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8 Comments

Might have to run ads.

Despite all of my attempts to avoid it, at the end of this month, we're going to start running ads on the site. Why? Because it costs SO MUCH to stay online and relevant. Even these posts on an established platform see exactly 0 views, let alone patronages or donations. I need to maximise every cent I can from this site, so we're going to slowly push more ads each month, maxing out at 6 per post (which isn't a lot when you actually look at the length of the posts themselves). Mission failed, I guess.

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    noooooo. don't run ads...

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      I don't really have a choice at this point. Content alone takes up massive amounts of time, and yet we're still losing money on it. None of us have the disposable income to justify it for much longer.

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        it doesn't take up that much time. i write a lot of content each and every day.

        ... how can i help?

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          An example is a post like this, which took us a week to put together. We had to read and analyse the text, identify every bit that a reader would find useful (Context, themes, techniques, PALS, etc.), and then find external sources to back up what we found. This is, for most of us, on top of going to school and working offline.

          If you want to help us out in terms of content, this is our to-do list for the next few weeks. If you're still interested, please either reply to this thread, DM me on Twitter, or send an email to [email protected].

          If you want to help us in terms of not running ads (i.e. funding), take a look at our Patreon.

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            damn. those are huge posts. yeah, that takes time.

            ... i'm big into small posts, consistently, over a long period of time...

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              The issue is that we can't split posts much smaller than that. A post that covers one syllabus point will be around 200 words, so users will waste more time trying to find the exact bit they need (this was the issue I found with services like Scienceflip). The only intermediate size is just arbitrarily splitting posts, but that, IMO, makes navigation even worse.

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    How much traffic do you have? The ads will only benefit if you have a large number of users. How about some paid courses?

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      Paid courses defeats the original idea of free education, and the target audience tends to not have jobs (and therefore won't really stick around if what they're looking for costs money). This is, I think, one of the biggest issues with targeting high school students: you can't monetise directly from them, because many won't have a source of income which they can spend digitally, but you still need to have some sort of gain because of the time spent on development.

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