How should is it normal should raise revenue? ads? require payment to post?

Why do you care? Stop trying to make the site shitter. If you want to donate money to IIN buy tommythecat a years gold subscription.

Hi IINers. I didn't write this post, but I'm very curious to hear everyone's thoughts and I'll try add a bit of relevant info to the discussion...

- We do have ads on the site already. However, I do not show any ads if you're signed in so you may not have noticed them. I do this because people that visit a site regularly tend not to click on ads anyway, and because showing members ads is just annoying. They're already contributing to the site in other ways.

- The ads bring in some revenue, but not very much. Although IIN has quite a bit of traffic (> 1m unique visitors monthly), about half of that traffic goes to "NSFW" content that is hard to run ad campaigns against. Large brand advertisers, the ones that pay the big ad money, do not want their ads shown on pages that talk about fetishes or poop. I was banned from Adsense long ago for the same reason, which is a shame, because context sensitive ads are a good fit for IIN.

- I've tried putting "dirty" ads on the "NSFW" pages, but they only paid slightly better, and cluttering the pages with half naked girls negatively affected my google search rankings (where most of the traffic comes from), so it wasn't worth it. I've also tried various affiliate programs, with no real luck.

- IIN Gold is bringing in a bit of revenue, but also not a huge amount. I'm hoping that over the long-term this will continue to grow. I think the gift giving activity that it has created is the best thing about it so far, as it has helped to foster a more positive vibe in the community.

- There are two major expenses to running the site.

1. First is the server and bandwidth costs. For the amount of traffic being served, the site is quite efficient, and the costs are pretty reasonable.

2. The second, larger, expense is my paid moderators. I'm paying for a couple of hours of work to be done, every single day of the year. If we can think of a way to reduce this expense, it would be the same as creating a new revenue source. There have been lots of generous offers by members to help out with the moderation over the years, but I'm wary of doing this as it will create a weird balance of power in the community and can lead to all sorts of mischief. I do think some sort of community moderation system (like on stack overflow) could work, but it would take a lot of effort for me to properly design it and build it, and I'm still not quite sure how it should work exactly.

- Overall I'm right around break-even. Some months are better than others, depending on traffic levels and the occasional direct ad purchase by advertisers. If someone out there has some sales skills, I'd love to bring someone in on commission to do ad sales, which could be quite profitable for both of us.

So that's the story. I'm pretty happy with how things are going. IIN is a lot of fun to run and experiment with, and I've learned a lot from building and maintaining it. However, it does take up a lot of my time and of course I'd love to figure out a way to make more money from it. I do feel the potential is there to do so somehow. If I did, I could def. devote more time to it and continue to improve things. I'm all ears for any ideas or suggestions. Thanks!

I think ads and pay-to-post are both ideas that would ruin the whole site for me (and it would take a lot to ruin this site). I really value the "cleanness" of the look of IIN, and I think having any ads at all would wreck that. We already have ads for non-registered users though, and Gold is another way to raise revenue. Maybe increase the number of ads for non-registered users, but for registered members ads would have to be an absolute last resort.

From TheManagement posts, I get the impression that raising money is a really difficult thing to do here, which is a shame. There's an iDevice app, but I doubt that raises enough to cover it's cost (especially now the site has a mobile version).

I think having to pay for posts would be the worst idea in the world. I can't see many people buying into that. I personally wouldn't even mind adverts, and I like your idea about that.

As for donations, Gold *sort of* works as a donation. Granted, you get extra things, but it's still a way of giving back to IIN and also giving something nice to another user (or yourself).

This is a bad idea. This is an advice forum. That is saying "Only people who make a lot deserve to ask for help". Everyone has issues sometimes and I don't think not having money would exclude you from that fact. Having ads though is something most sites do so I don't see the issue with adding them here. Long as they do not interfere with the way the site functions.