[gorgon_123]

1. this is none of my business
2. i'm a curious monkey nonetheless
3. hypothetical situation: with the recent opening of revenue streams on this site (sponsors + the store) i hope that the capital that Jude has invested in this site ($5000 was it?) will eventually shrink to nothing. And the monthly maintance/bills for this site will hopefully be covered one day. Suppose this happens, and it costs no $ out of Jude's pocket to keep this site up what happens with the excess cash (profit) that head-fi may one day generate?
4. I realize that this may never happen (and I'm not in a position to know since I have no idea what kinda mulah the sponsors etc are bringing into the site).
5. i'm just being a curious monkey... please I hope this doesn't pressure Jude to disclose his entire financial situation as it is none of our business.

anyway... i'm being quiet now

 

[dhwilkin]

Not that I'm an authority on this or anything, since it's not my site, but I'd guess a couple of things could happen if there was a surplus:

1) Upgrade the hardware/software for the site
2) Do some advertising in Stereophile or something (who knows, maybe we might see a TV commercial one day!)
3) Give the excess money back to the sponsors

 

[jude]

With the two sponsors we have, monthly costs still aren't being fully covered, but it does get us a lot closer than we were. The idea is to, of course, cover the costs completely through sponsorships, and, yes, I'd like to recoup some of the money I put in if and when that's possible.

It's almost impossible to plan for a month-to-month break-even. So far every month, we've fallen short. Some months going forward, hopefully we'll bring in more than we spend -- and that is my goal, to bring in more than we spend. That is the only way to be able to fund continued growth of the community, and also to fund continued improvements.

Occasionally things will also break or need repair -- I want to be prepared to deal with these matters. I don't want to be sidelined by a broken server that we can't afford to replace. Or handicapped by bandwidth costs as they grow (and they will) -- bandwidth will probably always be the single biggest month-to-month expense to cover, and it is quite expensive (even now).

I also want to provide storage space for members to use for photos and other headphone-community-related files (only). That way we're not all struggling to find a decent photo hosting service, the free ones having pretty much disappeared. NOTE: I'm not sure when the exact date for this is, or how much space we'll each have, but this is something I very much want for us.

Long story short, gorgon_123, the sponsorship money will all go toward running Head-Fi and improving it. On those months that we may bring in more than we spend (which is something I can hardly wait for given how it has been so far), then we'll sock it away for cool stuff (like the aforementioned storage among other things) for the community, as well as for repairs and for future cash shortfalls. Right now, it's still all shortfalls. I'm working on it.

 

[gorgon_123]

another question: now that the two most obvious sponsors have signed on are there any other interested parties we can look for in the coming weeks?

 

[jude]

Quote:

Originally posted by gorgon_123 another question: now that the two most obvious sponsors have signed on are there any other interested parties we can look for in the coming weeks?

Yes, there are some others we should be seeing soon. Of course, I'm not in a position to name names until they're final.