Community support

This is the 38th issue of Fusion Authority and I have to say we're going strong. The readership is still growing steadily, the content is rather useful (if I do say so myself) and the feedback we get from the community is great. There's just one problem. We don't charge for this service. Yes, its true we have banner ads, but to be totally honest, they don't bring in much money. We tend to give out banner space to friends and colleagues in support of the community, rather than searching out paid advertisements.

For the first 6 months of operation, we did have a sponsor in AbleCommerce. This worked out rather well with us getting some very much-needed cash. Sadly, this relationship recently ended. Now we have a question. How do we fund this? How do we pay the editors and writers we have (yes, we are behind in paying some of our authors. This will be taken care of.) I've come up with a few suggestions and I'd really like community feedback on them.

1. Charge a small fee for a subscription
2. Charge a site fee
3. Trust in banner ads
4. Look for more corporate sponsors
5. Fund it out of pocket

Just as a teaser, we have a number of additional projects being worked on to advance the community. The first is an annotated documentation system that allows people to make comments to the ColdFusion docs. This is currently in a final beta here. Additionally, we are building COMPLETE archives of all the houseoffusion lists. The structure of this is done and the display is in alpha at the moment. Currently this is limited to an archive of the Spectra-Talk list, but others will be put up soon. One of the places that the cash will be going to is to pay for editors to organize and clean up all of this content. Five years of content with anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 messages a year is a LOT of work. What we need is a clear plan for support.

Thank you for your feedback and suggestions and please enjoy the issue. Oh, as a small experiment, I've removed the banner ads on this and the previous issue. This is to see if the ads are really useful at all.

Michael Dinowitz
Publisher, Fusion Authority

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