code? Is there someone we can as a large group come into contact with that could help us in any way?

I have contributed thousands of dollars in development time to open-source projects that I could not contribute financially to. Let me know if I can do anything that isn't C# since I don't have Windows installed and am a total noob with .NET programming.

You made it very clear that you need financial help but it's just not possible for a lot of us to help for different reasons. As the phrase goes time is money though and you are only 2 people running a big-ass website with huge operational costs. Let us know if there is anything we can help you with so that maybe you can focus on more important things with your own time.

If I was in a position to donate, which is not gonna happen soon I'd love to contribute with a monthly fee through an in-site method, PayPal or Patreon - even though I think none of these would be trivial for me to use since I don't have an international credit card and am not based on the US.

there is also an option to migrate to another hosting provider

I think this is a necessity, unless you can greatly improve performance (and thus lower costs). I did a little math and it seems like every person who upvoated this post so far would have to contribute with ~60 dollars a month for you to close out even at the end of each month. That is a lot of good will right there, even more if you're depending on every single upvoater here to set up a subscription and pay for it for years on end.

I don't think it would be wise to let go of CloudFare though - without it Voat could as well been dead already! Chances are it will come in handy again.

Thanks for the best platform for discussion (and many other things) the Internet has to offer! Voat is in many ways the pinnacle of technological evolution up to this point - you're doing the good work and I wish us all the best of luck :)

Sounds like Voat is gonna need to get some gibs. Someone gib Voat gibs! There are many avenues to get gibs and Robotussin McGibbs only takes gibs but would consider gibbing some gibs to maintain this platform.

I'd be fine paying a few bucks a month, I'm sure others would too.

I would do a subscription. Is there a way to invest in voat? Buy a piece of the pie so to speak? User owned website type thing where you get shares? I dunno, it might be cool. Or not.

I'M IN DELAWARE! :D

Hate to make this a circlejerk here, but I would just like to say thank you @Atko and @PuttitOut for all your hard work here. Without you guys none of us would be here.

Can't wait to see what the future holds.

I don't care about voat's financial status. You are letting it turn into reddit. It will be dead within a year.

My opinion on ads is this (as alot of people are all for this idea) unless you're rock solid about advertising, Voat may end up just like that other place. The other place was all well and good until profits and ads got mixed in. Now it's just an ad farm, a business looking to make a profit and screw anyone who gets in the way of the bottom line.

I would honestly pay a monthly donation subscription to Voat just for a little badge next to my name that says I am a monthly donor, I don't need more than that.

I would honestly pay for no benefits, just to keep the site going. That's enough for me.

You can watch bitcoin donations here: https://blockchain.info/address/1BFqer7P9qqqiirbC63KqxfuZYXxk6RrBZ

I know it wouldn't be popular. I know it would be difficult, but have you considered forming a corporation of some form? I would love the opportunity to purchase a share of ownership. Especially if we did start having ads, the opportunity to share in potential profits and having a true investment would get me 100%. It also would allow people to have a reason to purchase and also to perhaps purchase at a larger percentage or amount. As an investor you may never make a dime, but you might.

Voat Gold FFS!

How many times are you going to post this comment?

Hi Atti and Putt,

Here's my quick analysis, feel free to expand Voaters:

COMMERCIALIZATION VIABILITY

The demand for the service Voat, Inc. provides rests upon its commitment to free speech and community control; not its financial independence from commercial interests.

As long as Voat is completely transparent about its revenue, commercialization to a certain extent won't hurt Voat's credibility.

It's imperative to separate the hidden financial interests in similar services from transparent ones. Surely, quiet money is good money in the short run, but we should definitely be able to monetize Voat to an extent of $15,000/mo. without sacrificing transparency.

COMMERCIALIZATION OPTIONS

Voat has three overall revenue stream options:

A: Directly from users

B: From advertisers who pay to expose users to advertising messages.

C: Political or corporate sponsorships

Let's explore option A first:

OPTION A: DIRECT REVENUE FROM USERS

We can imagine a few models here:

• A1: Subscriptions
• A2: Freemium payments
• A3: Donations

A1 will severely restrict intake to Voat and it's a killer move, to be honest.

A2 can work in some forms, like Reddit Gold did to an extent - pay more, get more. Gold as a super-upvoat is a bit dishonest, but hey; it pays the servers.

A3 is interesting on its own, but only on a project-by-project basis. We could very well do donation drives (give users badges and flairs in return!), but they work best if targeted towards a goal.

