Ok the subject is undoubtedly going to solicit some hostility, but hear me out
First, pysoy.org (mostly svn.pysoy.org) requires an ever-increasing level of hosting; last month over 54gigs transfer was needed and at current pace by the end of 2008 that'll triple. Much of this comes in unpredictable spikes in a very short period of time when we get dugg or linked to from a prominent blog. I've been paying out of pocket for hosting over the last two years, from a slice of my home net connection to recently moving the site to a serverbeach server costing $80/mo, partly to handle these traffic spikes. This server is only used for pysoy.org and related sites (ie, copyleftgames). Second, about 15% of our new visitors are arriving through Google ads which is costing on average $18/month to run. Much of this goes to other free software projects, such as Ogre3D, and to sites we owe some loyalty to such as gamedev.net, so I don't mind the cost, but it's something to consider. Now the reason we haven't been running Google ads on pysoy.org is we have no control over which ads appear - it would seem very wrong to have links to proprietary mmorpgs appear on our site. Head over to ogre3d.org to see the kind of stuff a similar website gets - including spyware and "get your free iPod" ads. I recently found Project Wonderful - http://www.projectwonderful.com/ - it's used primarily to advertise web comics but also for more generic things like domain registration. The short list of differences between it and Google ads: - we can filter every ad, thus filtering out proprietary software and other unsavoury ads from our site before it appears - ads that are mistakenly approved can be rejected after on the site - most of the ads we'll get are likely going to be web comics - advertising is done via a bid system and is primarily based on site visitors (impressions), not ad clicks - based on our level of traffic, an ad space could reasonably earn $10-$20/month over the next few months That may not seem like much, but it's something and it'll scale as our traffic grows. I'd rather not use advertising at all, but to be completely on the level, hosting is starting to exceed what I can afford out-of-pocket.
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