A win-win solution to support MD that already works at a Jp video sharing site [Rejected]

[ikemen]

MD admins need a lot of money to keep the site online. This solution should help to make it cheaper for them and will be more environmentally friendly than merch.
This already works well on nico nico douga:
I propose giving users the ability to run ads for MD manga: on front page, search(similar in tags) and manga page(similar in tags) bought by money. The users benefit as well - if a person is ready to spend money to run an ad without expecting monetary gain, it's gotta be better than average, probably(could also make it so that only manga above certain rating is available for being advertised). This makes it easier to find good manga(which is rarely popular).
The user can either run an ad for everyone or for their country only((cheaper) to discourage faking through vpn, users with recently changed country ips could only be approved for worldwide ads). Old/less followed series should be cheaper.
Will work better if the user had ad click metrics.
Also give all users a chance to win an ad(that works for short time) or a coupon for 50% off ad purchase so that all users could eventually use the feature.

Some will complain but I don't see a valid reason - there are always gonna be tons of manga on the front page that most people ain't gonna read anyway.
Would be good to show the actual user count and cost of upkeep per day at https://status.mangadex.org/ or on the front page below. If the upkeep needs for the month are somehow met, MD could disable ad purchasing.

 

[happypurple]

handing any type of user financial data is not something the devs or users of this site will get behind

 

[Teasday]

A rotating "user recommended title" space one can buy with some kind of points (exchanged for real money, awarded for contribution, who knows, doesn't matter) is an idea that's been floating around staff chats since I think the first year of operation. We never actually implemented it but I still think it'd be a fun concept and alternative for otherwise trending manga recs on the frontpage.

Though we'd definitely need to get the trending manga back up first, so.

 

[croissant]

Make such that you could directly annotate a page in manga with your commentary.

Make it such that free-plan let's you annotate 5 times in a chapter, and from there you could make tiers of premium-plans, the more the users pay the more commentary they could add.

 

[Teasday]

To be clear, we don't currently have plans to make any kind of paid features. You can't even donate to us.

 

[panzerkampfwagyu]

Another thing one could do is to do it like Tumblr and sell useless functions while marketing them as useless functions. 2 Checkmarks for 8 bucks(Single purchase and stackable) and similar things that do not give any benefit, but are dumb and for fun.

 

[RogueKitsune]

The biggest problem you face with that kind of thing is the fact that Mangadex is a pirate site and therefore taking donations/"micro-transaction" requires transferring/receiving money in "creative" ways. In the past MD accepted donations via paypal, but that got shutdown for obvious reasons. Having a bank account or similar to accept money requires an ID in most places and thus would link someone to illegal activities which they could then be on the hook for. Crypto was an attempt that was mostly unsuccessful because of it's complicated nature and sometimes legal status in places.

Then you have issues with content moderation on what can or cannot be put up for advertisement. Exclude everything that is marked Porn or Erotica, sure, super simple. What about titles marked with 'Gore' and 'Sexual Violence'? What about GL and BL? These are some common things that people filter out, would the "advertisement" have to respect user preferences as well? Then we come to possible abuse. What if an individual intentionally sets up advertisements for a certain country, and only picking titles that contain elements that would be offensive there (Mods are not all knowing). Would it be valid for GL to spam all the titles that their group is doing?

Don't get me wrong, it would be great to be able to plaster some real niche yuri titles gems in front of everyone's eyes, but there are just a lot of problems that are unique Mangadex. The reasons this works for niconico and others are that they are legitimate companies, have lots of paid moderation, and basically only target a very specific market/userbase/demographic.