In summary, a sort of freemium model could be implemented as a steady income stream. On top of this, donation drives towards specific goals could be held in exchange for symbolic tokens like badges.

However, as great as it would be, my qualified hypothesis is we can't keep Voat running ourselves. Not directly, at least.

OPTION B: ADVERTISING

This breaks down into:

• B1: Digital displays (banner ads etc.)
• B2: Native advertising (sponsored AMAs, stealth commercial user accounts etc.)
• B3: Premium placement ads (every 10th link is a marked sponsored ad)
• B4: Sale of user data for further targeting

B1 could be a steady revenue stream, while probably not enough to sustain Voat on its own (click-throughs would be bad and media space would not come at a premium due to the non-PC nature of Voat and the weak demand outside larger economies for niche media space.

Reddit successfully uses B2, but it would kill Voat at this stage - as it should, btw.

B3 would disrupt Voat as well, but I'm not sure about how it could be done. It would have to be clearly marked links - just one erroneous click by a user would lead to instant animosity towards Voat.

B4 would be an insta-kill to Voat as well with limited financial upside. Reddit has the size and VC payback demands - see the new privacy policy - but for Voat, it would pose a great risk for little reward.

In summary: Digital displays could bring a supporting source of steady income, but probably not enough to reach a sustainable financial model for Voat on its own.

OPTION C: POLITICAL OR CORPORATE SPONSORSHIPS

This option would require a political, ideological or corporate entity to agree to cover Voat's running costs up to and even beyond break-even.

Option C is very muddy, as it relies on some ideologically independent sponsor, who is willing to foot the bill without getting equity in exchange. The second equity is given en bloc is the second Voat loses its core value - an honest, free place to meet.

I don't see a viable road here, but please - if someone is more creative than me, speak up.

REVENUE MODEL

As cold as it sounds, Voat needs to deploy several tactics at once:

• A2 (Freemium) + B1 (Digital display) should both be used to generate steady income to cover maintenance.
• A3 (Donations) should be used for one-offs or major improvement projects or even as pay-outs to you guys.

FINAL THOUGHT: LET'S OWN THIS TOGETHER

You could, all things going well, decide to 'go public' with Voat over the course of several months. You could offer up 49% of the equity in Voat for the users, but sell it in increments to keep prices sufficiently high. I'd easily value Voat's equity at a couple million at this point, provided I had full commitment from you founders.

It's worth thinking about, too. The dispersed ownership might give Voat financial ballast while providing a unique position for the site in the market - I mean, how great is that?

These are things to consider. Reach out if you want any elaborations.

/Scandinavian

If you're a MS shop have you looked into Microsoft's Bizspark program?

I'd think they would jump at the chance to get what has the potential to be a huge user community advertised as being hosted on Azure.

Hats, bumper stickers, Coffee Mugs, t-shirts and baseball bats (for those fighting refugees) with the voat logo.

Yeah couchbase includes the entire dataset in memcache and eventually persists to disk.

Memcache is a great tool for caching in general, not sure if it's an option on microsoft systems though.

@Atko, what do you think of this suggestion for monetizing Voat? Basically users are able to select a favorite charity on their profile page, and other users can "tip" their helpful/insightful comments to benefit that charity, with the understanding that the money tipped is shared 50% with Voat and 50% with the charity (or 100% with Voat if the tipped user doesn't have a charity selected).

Tipped comments wouldn't need any kind of visual indicator, just a PM sent to the tipped user to let them know a donation has been made to their chosen charity as well as used to support Voat directly. It would be good PR for Voat to be a constant source of charity support, it would provide a funding option for Voat in a way that doesn't mess with comment rankings, and people could feel good about supporting their favorite charities through Voat.

The only caveat would be that you'd have to somehow vet charities to avoid paying money to "ChillyHellion's gaming fund" or similar setups, but I know Amazon's Smile program already has some kind of system set up (a portion of your purchases on Amazon go to your own selected charity). It might be possible for Voat to mimic this kind of setup in its own way using publicly available charity information.

I'm willing to fund this site however you choose. As long as free speech is protected, I will support it.

Ask Protein World to advertise here. I'm sure they like us.

I will definitely buy voat goodies once they become available.

This makes me think of something done back in school....it was like a bake sale or something.

We should have VoatCoin, with a 1% exchange fee back to Bitcoins or currency to fund Voat

Most voaters seem to welcome non-intrusive ads. I will gladly turn off my ublock for you guys :)

hm...theres that too... :/ still theres other ways than ads tho.

