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Dakka Dakka has banner ads and the DCM subscription. Where/who does the money go to? Is it all for hosting, is our honorable admin legoburner getting some compensation for his time? What?

I would imagine first and foremost it goes towards keeping the website up. I bet the gallery uses a lot of server space.

I don't imagine that it costs an extreme amount to run a forum/database, but since the DCM program exists, I imagine the ads are not enough revenue.

Blackjack.

Hookers.

In fact we had to get rid of the Blackjack.

Some of the money goes to Yakface, but alot of it gets reinvested into maintaining the website and the debauchery that occurs at night in and around the residences of each Mod, which I hear can exceed seven figure digits if private jets get set on fire and Snoop Dog makes an appearance.

Kid_Kyoto wrote:Blackjack.

Hookers.

In fact we had to get rid of the Blackjack.

It seems the recession is affecting everyone these days.

I was sitting chatting with Lego the other day, and this very topic came up in conversation. To put things shortly, there is a small surplus of excess cash actually made as of the moment, but its all put to one side to be reinvested into Dakka. Lego's currently planning a server upgrade, as the current one is getting slower, and finding it difficult to handle the large amount of webtraffic going through it, not to mention the amount of space the gallery takes up. However, the upgrade, and new space will of course, cost a substantial sum of money, considering the amounts of data involved.

At least, that was my understanding of the issue. Feel free to correct any mistakes I might have made in my summary there Lego.

This is all good news.
But, pics of the Ladies of the Street Corner or it didn't happen!

with the amt of cash Yakface spent on this place, I'd hope he's making some kind of profit...

As far as I know, yakface and legoburner treat DakkaDakka as their "hobby" and don't make any profit whatsoever. As Ketara said, it all gets reinvested into the site...

Might as well take this moment to say- thanks for all the hard work, yak/lego!!

Agreed. Thank you guys!

Well its my 2nd best website. I cant tell you my 1st best. I might get in trouble.

The Gallery takes up a HUGE proportion of money, I think. Forum providers charge by the memory density, and since dakka has like....Millions of images, you can assume they've put a lot of money into that.

Other than that, I might guess it goes to legoburner and Yakface, or to some new business plan they have stewing in a pot. Or their space program. Or their mission into challenger deep. Or their antarctic cave-digging project.


Seriously, how much money do you guys rake in monthly? I can only guess it's in the thousands. We had a discussion like this on another forum, and they talked about how they make like 400$ a day :O And they had less ads than dakka too.

Not too offend anyone, but some of the gallery images could be edited/eliminated. Theres a LOT of really good stuff on there, but theres also a bunch of WTF?? stuff. I wont try and single anything, but you all have seen them and know what I mean.

Maybe something that wont start a lot of butthurt...like making a WIP section that gets auto-deleted after a period of time. Anything not completed goes in there, gets deleted after 30 or 60 days, something like that.

Could also go with a rating based system...stuff thats consistently poorly rated gets deleted...but that may lead to whining and BS.

That, and our ongoing war with the silent menace of the Spambots, is indeed an ongoing operation, mainly perfromed by a crack addled ( is that right ?) hand picked team. Or something like that anyway.

reds8n wrote: That, and our ongoing war with the silent menace of the Spambots, is indeed an ongoing operation, mainly perfromed by a crack addled ( is that right ?) hand picked team. Or something like that anyway.

And what is the role of each mod on this team? I assume someone has to make runs south of the border (from England, a swim across the channel) in order to get such illicit goods.

Well, I can tell you where the money doesn't go!

Alpharius wrote:Well, I can tell you where the money doesn't go!

Alright. I would like a detailed explaining of where it doesn't go.

Ketara covered it correctly. There is a very small surplus each month that is set aside to cover future costs in case of expansion or getting dropped by advertising providers. We run it as a hobby so dont monetise as much as we could. To get any serious cash we'd need to go to the level of the ad-heavy sites like librarium online or BoLS which we dont want to do. We've as of yet not taken even a penny from the emergency fund and have no intention of doing so without a significant change in circumstances. We have two servers (live and backup), two domains and two email services (one free, one paid) that are the bulk of costs.

Emergency fund = ale and whores.

The money goes to make the site one of the most technically impressive forums online. I would think that would be obvious.

Lol malfred

Thanks for the answer straight from the top, legoburner! Keep up the great work!

legoburner wrote:To get any serious cash we'd need to go to the level of the ad-heavy sites like librarium online or BoLS which we dont want to do.

And we all love you for it. I can't stand going to those sites because there is more ad space on the page than forum content to read.

Remember, serious cash to legoburner is equivalent of the gdp of Finland.

The money clearly goes to pay the fat, bloated salaries of the Moderators.

Oh wait...

malfred wrote:Remember, serious cash to legoburner is equivalent of the gdp of Finland.

No i think the with serious cash you need to atleast be able to buy a slider at White Castle.

Kirbinator wrote:

legoburner wrote:To get any serious cash we'd need to go to the level of the ad-heavy sites like librarium online or BoLS which we dont want to do.

And we all love you for it. I can't stand going to those sites because there is more ad space on the page than forum content to read.

Yup. Unobtrusive ads is one of the reasons why this is my only whitelisted adblock site.

Nice to hear, thanks. It is always tempting to add more adverts when you see the sort of financial numbers that get thrown around by the heavy advertisers out there but every time yak and I talk about ever taking a profit from dakka it just feels wrong and neither of us agree with it. I also speak to brotherargos at b&c from time to time who feels very much the same way so we have peer pressure to stay mostly ad-free too

We are doing fine for the moment but if we ever need more income then the next advert location will be on search engine referal. Basically, if you come to dakka using a search phrase on a search engine like google, there will be one more text advert in the page than usual on some pages, but it will not be visible to any registered member and is basically just there to cash in on people who come here by mistake and then immediately leave. Like I say though, that is only planned for the future if we need more cash for some crazy project or more powerful hardware. At the moment there are no plans to implement such a thing.

I'm sure this has been brought up before, but have you guys thought about reintroducing merch? Shirts, dice, dice bags, etc?

I know I'd like to get some dakka dice.

We will probably at some point as it would be nice to see people wearing dakka stuff at conventions and things. Time and decent graphic designs are the biggest sticking points assuming people are happy with using third party merchandisers. Dice are not supported by most third party merchandisers though so they tend to just be when a mod feels like they have the time and effort available to handle creation and shipping to the numerous DCMs that want them each time.