Ace

As you may know from several other topics on this subject, unfortunately the MFG forums are a long way from being financially self-sufficient. The founders have been covering the costs of their own pockets for a long time, and it's getting to the point where we're not sure we should continue. There have been a few members who have made contributions -- which have been very helpful -- but unfortunately they aren't enough for the long-term. We went through a similar process in the MFG 3.0 days, but never managed to come up with a system that interested more than a few people.

In this thread, I'd like to ask for some help in brainstorming some ideas of ways to raise money to help keep the forum alive for the long term. What are some things that you would be willing to pay for? Both one-time payments and regular subscriptions would be useful. The dollar amounts don't have to be large -- if there was something that lots of people would be willing to each pay a small amount for, that would be great too.

Here are some ideas to get things going:

• Gold membership, on a subscription basis -- what benefits should it have to be useful (things like no advertising)?
• One-time contributions specifically aimed at supporting a move from CS back to Invision
• Pay-for-service items -- like paying a fee to have a custom rank or adding a graphic under your avatar
• Feature development -- contribute to a pool that would fund the development of new features
• Auctions -- contribute one or more interesting items to the forum, where they would be auctioned-off (I would be happy to get the process going by contributing some cool stuff). We would need both contributors and bidders to make this work.
• Contests -- after a minimum number of contestants make a committment to join, an entrance fee would be paid. Judging of some kind would then be done of the items entered, and the results would be published, titles awarded, etc. The prize for the winner might also include an item contributed by a member (again, I would be happy to contribute something cool to get this going).
• RPG stuff -- pay for certain items that can be used in the RPG section
• Forum Amazon store -- buy items from Amazon after clicking on a link on the forum. It doesn't cost you any more, and the forum earns a few percent on your purchases.

I would appreciate hearing your comments on those ideas, as well as any other ideas you might have. How much would you be willing to pay, or would you be willing to contribute items for auctions or contests? Do you think other people would also be interested?

Chuckles

I like the RPG items and Gold membership ideas myself,

Maybe we could set up a MFG shop and sell anything from new post ranks to things like profile games. Well that's they only thing I could think of.

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Island of 1,000 Condiments

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Manic

This idea might seem a bit off-the-wall, but it may help in giving a few extra bucks to the site. If MFG has any talented artists, they could do comissions for a small price that wouldn't be paid to them, but go towards helping the site costs. If we got really serious about it, I'm a musician. I could make theme songs or something for people's RPG characters if they were willing to pay a bit more for a full piece of music composed from scratch, specifically for them.

Here's another idea for gold donators. You remember on the old MFG, how members had those little blue squares under their rank? An option would be being able to customize them by using your own little graphics for it. Here's another idea for customization. I've seen other boards do this, and it looked really neat - being able to skin your own posts. Like, whenever you make a post, the table your post is in could look different from other peoples', such as the background, text color, font, and other things. If you changed your post skin, all of the posts you've made so far would change to the new skin.

Here's another one. Make one small banner ad appear on the top of every page on the forum; something reasonably small, like 500x75 or something. This would show up for everybody, including gold members - however, the ads wouldn't be from unrelated businesses and shit we're not interested in. The ads would ONLY be made by members of MFG, and added to the roster to display at random. Say I wanted to advertise my site, Begrimed.com; I could make a 500x75 banner ad and pay a one-time price to have that banner appear on the top of the site. It's a good way to give yourself exposure, and people would be more interested in them since they're creations of members on the board, and not ads from big companies that nobody's going to click on anyway. That's something I'm sure at least a few people would be willing to pay for, especially site owners who want more traffic without all the bull.

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Superior

The idea I've found to be the best is the 500x75 forum banner for Member's who own sites and whatnot. I know I would be interested in that because I'm currently in the process of creating a Website. The only bad thing is I'm not sure Ace would really want other things being Advertised. We all know how he feels about that.

As for idea's I'm flat out of them right now. Maybe there is a way to convert some of the Fanatude! suggestions into money making profits for the forum. Well, I know that one of the suggestions right now in the Graphics section came from the Fanatude! contest and will hopefully be making some profits for the forum in the near future.

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Manic

I know MFG's not too fond of people linking to other forums, but if people are paying to have an ad displayed, thus bringing money to the site, I don't see much of a problem with it. If it were still an issue, then one stipulation could be that any sites advertised couldn't have a forum.

