For those not scared of reading,
I have lined up a few items which seem to have raised questions within the community.
Thanks for those who cared to ask or send feedback :)
I'm hoping the provided read and numbers will help "put things in perspective" for you.
Put things in perspective I:
Needed budget for a professionally run community
I asked someone familiar with running community sites what kind of annual budget he'd expect when operating a site like wikiloops. The answer was
“roundabout 100.000 € a year.” (that's 117,000 US-$ for you)
I asked:
Why's that?
And the answer was:
“No one works 365 days a year, so you'll need minimum 2 people on the project,
ideally one with a hand for code and one who is good at tending to the community and taking care of communications.
The two will need some place to work, so you have office cost,
plus you'll need a part of the budget for server infrastructure and other external services,
be it lawyers who review your terms of use or fight down copyright claims, special app coders, graphic designers, translators, promoters and tax accountants.
You can try to invest less, but if you want to keep up with the webs evolution and want to grow, then less budget is not a good idea at all.”
Put in perspective:
The professionals calculation of 100k € per year is 1.26% of what the wikipedia is asking for in Germany this year (they ask for 7 900,000 €).
The assumption that two people are needed may seem questionable, but if you look at soundcloud, who provide a technically similar service (= quite similar development needs)
to a much larger audience (= very different community management needs),
and notice that soundcloud now has 247 employees (after downsizing in 2017, source: wikipedia),
you'll understand our business expert felt wikiloops would have to do with 0.8% of soundclouds personell – that does not seem like an overly generous team, if you get the picture.
Conclusion:
That guy knew what he was talking about. At his budget, we'd look at an operation cost of $ 13,35 per hour.
Put things in perspective II:
Sources of income to cover the budget need de-mystified
wikiloops has one long term sponsor (thank you, Thomann!), and -again since august 2018-
is displaying visual advertisements which generate some income.
If our sponsor sticks to their commitment and if advertising revenue stays within the monitored range, these two sources will amount to roundabout 5,000 $ in 2018.
Then, we introduced the “download tickets” which generate some income - but judging by the current trend, that will amount to another 1,000 bucks in 2018.
There are people who believe there must be some kind of secret music deals going on in the background which generate income. That is a myth, and who ever believes that should answer the question why a service like CDbaby successfully operates by charging musicians money to release their audio onto marketplaces – if there was options to get rich on home-recorded audio, I guess someone would have put such payed submission services out of the game by now.
You may as well send me an anonymous email and try to set up a sneaky background deal where wikiloops gets rich and you get use rights to some wikiloops music. See what will happen, put it to the test and feel free to publish my responding communication here, but please let go of any untested conspiracy theories.
Conclusion:
We will gather 6.000 $ from the named sources,
plus whatever is donated or spent on membership upgrades.
Put things in perspective III:
Why wikiloops must be either a charitable thing or discontinued
So we'll need 117,000 $ minus 6,000 $ = 111,000 $ budget need if we tried to operate wikiloops as a business enterprise.
We currently have 292 active members who uploaded in the past 30 days,
1.739 members signed in for a visit during that period.
If we split the 111,000 $ between the people who came around in the past month,
we would be either looking at:
380 $ per head / year if the uploaders were asked to pay, or
63 $ per head / year if anyone signing in to wikiloops had to pay.
I do not know if you agree looking at those figures, but my feeling was:
That is not likely to work. If you are aware of how many people on this globe (and on wikiloops) can not afford to spend these amounts of money on fun things, and if you shared my experience of how reluctant internet users are when it comes to paying for something, then you will probably agree above chart is completely unrealistic.
Conclusion:
If I want to operate wikiloops, I'll have to face the fact that this will not work when measured as a business enterprise.
The only solution is to see wikiloops as a kind of charitable non-profit thing which by nature does not cover it's cost,
and which relies on outside people who pour in finances and volunteer to help the good cause.
By taking into account that we have some people who volunteer,
that these folks work from home at no budget expense, I can operate with different figures than those offered by the outside business expert, so my conclusion was:
“I'll do it for 40.000 $ instead, and I'll make up for the missing 71,000 by motivating volunteers to help on wikiloops, and by developing for a small salary.”
You can call that insane from the start, but that's how I'm going about, and the 40,000 is pretty close to the $5 per hour we have been advertising thru the shoutbox.
Put things in perspective IV:
Operating on a non-profit budget of 40,000 $ - how?
Let's not forget the 6,000 $ covered by advertising and sponsoring, so down to 34,000 $ we are.
