My vote’s for a donation button/page, too. :buttrock:
If CGTalk is having a cash flow problem I want to help, but there must be a cheaper way than buying a $50 book that I don’t really need right now. Besides, a $10 donation is pure profit, baby!
Membership fees don’t sound like a great idea since there’s a goodly number of 14-18 year olds, not to mention the grownups, who frequent this site and may not have access to a credit card.
Someone mentioned in another thread that they’re 34 years old and have never had a credit card and never plan to get one. I sorta peed myself when I read that, but then again, I suppose it’s reasonable to assume a lot of CG artists are still living in their parents’ places. With no credit history, that’s about the only place you can go.
CGTalk has 163,206 members. If each paid $10, that would come out to over $1.6 million. I don’t think it costs that much to host this site. Especially not with all these great new things like books, store, and training classes.
If even 10% of those people paid the registration fee, it would be an amazing accomplishment. Many of the members being counted in that amount have never even made a single post, so how likely do you think it is that they’d pay a registration fee?
How about a donation page that has a indicator showing how much money is needed each month to keep the site going? This way users are given the resposibilty of making ends meet. Awarding badges to donaters would also be a plus.
Another angle of attack could be to make available more advertising slots, like http://www.evermotion.org, or sell something other than books. Maybe even pdf tutorials from different featured artist from different disciplines, pretty much like http://www.computerarts.co.uk/. That should get the revenues up.
Beer Head
Is it possible to kind of franchise (sp) cgtalk, people put money into it, and host the pages on their server, (or cgtalk own the severs and people lease them), then in return people get money if they get more advertising or sell more artwork etc, kinda like an e-Burger King or something, I know what I mean but can’t explain. It might be a crap idea anyway.
AnDy
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