Alright here is some real talk:
Our funds are gonna be tapped at the end of the year.
Now we do have a server in place, and we have a place (small office) for the server and internet. Basically is $500/month to keep that going, which we can mostly cover through patron support.
The big thing we are looking to lose is IT support. We flat out could not have gotten things (the server and infrastructure) stood up without the IT support.
I know people here have already made tremendous donations to get us where we are, so I feel like I’m beating a dead horse asking for donations.
We have stood up several things to try and get some revenue. The whole point of the homepage is to capture new users. If we can have a surge of new users, we can have more people to help crowd source us.
We can also sell ads on the homepage, but we need traffic there for it to be worthwhile. We never intend on sticking the obnoxious Google Adsense stuff on here, and have no plans to put ads directly on the forum. But we would like to sell ads that are neatly curated on the home page (you can see the spot we have reserved on there)
The other potential Avenue for monetization is growing the YouTube channel. If we can hit 1000 subscribers we can start receiving income from YouTube. We understand that YouTube is anti-free speech in general, but it is one of the paths we are having to pursue.
We have a shop that could bring in money if we have a surge of users as well.
Without a doubt the number one thing that will help us everywhere is growing our user base.
In the end, I’m not trying to ask for donations here. I’m really looking for ideas. Ideas to grow, ideas to monetize, anything. If we have to cut off IT support at the end of the year, so be it, and a few of us will do our best, but it puts us in a precarious position.