It's a good essay, and while I totally agree with "don't just slap adsense on there," for some people monetization is the hobby, or at least part of it, and even if it isn't there's nothing inherently wrong with putting up ads.

Being prescriptive and saying "don't try to cover your costs" is a little like saying "don't click coupons" or "don't shop at sales" if you're buying stuff you like but don't need. To go back to your baseball analogy, sure, you won't put ads on your jersey, but you very well might agree to store the bats and helmets at your place in exchange for the team waiving your fee. Why is it wrong for people to take a generally accepted method and save a few bucks if they want?

A good point. In my experience, if you're going to do anything more than AdSense, it will require a decent time and effort investment. Building the infrastructure to allow people to give you money is surprisingly difficult. If you're only trying to get a couple bucks a month, then the ROI may be worthwhile for learning, but horrible otherwise.

Browsing and clipping coupons takes maybe 20 minutes. If you can get a monetization scheme set up for your site in that time, then it's totally a great idea. I'd kill for something that could be monetized that fast.

That might make a good article: How to monetize in less than 1 hour. I'd definitely read it if someone were to write that up.

I think that people use "covering (negligible) costs" as a euphemism for trying to businessify their side-project. Covering these low costs would be the first, modest goal in trying to convert the project to a business anyway. If they instead told their friends or web-colleagues that they're trying to grow their web-trinket into a viable business, they'd probably be criticized and made fun of and ultimately talked out of the idea. So instead they talk about "covering costs," and it's pretty much a low-investment, no-risk way of experimenting with making something a business.

Yeah, I can see your point. Covering costs is definitely a milestone that I look toward when monetizing, but only as a first step on the climb toward profitability.

Likewise, I don't disagree with your point that some things should remain non-monetized side-projects.

"The only reason to monetize a web project is if you intend to make serious money."

Err, or maybe you just want to break even. If user's find what you're doing interesting or useful, they'll put up with an advertisement or two.

I agree with the general sentiment (don't deface your hobbyist site with ads until you want to seriously monetize it) but I disagree with his solution. He basically advocates "just suck it up -- $100 / month is not that much."

To many people that is a ton of money. A better solution would be to

a) switch to something like Google App Engine which will not charge you a dime until you are serving millions of pages a month.

b) ask a buddy to let you put the site on one of their under utilized servers (this is what I do for my startup, even though we run through terabytes of bandwidth per month)

c) ask a company to sponsor you. Many companies have a plethora of unused servers and would be happy to donate some of that to someone in need.

d) ask the community for donations. I bet you could scrounge up enough to cover hosting, especially if the community realizes that the alternative is ads.

If all of that fails, then go ahead and fallback on adsense - at least you tried.

I've updated the post to include your ideas, except for the App Engine one. My only disagreement with it is that it only applies to Python and Java, right?

Anyways, thanks for sharing your ideas.

I have a bunch of sites, and I don't think that the world is owed them on my dime. If they get free content, they'll have to learn to cope with a small ad at the side of the page.

And the guys who really care have an ad-blocker anyway.

Even with very moderate traffic, if your website has the right audience you can use Google Adsense to cover your hosting costs quite easily, without ruining the experience. I have a _single page_ web site (driven by a Rails service) where I am able to cover all of my hosting costs, across several providers, because AdSense returns a $3 CPM for me.

Could I afford to keep the site up without it? Yes. But why? Having AdSense on the site takes zero incremental work after the initial setup.

The author here is responding to my comment in another thread:

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146091

I was asking how I could approach making money with my group's hobby MUD, at least to cover server costs, and I had various concerns about how that would affect our team of volunteers as well as our players.

I think the response is reasonable, but I also agree with other comments here that said that the "covering server costs" is the first milestone towards hauling in some more serious money. If we can get at least that far, indicating that the Dark Mists community has interest in supporting its growth, we can then look into some expansion.

For example, we are in need of interested developers who are not about to run off with the source code to host their own MUD or use for their characters' and friends' characters' benefits, as has happened to us in the past on several occasions. A little legal support would be nice.

I recognize that the trust factor is its own ballgame and indicative of the management as well as the community. Every online project has to figure out how to handle these kinds of issues. I am not sure if it is harder with the project being an RPG, since you have to keep a large number of secrets in order to allow your Explorer player enjoy the game.

I was unaware you had a larger goal than covering costs. If you want more, then it's a different ballgame. Just don't be afraid to own up to your goal of making money. It's OK to have a hobby that makes no money, and likewise, it's OK to have a project that you want to monetize.

I can understand that you do now want developers to use their knowledge and access of the code to benefit in-game. But why be concerned about clones?

You could luck at how NetHack gets developed for some inspiration.

You could find alternative ways to cover your hosting costs. I'm covering all hosting for http://wasitup.com with referrals (245 pending at the moment) I've gotten for people signing up to Linode after I wrote this performance comparison of VPS providers: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

That makes perfect sense for wasitup (which I use and like, by the way). Good idea.

I've updated the post to include your idea. Thanks for sharing.