Now let's look at the membership upgrades / donations side of things:
For some time, the number of “supporting members” (worth 5 $ a month each, some give more) has been fluctuating somewhere around 300.
It rises when we have a support rally, and falls as supporting membership statuses time out.
Some new people join the supporters, some old supporters move on to something else.
The evolution is almost impossible to forecast,
since we are looking at a mix of people who follow my calls to donate and give in “charity mode”, while there are others who support as a means of “purchasing an upgraded membership”.
All I can do is hope the trend of 2017 will more or less continue, and if we assume it will, we can do a rough calculation and say we may gather:
300 members monthly fee of 5$, would make 1,500 $ a month, equals 18,000 a year, when there is 34,000 to meet.
Conclusion:
Despite all optimism, user support and volunteered work, the charity project wikiloops has an annual “budget gap” of 16,000 $,
of which even I have no idea where they will eventually come from.
Put things in perspective V:
How have we managed that in the past? And how about the future?
In 2017, one member stepped foreward and payed half of the stated "gap" in a one-time move, so wikiloops could keep going,
and I chipped in with the other half - or simply cut my salary accordingly, so the ship wont sink.
In the end, credit belongs to my wife and parents who have been silently making up for what I'm not earning.
If you wonder about the future, look at it this way:
To make things simple, let's assume all money that comes in during the years-end funding rally during November and December 2017 is meant to fill the tank for 2018.
Then, on November 1st, I am looking at a scenario where I have no telling how much support there will be.
That day, saying “wikiloops will go on in 2018” is equivalent to saying “On top of working for little, I'll chip in with at least 16k $ if no one else helps”, and it could be a lot more if it turns out the number of supporters drops on the way thru 2018.
Then starts the funding rally, and a lot of people out there choose to help and donate some cash.
On November 20th (day of writing), 103 individuals have chipped in with a total of 3656 $,
and if I add that to the expectable ad+download ticket revenue 2018, then I have a safety net of now 9.691 $, leaving me with over 30,000 $ risk to carry (assuming no one will continue support in 2018, which is not likely, but there is no guarantee, either).
Of course there are 10 months in 2018 before November 1st 2018 starts the whole game over again, and there are 40 days left in 2017, but you can probably smell that the weight of the uncertainty is quite heavy.
It is hard to live a relaxed life if you have no idea if your salary will be available two months down the road.
If at the end of the year it turns out I “only” had to cut my salary by 8k (putting me at an hourly rate way below minimum wage in Germany), then that is bitter enough, but having to carry the constant insecurity is even more energy-slurping than having to live a simple life without a lot of luxury.
Conclusion:
Maybe you will agree that there is an unbalance in the “who is carrying the load and doing the work” and the “who is having fun on wikiloops” - but that is again one thing which is absolutely normal in charity organizations. You would not stop to support the red cross, just because the people they treat seldom do, right?
I have been in the situation described here for some time now, and as you can tell, I have not decided to give up so far.
I'm doing the best I can to reach out to people like you,
hoping someone will step forward and say something along the lines of “hey young man, count me in, buy your wife some flowers and make sure not to worry about your salary in 2018 and beyond.”.
And even if that won't happen, you may count on my attempts to keep the 'loops around for all they are good for.
I believe there is some sort of justice beyond money, and I'm hoping for those of you who do support, for my wife and my parents and last but not least for myself that one day there will be a reward for the joy wikiloops brought to a lot of people. Wish me luck, and feel free to join my end of the scale anytime.
Put things in perspective VI:
Given there was a budget of 40,000 $ available on january 1st 2018, what would be likely to happen?
I'd turn off the google advertisement on wikiloops first thing. To me, the revenue is in no relation to the negative effects (such as site-slow-sown and data hogging policies by our “ad partner”).
I'd run a lottery on two flights to the wikiloops meeting from overseas between the supporting members.
I'd roll back to offering wikiloops without usage limits for free in areas (think Africa, South America, Russia, Asia) where the average income is low, or online payment availability is not to be expected.
I'd put some more force & budget into getting more publicity about wikiloops going.
I'd push into releasing the first cross-operating-system mobile app for wikiloops, that could go live by late summer if I put my head to it.
I'd look for a payed someone who would be suitable to substitute myself for some weeks of the year, so I'd be able to take my wife travelling without having to stay in reach of wifi, and without carrying the wikiloops laptop wherever I go.
Thank you once more for your interest, and feel free to comment or ask about a detail which I may have missed to explain.
