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- Jan 24, 2018
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Edit: Just for clarity... the poll options are a joke and unrelated (kinda) to this announcement :U
We won't remove/ban either.Hallo hallo and season's greetings,
I'm sure you're all sick of the 502s and server problems that have been occurring these past few weeks. The reason for these issues are quite simply that over the past year our average daily traffic has more than tripled. Early this year when we were kicked off of CloudFlare and had to stop taking donations via PayPal, we polled you on how we should continue to fund the site going forward. From the 8389 responses to the poll, 14.3% of people said they would donate crypto, 9.4% would donate servers for us to use, 22.3% would be fine with an affiliate sponsorship, and a whopping 53.9% of you said that you would be fine with non-intrusive ads. Affiliates being fairly similar to ads, that would be a total of about 75% of the respondents being more or less fine with us running some type of ads - even though historically our stance has been not to run any except as the last resort because, well, nobody likes ads and we're not aiming to profit off the website.
Measures taken so far, and the current situation
We began accepting cryptocurrency donations and have been able to sustain off of them for the most part until now, but compared to when we had a PayPal, donations aren't anywhere as regular as they used to be. As the traffic and database load have increased and additional servers have become necessary to meet the demand, our monthly costs have started to outpace the average income, slowly chipping at what we've been able to save up over the years. Our costs at the start of this year were $565 a month, and currently they're at $920 a month, 163% of what it was before.
Our initial idea for the "donate server" option was that a single user would pay for a server and then give us the credentials to it, but to little surprise, the uncertain reliability made that idea unfeasible. Half a year later, as our image servers were hitting their limits, our community created MangaDex@Home as a way to allow users to contribute storage and bandwidth to serve images directly to readers. It was a pretty resounding success, and our image servers have been able to catch a break ever since. Even so, we're still left with the problem of how to cover all the growing operational costs.
Affiliate sponsorships remain an option we're open to but without any offers, it's not something we can explore. That leaves us with option number four, non-intrusive ads. Our immediate financial situation isn't outright dire, as the recent call for crypto went fairly well, but the clear trend is that we're slowly bleeding money, and the fact that we have to rack up additional servers soon isn't helping that fact. If we were to wait until the very last minute to implement ads, there's no guarantee we would be able to find an offer that was safe to expose users to. We've regularly gotten emails where people offer us 10k, 20k, up to 50k a month to run whatever ads they want, but I'm sure you're all aware of the type of ads that are running on other aggregators. The ideal ad would be for a service actually relevant to the site that's also not going to give people malware cancer if they click on it. Luckily for us, we did receive such an offer, and considering our situation, we decided to accept it.
The ad that we accepted
We accepted an offer to run a banner ad for the Chinese Wuxia Cultivation mobile idle game Immortal Taoists by the developers HK PC Times based in Hong Kong. It will be up for just a week, from December 21st to December 28th. The ad itself is a tracker link that uses AppsFlyer's mobile attribution service. Because the game is a mobile game, we're only showing the ad to people who are viewing the website at a mobile width. The game itself has over a million downloads, a 4.4 star rating after 167k votes on the Google Play store and a 4.8 star rating after 14k votes on Apple's app store. One of our staff has even played it before and described it as "better than the average shitty mobile idle game", so we're satisfied with the game's credibility.
Clicking the ad and installing the game on your mobile device is a great way to support us! The better the ad will perform, the more secure our future. If you want, you can simply close the ad (which adds a "hide_ads" cookie in your current browser) or use an ad blocker.
Will there be more ads in the future?
We currently don't have any plans to run ads in the future. If the current ad performs well, we may be able to move to a more affiliate sponsor style for them and choose to promote the game on our own terms rather than through a banner ad deal. The third alternative option to support the site was for an affiliate sponsorship anyways, so it just might have to happen out of order. If the ad doesn't do well, then we'll know that not even running ads will likely save us in the future and we should just not consider it as an option in the first place. We'll announce how many months of our server costs, found on the support page, were covered by the ad's performance when the time period is up.
