Last week I wanted to hear your collection opinion on having Advertising on Fourtheye. The highest voted options were both of the opinion that it should either be free, or that ads are to obtrusive. Personally I agree with both of those statements. There was not much support for the clicking of ads purely to help Fourtheye make money.
My stance has always been that I would avoid advertising where possible. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly I feel that most of the content presented on this site is sourced elsewhere, and therefore I should not be making money off it. There’s also potentialy copyright issues involved with making money of other websites content.
Secondly, I generally find online advertising to be either obtrusive, or irrelevant, and sometimes both. How many times have you seen advertising on websites that have very little to do with the subject matter. I believe that most Fourtheye readers are technically proficient enough that they know how to find a bargain online without resorting to clicking ads.
Fourtheye is a reasonably cheap website to host and maintain. It costs me less that $10 per month for hosting costs, and provided bandwidth doesn’t greatly increase, this shouldn’t change anytime soon. I’m happy to continue donating my time to maintaining the site. I’d probably spend 4-5 hours per week working on Fourtheye.
The only revenue exercise I may undertake is merchandise, and I have several ideas of what to do there. There may be a cool Fourtheye item available sometime soon, once I’ve worked out the various business complications (ABN’s, GST, etc.) . Keep your eyes peeled.