Edited by Dick on November 20 2017 16:06
I have lined up a few items which seem to have raised questions within the community.
Thanks for those who cared to ask or send feedback :)
I'm hoping the provided read and numbers will help "put things in perspective" for you.
Put things in perspective I:
Needed budget for a professionally run community
I asked someone familiar with running community sites what kind of annual budget he'd expect when operating a site like wikiloops. The answer was
“roundabout 100.000 € a year.” (that's 117,000 US-$ for you)
I asked:
Why's that?
And the answer was:
“No one works 365 days a year, so you'll need minimum 2 people on the project,
ideally one with a hand for code and one who is good at tending to the community and taking care of communications.
The two will need some place to work, so you have office cost,
plus you'll need a part of the budget for server infrastructure and other external services,
be it lawyers who review your terms of use or fight down copyright claims, special app coders, graphic designers, translators, promoters and tax accountants.
You can try to invest less, but if you want to keep up with the webs evolution and want to grow, then less budget is not a good idea at all.”
Put in perspective:
The professionals calculation of 100k € per year is 1.26% of what the wikipedia is asking for in Germany this year (they ask for 7 900,000 €).
The assumption that two people are needed may seem questionable, but if you look at soundcloud, who provide a technically similar service (= quite similar development needs)
to a much larger audience (= very different community management needs),
and notice that soundcloud now has 247 employees (after downsizing in 2017, source: wikipedia),
you'll understand our business expert felt wikiloops would have to do with 0.8% of soundclouds personell – that does not seem like an overly generous team, if you get the picture.
Conclusion:
That guy knew what he was talking about. At his budget, we'd look at an operation cost of $ 13,35 per hour.
Put things in perspective II:
Sources of income to cover the budget need de-mystified
wikiloops has one long term sponsor (thank you, Thomann!), and -again since august 2018-
is displaying visual advertisements which generate some income.
If our sponsor sticks to their commitment and if advertising revenue stays within the monitored range, these two sources will amount to roundabout 5,000 $ in 2018.
Then, we introduced the “download tickets” which generate some income - but judging by the current trend, that will amount to another 1,000 bucks in 2018.
There are people who believe there must be some kind of secret music deals going on in the background which generate income. That is a myth, and who ever believes that should answer the question why a service like CDbaby successfully operates by charging musicians money to release their audio onto marketplaces – if there was options to get rich on home-recorded audio, I guess someone would have put such payed submission services out of the game by now.
You may as well send me an anonymous email and try to set up a sneaky background deal where wikiloops gets rich and you get use rights to some wikiloops music. See what will happen, put it to the test and feel free to publish my responding communication here, but please let go of any untested conspiracy theories.
Conclusion:
We will gather 6.000 $ from the named sources,
plus whatever is donated or spent on membership upgrades.
Put things in perspective III:
Why wikiloops must be either a charitable thing or discontinued
So we'll need 117,000 $ minus 6,000 $ = 111,000 $ budget need if we tried to operate wikiloops as a business enterprise.
We currently have 292 active members who uploaded in the past 30 days,
1.739 members signed in for a visit during that period.
If we split the 111,000 $ between the people who came around in the past month,
we would be either looking at:
380 $ per head / year if the uploaders were asked to pay, or
63 $ per head / year if anyone signing in to wikiloops had to pay.
I do not know if you agree looking at those figures, but my feeling was:
That is not likely to work. If you are aware of how many people on this globe (and on wikiloops) can not afford to spend these amounts of money on fun things, and if you shared my experience of how reluctant internet users are when it comes to paying for something, then you will probably agree above chart is completely unrealistic.
Conclusion:
If I want to operate wikiloops, I'll have to face the fact that this will not work when measured as a business enterprise.
The only solution is to see wikiloops as a kind of charitable non-profit thing which by nature does not cover it's cost,
and which relies on outside people who pour in finances and volunteer to help the good cause.
By taking into account that we have some people who volunteer,
that these folks work from home at no budget expense, I can operate with different figures than those offered by the outside business expert, so my conclusion was:
“I'll do it for 40.000 $ instead, and I'll make up for the missing 71,000 by motivating volunteers to help on wikiloops, and by developing for a small salary.”
You can call that insane from the start, but that's how I'm going about, and the 40,000 is pretty close to the $5 per hour we have been advertising thru the shoutbox.
Put things in perspective IV:
Operating on a non-profit budget of 40,000 $ - how?
Let's not forget the 6,000 $ covered by advertising and sponsoring, so down to 34,000 $ we are.
