Financial update, so those of you purely here for the Skyline Chili trip reports can skip this.
This month is a little more complicated:
Expenses
- We/@zikzak upgraded the site’s hosting ability, which I think turned out to be a good decision given the debate and Trump’s COVID status. New cost is $80/month. That cost can go back down (after the election/inauguration perhaps) if it turns out that we don’t need the upgrade long-term.
Donations
- No paypal donations and no gift card donations in September.
- Patreon donations in September were a gross of $134.16 and a net (after Patreon fees) of $117.08.
- Here’s the complicated part:
2 of the donors who are listed as active had their donations declined in September. (The above $134.16 does not include the declined donations.) It isn’t clear to me whether those were effectively the donor choosing to no longer donate, or an unintentional credit card expiration, or something else. I will try to contact each of those donors just to make sure I understand which it is.
Donations going forward
- One donor reduced his/her monthly donation and an additional (third) donor shows up as declined from 9/30 forward.
- At this point, it looks like our net amount is about $103/month going forward if nothing changes. Still above the $80/month hosting, which is good, but getting closer to that level.
Advertising
Another complicated, unresolved issue. We are currently running ads on Google’s AdSense and it looks like that might be able to generate a dollar or two a day in theory (more on high traffic days). The major caveat is that Google is insisting that @zikzak confirm personal information, yet is seemingly ignoring his efforts to do so. @zikzak has repeatedly tried to contact them to resolve this issue, and has posted about it on Google’s public forums. But there is no resolution yet. So at this point, even though there is a dollar balance in this AdSense account, I do not consider those funds available to us in any way until they are literally in my hands.
At this point, I want to make a comment about the following post and the 5 people who liked it:
If this is a joke, then haha and whatever. But @beetlejuice has been saying this shit repeatedly and it’s a slap in the face to one of the very few people who is spending his personal time maintaining this site. @zikzak isn’t getting shit, other than the money that I reimburse him for hosting fees. The Patreon account is accessed by me. The paypal account is mine. And the Google AdSense account that I mentioned above is in @zikzak’s name, but I have the ability to log in and see the balance and any transfers. The balance is just sitting there. So I’d encourage everyone to kindly fuck off with any insinuations that @zikzak or anyone else is taking money from this site unless you have evidence that I’m not aware of.
Current balances:
Paypal: $30.39 after reimbursing @zikzak for July-September hosting fees. (We’re considering adding me to the hosting account so that I can just pay this directly.)
Patreon: $1,512.28
Total: $1,542.67
Thanks everyone for the support.