Quote:
“ I don't make much from my site ad wise, mostly because tech savvy visitors use ad blocks. But those that don't do contribute something towards hosting fees.”
Me neither, I admin a couple of forums and a few hobby based blogs, no commercial or business activity as I just started them because I had an interest in the subject. However, over the last 12 years they have reached the point where their combined traffic requires them to be hosted on a VPS which costs £30 per month. Add to that the individual domain costs, license fees for the forum software and those expenses just to keep the sites online can all add up.
Until recently around 70% of those running expenses were funded from Adwords and Skimlinks, non of them my sites never earn a profit but that was never my intention anyway, I was just happy for the lions share of the expenses being covered simply from discrete adwords banners and links on keywords. However in recent years that has dwindled to less than 50% of the expenses being covered, and my day job wage is covering the rest.
If I was to pay myself even minimum wage for the hours I spent on them, approving registrations, filtering out the spam bots, improving SEO, dealing with exploits and writing the hundreds of pages of unique content which are on there in the first place those costs would be even more significant, however that is my choice and i'm happy to do it for free, but in addition to both my labour and free time being provided for free, I'm not happy for my wage to be picking up the shortfall in running expense cover. I'm sure that many others here, would feel exactly the same way, but how many of those same people are actively running adblockers and putting the owners of the sites that they visit in exactly the same position?.
It has reached the point where I feel I either have to shut some of them down, or start charging members for access. I'm sure we've all browsed such hobby run sites and taken advice on everything from fixing cars, choosing hotels or tips for our phones and it would be a shame if those impartial websites, owned by private individuals all began charging to access their content or just closed, leaving nothing but the commercial entities owned by big businesses.
I admit that I use an adblocker myself for the places where Ad's outnumber the content, however I do play a fair game and remember to disable and whitelist the places where its privately owned and run in somebodies' free time.