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| MicroWiki homepage with ads |
MicroWiki, the leading micronational wiki in the micronational community has a funding issue. Not enough financial support to sustain server hosting costs. Despite Patreon bringing in funds, it is not enough and Luxor ends up picking up the slack.
MicroWiki is primarily funded by Patreon which as of July 15th 2022 brings in 54.97$ dollars a month or 659.64$ dollars a year. However, this number can vary from time to time. Luxor the main technical administrator has made it clear that this alone does not fully fund the site and that he has been using his funds to keep the website afloat and has for years. Luxor has stated that Patreon pays for half of the costs.
MicroWiki has experimented with running google ads for non-logged-in users. Luxor has stated that they will not run ads for logged-in users as it would make editing the site much more difficult. For the first seven days, ads were run approximately 17$ were generated or roughly 2.40$ a day. If consistent that would generate around 73$ dollars a month. That is substantially more than Patreon.
The current costs to run MicroWiki are around 100$ a month, which includes the database storage, the web volume, the backups for the web volume and backups for the database storage and the object storage, this server gets easily overloaded. An ideal set-up would cost 120-130$ a month. If we add on the money made from ads to the money generated from Patreon then the site would bring in 127$ which is enough to sustain the wiki.
However, there are a few concerns. It is unknown and will be unknown for a while how ads will affect MicroWiki's total viewership. The ads placed also make the site less readable and can be in inconvenient places. The administration has tried to keep MicroWiki ad-free as long as possible due to despising ads.
In conclusion, it will be interesting to see if the administration continues running ads as a long-term funding method. The wiki is not self-sustaining yet and ads could help it reach a place where it would be self-sustaining. It could even lead to upgrades for the wiki.
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