You could sell Voat brand merchandise with pics of little Goatie (does the goat have a real name)? I'd kill for a 'im checking your bits' hoodie.

There are companies that make small as order batches so you wouldnt need to pay for all the merch up front.

You can put non-instrusive ads (pllllz make sure they arent shady malintent ads) Theres many other ways to cover cost without ads tho even if people hate non intrusive ads.

Have people help you with: merch, sites, code, finances.

Theres a whole ton of people here good and different stuff atko. No matter how big or small if we all combine our efforts and have a plan directed by you we'll be goaten (golden) :p

edit: btw I pm'd u atko about goat.video

I would gladly toss Voat 100 bucks a year if there was also some incentive, like no CCP restriction for downvoats, or 25 subverses that I could mod, or 5 alt's can I can create from the same IP address.

I'm not in favour of an ad model. While it would generate revenue, it would also change the fundamental character of the site. If it comes to it, so be it - I'd unblock for voat, but I really hope not.

I think a reliable way to donate, particularly subscriptions is the key. Steady and predicable stream of revenue is necessary so that you're not worrying from month to month whether you'll make rent. Paypal clearly didn't work out so well. Patron is having great success in the podcasting world, I'd say give it a try. They do take a cut, but it's a reasonably trusted platform that would take the payment burden off you so you could focus on the real work.

Sadly, you'd probably have to go "Jimmy Wales" on us once in a while, shilling for money, but I think you'll be surprised how many users would pony up to keep the site funded and unsullied by an ad model.

so $0,10/month per user? I''m in.

Not long ago twit.tv started asking for donations to buy everything to start a new streaming TV station. Contact them and see how they did it. I for one would donate money and yes to non-intrusive sidebar ads.

Could you start up a funding page on something like patreon that would allow us to basically subscribe to Voat? If you did something like this soon, you could see how well it worked before your current funds ran out and figure out if this would be viable before falling to the side-bar ad alternative. The numbers they have up look promising, as you would (hopefully) get a decent sized batch of us willing to sign up so that this place doesn't need to make any changes to suit the tastes of advertisers.

Whatever happened to the warrant canary?

I'd pitch in to keep voat up, but there needs to be an easy and a straight forward way to do this

Give people flair next to their name if they contribute on a monthly basis. Have different levels, 5/20/100 per month billy goat/mountain goat/ etc

I think running this site with only donations is little problematic. Is the active user base who donates big enough to cover the expenses? I don't think I'm prepared to donate more than max $12/year for this site and there are probably many who don't want to donate at all. I think you should consider ads.

I've tried to donate before, but gotten confused as to how to do it. What I'd like is a big 'DONATE' button at the side, that takes you to a page where it explains clearly how I can send you money. It shouldn't assume I have a bitcoin account, and if I need one to donate, a link to a trustworthy page where I can make one would be useful.

I prefer not to see ads, but I don't mind paying for valuable stuff online. And I value Voat, so please let me give you money!

So a diversified suite of recurring revenue products and services is probably the best bet. Some people would like to donate, some would like to buy shirts and merch, some would like to tip others. However, each of these things will take developer, project management, and testing/QA time. So my suggestion would be this. If @atko and @puttitout are ok with it, create a list of paths. each path would be one of the items I listed above, and some I no doubt missed. For the next couple of months, let people donate money to whichever path they wish to use/see put into effect. The money can be used to hire developers to build that functionality. Enough people donate, it gets built. Not enough people donate, it hibernates till someone gets annoyed, and wants it built. Function Bounties. My $.02. Hope you don't mind.

Let /v/letsdraw and other artistic subs come up with a rad design for you to use if you do decide to sell merch.

Thread here: https://voat.co/v/letsdraw/comments/815426

a highly visible donate button. my favorite private torrent tracking site has been surviving for over a decade that way.

Like something tshirt worthy? Cant wait

Is there a way to make a regular, scheduled donation? I'd be up for it.

The way I see it, Ads by Sub-verse is about the only way this can work long term.

1. Donations - Sure, donations can bring some revenue, but it is not consistent, and is pretty much totally dependent on the community. Only a fraction will donate, and then only once or twice. Some will do reoccurring, but not enough IMHO.

2. Sell stuff - I'd buy a T-Shirt, a mug, maybe even a bumper sticker, but beyond that, I'm not going to be buying stuff every month. Plus, running a store is a pain in the ass, and @Atko or @Puttitout probably do not have the time to devote to a store.

3. General Advertising. Front page, maybe, but only if @Atko and @Puttitout are willing to filter the front page, and that's where that other site ended up having major issues. I'm sure many advertisers are not interested in having @hecho posts or the MH101 trolls next to their products.

