Hello everyone,

today’s review will be a bit special, since as of now, For the Record basically has two ways how anyone can contribute – either by that Paypal button in the upper right corner, or by the Patreon system. I explained it in detail in the original post and I would like to thank everyone, who took part in the pledges and contributed via Patreon – you can find the entire list here, although I would especially like to thank Tugboat1964 (as usual :)), Godsmacked, Ammattimies, daedric_orc and Kkesu for extra-large pledges.

What happens now is that we wait. There is a day (and I am not sure which day), where (once per month) the pledges will be transferred. It’s supposed to be “end of the month”, but it hasn’t happened yet, so I guess it will start from next month or so.

But of course, I haven’t forgotten other people, who have contributed to FTR via Paypal!

Contributors

polyarmus (Czech Repiblic)
elr (Germany)
Satbel (Czech Republic)
Jean-Christian N. (USA)
Claus L. (Finland)
Luca S. (Canada)
Victor P. (USA)
Bob R. (UK)
Bolterman (Spain)
William C. (USA)
Xavier L. (France)
Jürgen G. (Germany)
Marshall L. (USA)
*anonymous* (UK)
Niels Børge R. (Denmark)
R.R. (Germany)
Jonas B. (Germany)
Sean M. (Canada)
InSL (Germany)
Jay N. (USA)
Siegfriend M. (Germany)
Jürgen B. (Germany)
DeadMoney0811 (USA) – thanks for large contribution mate! Much appreciated.
Lee D. (Germany) – a message from him: “In space, noone can hear you WUB”
KTZV_D86 (Germany)
Tore B. (Norway)
Martijn W. (Netherlands)
Gnomefather (Norway)

Thanks to all of you! This month is covered even without the Patreon subscriptions then.

There is one more issue that I got asked several times, so I thought I would address it, since this is the relevant topic for it. A few folks sent me e-mails, asking why wouldn’t it be easier to set up advertisements and be done with it. I believe this point warrants a bit of an explanation.

The obvious thing that everyone understands is that ads are annoying. Noone wants to see them and most people use some form of adblocker to get rid of them, They screw the page layout and they distract you from reading in peace (especially the moving ones). But that’s of course not all.

As some of you, older readers, might remember, there were ads on this site for a few months (last year from June to October or something). After that, I got banned from AdSense (for reasons I still don’t understand, appeals didn’t work or anything) and I got by from reader generous donations. Edrard offered me to renew ads with some other service, but after some testing, I found out that other ad services are either paying too little, or are extremely annoying (wanna see a fullscreen ad everytime you click on a link? Didn’t think so).

But in the end, the payment was the problem. You see, in the months the ads were up, I noticed a trend. Ever since FTR moved to wot-news, the reader numbers were rising up pretty much steadily, but the ad revenue wasn’t. Revenue is based on clicks, but also on pageviews. My guess (!) is the following: the hard core of FTR readers (the “old guard”, that supported FTR from the start) had their adblock off, but everyone else had it enabled, especially the new influx of readers. Asking for them to disable it was simply not respected (I don’t blame them, as I said, I dislike ads myself and such is the right of everyone), creating the abovementioned effects: reader numbers went up, revenue did not. At that point, it wasn’t an issue, but with

- influx of new readers
- DDOS protection
- new server hardware

the monthly costs of FTR practically TRIPLED overnight. I know I said I wouldn’t post numbers, but let’s say that the current Patreon sum covers the running costs with a few bucks left, so no worries – no weed sellers or hookers will profit from your hard earned money :)

Either way, if the ads were kept the way it was before, they wouldn’t cover nearly as much as it was needed and asking for donations or pledges, while the site was riddled with ads, that just seems…. wrong. So, in the end, I think that the current system is the best I can do and I am glad you guys understand that.

So, once again, thank you all.

- SS