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The kickstarter thing for a year's business costs are basically an old-fashioned subscription drive - who wants to see brand-name websites doing this every year? Welcome to a new form of spam.
Interesting take on the crowd funding issue. I expect to see more of these sorts of creative things. Advertising debt is annoying. And sadly people like PA with their 2 ads get nailed because people have been so massively inundated with ads all day that even one more is painful. Another experiment they haven't tried, but would be good to run, would be to make the site subscriber only with the long tail free. So imagi…
Aside from Google searches when I actually wanted to buy things, Penny Arcade had the only ads I ever looked at with actual interest.
(There's also the fact that if anyone is seriously bothered by the ads they're probably already blocking them themselves. I think people donating here are doing it to "give back", not because they actually care about the advertising.)
I enjoy Penny Arcade. That said, it seems like an awful lot of money for an ad-free website. Aren't they making enough off of merchandise, their expo, their games, etc., to make the site ad free? From what I understand they are wildly successful (monetarily as well as publicly) so why do they need the public to literally give them money?
They have over a dozen employees, do the math it doesn't work out to a killing for them to have this kickstarter succeed at 250k a year. They could survive without any ad revenue at all just on their other sources of revenue alone, but that's a hard sell when they have so many visitors and doing so might limit what they could do. Make no mistake, almost certainly they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the tab…
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/twokinds/twokinds-book-p...
The artist is now quitting his job and doing the comic full time with the kickstarter money, and is making a book. There is a lot of potential in crowdfunding!
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Their site is one of the few where I disable AdBlock. First, it supports a comic and a site which I love, and second I actually like their ads. They have stated they play every game that is shown in an ad, and don't allow terrible games or terrible ads for a game at any price.
Seems like the exact opposite of the standard practice in old-school journalism of strictly separating editorial and advertising staff in order minimize conflicts of interest. The fact that they are seem eager to get rid of ads makes it seem like worrying about these kinds of thing are at least a constant nuisance.
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You aren't really paying to remove the ads. There's a couple of comics I'd like to see on Kickstarter this way, because I wouldn't mind tossing them some bucks, but all they have are merchandise (which I've already bought) and PayPal links. Sorry, no, no PayPal. I wouldn't really care about the rewards, I've already received them.
The new kid was an interestingly drawn strip and it would be nice to see it brought back to life. Or even just see gave come up with more crazy DnD settings.
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Unfortunately for PA, their content is probably 90% games/pop culture topical. After a month it'd be completely stale and irrelevant (with exceptions of course). I think the better move would be to have pay users not have to see any ads. Simple web re-design to remove that for pay users, otherwise free users still have to look at the ads. There are a ton of sites that do this and are quite successful.
What's a site that only offers "no ads" as their paid-upgrade benefit? I haven't seen one offer just that, it usually comes with a grab-bag of other features that can't be replaced with a client-side script/extension. (DeviantArt's premium account is the upgrade I thought of. ( http://sta.sh/047k5sokcr2 ) The two major client-side features of no ads and more thumbnails are solved with NoScript and AutoPager respectiv…
Can anyone describe the types of people who bid+pay 5 and 10 thousand dollars for these projects? I can't imagine devoting that much money to a playdate at PAHQ or to hang out for the day with the designer of the OUYA. It doesn't seem like real money at that point but I know these peoples' credit cards will be charged. I don't get it...
And I'd assume anyone doing it for PA are hardcore fans who've loved the site for years and have serious disposable income to hand.
I really really wish the flattr model would take off for stuff like this. Each and every site having a huge fundraiser once a year like this seems unsustainable.
My current startup work is aimed at avoiding that cost entirely.