So this leaves Ads by Sub-verse. Let the advertisers decide which sub-verses they are willing to place ads, and lets the chips fall where they may. I could see Vivid wanting to have ads on the NSFW subs, and HP or Dell wanting ads in Technology subs.

Just my 2 cents

Allow People (namely me) to invest in an equity stake.

Thanks @atko and @putitout for all the hard work and info, you guys have been great. My ideas...

T-shirts, mugs, etc. You don't have time for that shit so hire with some ambition like the shirtwascash guys to do it. he/they gets a cut to help do the work and you get money, the merch sales stay fresh and the money keeps flowing.

Mother Fucking Patreon. We both know reoccurring payments are where it's at and while I am not sure if Patreon will be dicks because of certain subs, its a good solution for re-occurring payments.

Your own version of gold. Maybe Voat Goats or something where the users can buy this for other users who do something good, post good content, etc. They could get a custom goat avatar, access to special subs, some flair, etc when a user gets it.

Ads, I fucking hate them but they help pay the bills and a part of life. Set that shit up.

I'm going to say no on have subscription based site, making it as voluntary as possible is the way to go. You will find your core users will be generous enough along with ads, voat goats, and merch, you should be able to cover your costs and maybe make some money.

-DG

Voat logo on 80% AR15 lowers.

sorry but i think i wouldnt pay a dime for posting something on a message board like this.i'm already burdened with having to pay to my isp for my internet. i think that ads could be the way to go as long is a reputable ad agency that doesnt like to inject malaware in to their adverts.other than that i wish atko and co. good luck in their endeavors

p s: wouldnt mind the ability of people to donate freely as well

So $5k a month. That works out to about $166 per day. Here's a really simple idea: for $10 you get to create a post up to 'x' words that's displayed on the sidebar and visible to every single person on Voat - for one hour. Self promotion, subverse promotion, rants, and amateurism in general obviously fully encouraged. Basically you're making a post that everybody will see. That's cheap enough that I think you'd have no trouble whatsoever filling it out and may even have to turn down people who want to buy up too many hours. A full month's booking works out to be $7,200 in revenue for Voat.

Keep it fun and simple. So no special rates relative to display time for instance. If somebody gets stuck at 4am (relative to voat primetime) sorry - buy another slot, it's only $10! And only display what time the ad will be shown once the person has paid. The touchy issue would be what's allowed content wise. The racist folk would line up from here until next year to be able to have a racist rant viewed by every single voater at $10/hour, so you'll have to make some decisions that are going to end up with people upset either way you go - but aside from that this seems like a simple and all but guaranteed way to keep Voat a truckin and even make a few bucks for you guys that started the show.

Sounds good! I'm not sure how helpful I can be at the designing/merchandising part of things, but it is a neat idea.

I'm home (finally) on Friday!

And that's great to hear, I hope everything goes smoothly and congratulations on being homeward bound :)

Show donations as a heart icon against the user's name

I've noticed that some users have donated cash and it shows up as an icon when viewing their profile... however I think it would be a far better form of advertising and use of people's pride if a little heart appeared next to their username... to prove they are a better quality of person than everyone else. It would also advertise the fact that people can donate. Hyperlink the heart icon directly to the donations page.

Reddit Gold

What's wrong with a Reddit Gold style service that only lasts a few months?

It's not a once-off purchase and it won't necessarily require any additional functionality beyond adding a tiny icon to the person's user name.

Make it just like my first suggestion, with a visible icon that users can click that will take 'em directly to the purchase page... but set a window of a few months before it expires.

Annual drive

Set a special date (perhaps over two days to accommodate users from all over the globe), once a year, and have a funds raising day to pay for Voat servers. Is there some way you can display a bar at the top of every Voat page that shows progress to the next milestone, with a big "Donate" button? In keeping with my other two "icon" suggestions, perhaps entice users with a special "Voat Day" icon (perhaps a crown) that will be displayed against their username for the next 11 months... if they donate on that day / days?

Static advertising

Also, if you were forced to display static adverts as a source of income, consider allowing people who really love Voat to increase the number of ads displayed on each window. Yeah, it's not ideal, however I'd be more than willing to max-out that setting and display an ugly amount of ads... if it meant that Voat would remain financially viable.

