Not complaining but when did this start?
People need to eat. Servers cost money. Moderation takes time.
Monetize away I say!
Moderation is free.
5 Likes
Time is money 
All I can say is ‘Bravo’
Such a community is a long time coming. The volunteerism and sense of community is phenomenal.
May you (and we beneficiaries 
) all prosper and flourish 
and where appropriate,
Happy Father’s Day!
seriously, throw ads everywhere @michael and @littleviolette. advertisers should be lining up based on the traffic this site gets…
We should all benefit from these awesome ads
Sorry guys…I run a pihole, so I donate…as everyone who benefits should.
We started experimenting with ads on selected groups of visitors 2 days ago.
While we pride ourselves to be community-powered, we also recognize our existing revenue model is not sufficient to sustain our operation and content production. We have been trying out new ways to diversify our revenue stream without materially impacting our user experience.
6 Likes
I think many people underestimate hosting costs.
For a site that gets as much traffic as this one, hosting your relational database at scale gets particularly expensive.
Not to mention all the image uploads, and probably multiple load-balanced application servers.
This isn’t just throwing up a blog on Squarespace… Discourse needs computing power to give the users what they want. The Search function costs DB compute cycles every time someone uses it, which costs LH money.
Of course, you could go cheap, but loading speeds would suffer.
I applaud getting creative with the revenue streams: the Marketplace auction, for example, is a genius idea.
Round of applause for the staff here for getting this far, to the point where we need Google Ads to cover the forum’s AWS RDS bill. It’s a huge milestone for growth!
2 Likes
Does a donation eliminate ads?
Yes. 10101010