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Ace

Yes. I guess it could either be a single all-in-one deal, or it could even be broken up ala carte, where people could pay for just the particular abilities they want.Those are some good ideas. Are there others? How much would people be willing to pay? Some of the items mentioned, such as changing the color of a username, would require development work, so there would need to be a critical mass of subscribers willing to pay before I would want to put in the time. Also, I don't know PHP very well, so more and better changes would be possible if we stayed on CS.Sure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Island of 1,000 Condiments For example, if Kaaru wanted to auction off a large sum of manga volumes to MFG, he would put them up for auction via MFG?

Right. The proceeds from the sale would go to MFG. The specifics of the deal could be flexible in terms of MFG to donor split, minimum price, etc, and would need to be published in advance for everyone to see.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Island of 1,000 Condiments You mean like, ‘Create-a-Character’ contests where Graphic Artists do some magic, and the winner has their character pinned on the Main Site? Just an analogy, but you get the point, yes?

Sorta. The contests could be graphics-related, or fan fiction, article writing, or any number of other things. The prizes could include one or more things such as cash, posting the winning item on the main MFG site, a special award graphic under their avatar, a special rank, free gold membership status for some period of time, etc.OK, what would it take?
For the Amazon store, it would be things like books, DVDs, CDs, games, etc.

However, we could also have an MFG logo store, with hoodies, T-shirts, etc. Goku and I started a thread in the graphics section to get people to design stuff that would go on some logo wear, but we didn't have too much luck getting people interested enough to contribute.

Ace

Maybe this could be generalized. People could offer a particular service through an ad in the new MFG Store, with a percentage of what they earn getting donated to the site, probably with some minimum percentage to keep it fair. A graphics person could do custom sigs for $1 each and donate 50% to MFG, for example.

Cool ideas. Both would require development work on either MFG or Invision, but if enough people were willing to sign-up, then sure.

Maybe all future forum improvements should happen that way. Someone says they want a particular feature. The person who would do the work (me in many cases) would set a price. People who want the feature would then pledge to pay a certain amount. When enough pledges come in, the work is done. When complete, the people who pledged to pay do so. Those who pledge and don't pay are banned.

MFG has always accepted advertising from individuals. I wrote a custom ad server that easily supports that kind of thing. I haven't made a big deal about it on the site because I didn't think there would be any interest from members and because it's not particularly cheap -- but sure, if people are interested, it's definitely an option. It could be either in a special location as you suggested, or it could be mixed in with the regular ads. All sorts of targeting options are also available -- by country, browser type, etc.

Island of 1,000 Condiments

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Manic

Another thing you might ponder upon is bringing the quote system back. However, instead of making it so anybody can post a quote (which resulted in a lot of really dumb ones showing up anyway), you could charge a very small amount, like, ten cents per quote if anybody wanted to submit one. There wouldn't be many quotes, obviously, but you might get a few people with a few extra bucks in their pocket and a handful of quotes they wanna put up. This is something that would require some user input, since I don't really know how other people'd feel about the idea.

C'mon, folks. More suggestions. We're on a roll here.

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warcrack

Prehaps membership could be required in order to acess the Amazon store. That way, in order to buy stuff, you would have to pay a subscription. It might be a little extreme though.

People in the forums often request certain people to make signature banners or other artwork for them. Prehaps, in the future, a fee to the forums will be required to do this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ace How much would people be willing to pay?

Personally I wouldn't go over 20$ per month, but I don't know the average price of internet subscriptions. Sorry if I'm acting like a noob with the prices.

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My favorite candy would definately have to be the good ol' Reese's Cup.

Masked_Felix

I've got an english Berserk Volume 4 that I can donate to auction off (Maybe more, I'll clean out my closet). You can have all of the profit.

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Ace

Cool. Can you write up a description?

Goku

Ive been thinking about this for a while and I will be starting my
graphic design course at university next month and will be required im
sure to do lots of projects. Im hoping that this will cross over with
MFG so that I can use my skills to create certain things for MFG
members. And hopefully be able to rent out my services via the MFG
forum with an amount of procedes going toward the forums for use of it.
This is an idea for now that I have come up as i don't have alot of media to donate to the forum. But I will keep thinking.
If we started treating MFG a bit like an MMORPG I think people would like to advertise there individuality through other mediums than posting so I like the Idea custom adds. And Various things like that.
On an MMORPG called flyff it is completely free to download and play but all development costs are offset by items that I bought with real money that can be used on in the game. and these sorts of items are really alot to do with creating and unique individual persona

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Broly

Well, just to put my opinion in, I myself like the idea of a MFG store where you can buy certain things to modify your avi, sig, name, etc.

Now, if I wanted to, where do I send a donation?

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Numeros MFG
-Cinco-