Charity service

I noticed that many Reddit pages used to have periodic charity drives for various reasons... (especially /r/Islam who promoted "charity" through the Islamic Relief "charity" with global links to terrorism funding). Perhaps Voat could provide all subverses with a similar service... except skim the top to pay to keep the servers running? You'd need to find a way to make that sound moral though... perhaps by calling it an "administration fee"?

Themed functionality for subverses... a bit like how the Google logo changes for specific dates

The recent Christmas snow theme looked really nice on /v/News... what with the snowing etc. Perhaps such functionality for specific occasions could be purchased for the various subverses? Perhaps the mods and the users could pay to spread the Christmas cheer, Easter, subverse-cake-day, moon landing, Australia Day (and other Nationalistic dates). Allow users to code and upload their contributions to a gallery that other users can purchase a once-off theme from for a few dollars. I'm unsure if this would raise much cash, but I suspect clever people would be willing to show-off their skills by freely donating to the available themes for rent.

Voat shop with mugs, t-shirts, sticker etc.

I've seen this in lots of web stores, but I have no idea if anybody purchases such stuff... felt compelled to mention it anyhoo.

I already looked at PostgreSQL and it sure looks like a good direction to take. SQL is by far the biggest cost we have right now and we can definitely cut our costs by going this route.

Long term plans? I find it increasingly difficult to find uneditorialized/unfiltered sources of information and places where people can say what they want. Big "players" are censoring content as instructed by various governments (for example Twitter reactively withholds content from users in a specific country, source: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169222?lang=en) and comments on news articles have almost disappeared from Swedish web. Imagine going to a bar and getting a piece of silver tape over your mouth as you enter the bar... That's what the web seems to have become. If someone out there wants to have their voice heard without having to fear the consequences (for example political pressure which I personally experienced), platforms like Voat are probably their best option. Both me and PuttItOut are together on this one - and we will do everything we can to keep Voat alive, for as long as people want to use it.

Start displaying adds. Maybe even offer a fee to remove adds from page for people who dont want to see them. Also maybe even have a subverse just for promotions and charge people to post in it. So if someone/company wants to promote a product they make a post in the promotional subverse and you get paid and maybe even charge extra to make it a sticky on the front page for 24 hours or something like that. I guess you would have to limit this to maybe 1 sticky per 24 hours incase you get alot of people who want to advertise... so the whole front page is nothing but paid for stickies ;-p.... if you want to stay in business you have to make profit, people will understand if you sell out a bit ;)

Make a cff.voat.co (cloudflare free) that requires a premium account. I'll pay a couple bucks a month to disable that thing. Bitcoin though. You don't want to have to handle credit card data and I don't want to give it to you and paypal's being a bitch.

• Enable non-intrusive ads
• Allow advertisers or subverses to buy the #1 spot, as long as it's labelled or called out as a "sponsored" post
• Users who make a contribution can have a special tag or "flair" beside their user names? "Verified Voat supporter". Tag could be active for a certain time period or longer based on donation level.
• Do a 50/50 draw each month. Voat lotto with 50% going to a single winner and the other 50% going to hosting fees (this might be grey or kinda illegal, but I don't know)
• Sell merch!

Who do we contact and how, if we have ideas and help to keep you online?

That could end up being really cool :) I feel like even though I love Voat as a whole, /v/gaming is really my home, and I wonder how many voaters feel the same about their favorite sub. Why not allow users to create their own designs, donate designs to Voat, and that way you'd have two benefits:

• users could advertise both Voat and their favorite subverse/hobby at the same time
• Voat might sell more merchandise because they'd be allowing for people's specific interests

On top of that, if someone asks me what Voat is, I can probably give a good explanation. But if someone asks me what /v/gaming is, it allows me to segue more clearly into what Voat is in terms of subcommunities: "It's the best gaming-focused discussion and news community on the internet, and part of a number of communities on Voat.co"

This is you

I will happily cancel my reddit gold for Voat ! .. Instead of Voat gold, can i just get shitlord status?

I would not mind some adds. as long as there are no auto play videos.

"we will obviously need your help to stay online. "

You got it, Atko. When the bank situation is clear, provide the link for us to donate without Paypal blocking us.

Bake-off ... I'll make the cupcakes.

If you opened back up Bitcoin donations, I would gladly give you guys half of the Bitcoin I produce.

Keep fighting the good fight guys.

https://voat.co/about

Under the heading Donations. go1dfish is right, but it could be a lie in general, go to the source.

If they were just like sticky links the community could even comment on them to warn if there were any problems.

@Atko ...Maybe think about getting someone to implement a tipping system so users could tip other users for comments, posts, contributions, etc. and Voat.co would get a % of each tip.