Now let's look at the membership upgrades / donations side of things:
For some time, the number of “supporting members” (worth 5 $ a month each, some give more) has been fluctuating somewhere around 300.
It rises when we have a support rally, and falls as supporting membership statuses time out.
Some new people join the supporters, some old supporters move on to something else.
The evolution is almost impossible to forecast,
since we are looking at a mix of people who follow my calls to donate and give in “charity mode”, while there are others who support as a means of “purchasing an upgraded membership”.
All I can do is hope the trend of 2017 will more or less continue, and if we assume it will, we can do a rough calculation and say we may gather:
300 members monthly fee of 5$, would make 1,500 $ a month, equals 18,000 a year, when there is 34,000 to meet.
Conclusion:
Despite all optimism, user support and volunteered work, the charity project wikiloops has an annual “budget gap” of 16,000 $,
of which even I have no idea where they will eventually come from.
Put things in perspective V:
How have we managed that in the past? And how about the future?
In 2017, one member stepped foreward and payed half of the stated "gap" in a one-time move, so wikiloops could keep going,
and I chipped in with the other half - or simply cut my salary accordingly, so the ship wont sink.
In the end, credit belongs to my wife and parents who have been silently making up for what I'm not earning.
If you wonder about the future, look at it this way:
To make things simple, let's assume all money that comes in during the years-end funding rally during November and December 2017 is meant to fill the tank for 2018.
Then, on November 1st, I am looking at a scenario where I have no telling how much support there will be.
That day, saying “wikiloops will go on in 2018” is equivalent to saying “On top of working for little, I'll chip in with at least 16k $ if no one else helps”, and it could be a lot more if it turns out the number of supporters drops on the way thru 2018.
Then starts the funding rally, and a lot of people out there choose to help and donate some cash.
On November 20th (day of writing), 103 individuals have chipped in with a total of 3656 $,
and if I add that to the expectable ad+download ticket revenue 2018, then I have a safety net of now 9.691 $, leaving me with over 30,000 $ risk to carry (assuming no one will continue support in 2018, which is not likely, but there is no guarantee, either).
Of course there are 10 months in 2018 before November 1st 2018 starts the whole game over again, and there are 40 days left in 2017, but you can probably smell that the weight of the uncertainty is quite heavy.
It is hard to live a relaxed life if you have no idea if your salary will be available two months down the road.
If at the end of the year it turns out I “only” had to cut my salary by 8k (putting me at an hourly rate way below minimum wage in Germany), then that is bitter enough, but having to carry the constant insecurity is even more energy-slurping than having to live a simple life without a lot of luxury.
Conclusion:
Maybe you will agree that there is an unbalance in the “who is carrying the load and doing the work” and the “who is having fun on wikiloops” - but that is again one thing which is absolutely normal in charity organizations. You would not stop to support the red cross, just because the people they treat seldom do, right?
I have been in the situation described here for some time now, and as you can tell, I have not decided to give up so far.
I'm doing the best I can to reach out to people like you,
hoping someone will step forward and say something along the lines of “hey young man, count me in, buy your wife some flowers and make sure not to worry about your salary in 2018 and beyond.”.
And even if that won't happen, you may count on my attempts to keep the 'loops around for all they are good for.
I believe there is some sort of justice beyond money, and I'm hoping for those of you who do support, for my wife and my parents and last but not least for myself that one day there will be a reward for the joy wikiloops brought to a lot of people. Wish me luck, and feel free to join my end of the scale anytime.
Put things in perspective VI:
Given there was a budget of 40,000 $ available on january 1st 2018, what would be likely to happen?
I'd turn off the google advertisement on wikiloops first thing. To me, the revenue is in no relation to the negative effects (such as site-slow-sown and data hogging policies by our “ad partner”).
I'd run a lottery on two flights to the wikiloops meeting from overseas between the supporting members.
I'd roll back to offering wikiloops without usage limits for free in areas (think Africa, South America, Russia, Asia) where the average income is low, or online payment availability is not to be expected.
I'd put some more force & budget into getting more publicity about wikiloops going.
I'd push into releasing the first cross-operating-system mobile app for wikiloops, that could go live by late summer if I put my head to it.
I'd look for a payed someone who would be suitable to substitute myself for some weeks of the year, so I'd be able to take my wife travelling without having to stay in reach of wifi, and without carrying the wikiloops laptop wherever I go.
Thank you once more for your interest, and feel free to comment or ask about a detail which I may have missed to explain.
Edited by Dick on November 20 2017 16:06
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