I love this site and I want it to thrive because it really is a great place for sharing and discussing. I'm not really business savvy but what about getting more investors to be partners with you? Maybe sell ad space like others have mentioned or have something like an award or badge system where a user can buy to give to another user for a great comment or post? Those are just some ideas. I'm also willing to donate or help any way I can :)

Is there any way we can reduce these costs?

I already looked at PostgreSQL and it sure looks like a good direction to take. SQL is by far the biggest cost we have right now.

https://blockchain.info/address/1BFqer7P9qqqiirbC63KqxfuZYXxk6RrBZ

Find a way to monetize the voat platform as a service.

Sell websites that work just like voat, but don't require any level of nerd to set them up and use them. Hell, make it a monthly service that people can use to promote events and then it deletes itself. Have an add-on that advertises those sites on voat.co (in a very clear and non-sneaky reddit way)

I would unblock voat on adguard.

Maybe you can offer a paid membership tier, where for $5 a month a user gets some special flair and access to beta features. I'd pay for that if only to support Voat.

Thank you for letting us know what is going on! I'd definitely rock Voat swag if it could help.

I would love what another voater suggested- do the equivalent of Reddit gold, but have a portion of the proceeds go to various goat-related charities.

One month it could be buying goats to help rural farmers around the world, the next month could be an animal sanctuary that helps out goats, you get the idea. As a community, we could suggest where/which charities could be nominated.

I'm not saying that all of the money has to go to it, but maybe 5%?

Also I'm dying for some Voat shirt options!

Cloud flare provides more services besides DDoS protection like caching and CDN.

Voat is still using cloud flare, just not the DDoS protection.

Far out

Good to see you guys taking voat to the next level! It is much appreciated.

We have been discussing voat's financial issues in the modernpowers irc over the last few months and have been bouncing ideas of each-other to see what we could add for voat. We have been looking into reoccurring merchandising actions and have a financier willing to pre invest once plans are solid. We would love to discuss our ideas and opportunities with you and @puttitout.

You can find myself, @PM_ME_YOUR_ARCHES or @Gill6150 in the irc channel most of the time.

https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.goat.chat:+6697#modernpowers

On behalf of /v/modernpowers we love what your doing and keep voat strong!

p.s we would really appreciate better search options and an extra sticky as options but that's another matter

Ads which depend only on page content are okay with me (without personalization or tracking). Also I'm okay with coarse-grained ad personalization ("choose ad themes you are interested in" in account options).

A 280px sidebar pic could work. It would probably need an "allow on NSFW subs" option, or even a "show only on NSFW subs" option too.

I would also love to get some goat merchandise. Thanks again for all your hard work.

I appreciate the transparency! I know this is a huge project for two individuals to spearhead alone, so I don't think any of us expect it to be handled perfectly, just openly and with the best of your ability. You're both doing a great job with something that few people would be brave enough to attempt, so I hope you and /u/PuttitOut know you're appreciated even if you don't feel appreciated every day on Voat. Thanks for the update, and for all the work you do on Voat.

Make it easy to take our money.

If you find the time, you could offer users to buy or crowdfund for new features. If the price is high enough to pay for the work and for hosting.

...we will obviously need your help to stay online. I may have missed to mention some costs, I will update this announcement if I remember anything. Please note that I wrote this in haste (I have a full time job which is rather exhausting as you may have noticed).

Hopefully this means we can start donating again.

I am cool with non intrusive ads. I would also be willing to may a small subscription service, if you guys could work up some cool functionality.

Voat T-shirts. Just put the goat on it. User submitted designs and polls to choose what to sell would also be pretty cool.

Somebody more dedicated than myself should definitely jump the gun on this.

Just out of curiosity, what was the reasoning behind no longer accepting bitcoin donations? Or is there still an address somewhere we can donate to?

I like cool t-shirts. Everyone likes cool t-shirts.

Thank you for the update, it's impressive that you've managed to keep this place running but it's clear that the community is really going to have to step up with donations and/or purchases if we want to keep the place afloat.

For some reason the first thing that popped into my head was teeshirts

You should allow subverses to buy ad space on the front page. It produces ad revenue, increases the size of smaller subverses and it doesn't involve third parties who are going to control and influence the site.

I would be happy to disable my adblock for you, please don't hesitate to put up ads!

Put Monsanto ads on every Amalek alt post, and Voat will create enough income to stay online until the dawn of the next epoch.

Also, I totally called it.

I honestly wouldn't mind non-intrusive (non animated) sidebar ads.