I was wondering if any of you had any advice on making a little money on a website. We have some traffic - about 4k hits a day and was wondering what the best/easiest thing to do would be to make a little money off it.

We run our server from donations and while this has worked well for the last 4 years, I was hoping to take some of the burden off of our members. We pay 80 bucks a month for our server and if we could make 10-20 a month some something unintrusive on our site, that would be great.

Something that would feed the clans Paypal account would be perfect, though I could take checks, but I would really prefer paypal.

I found a placed called t-shirt hell that pays 4 bucks for every shirt sold from my link on our front page, that's really what peaked my interest in this whole thing.

80 bucks a month for a clan server of some kind? yipes.

anyway...

there's always google adsense.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

yeah, its pretty standard for a 32 man dedicated server. I thought about google, even looked briefly at their stuff - do you have any experience with them?

Oh, I should mention too, that adult content while great, is a no-no.

as long as you follow google's TOS, they're pretty good.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Have to go with Van. That's probably the easiest way to make clean money. You could potentially make more, but with substantially more work. The biggest bitch people have about adsense is that it can poorly match ads, and put up ads you might have serious issues with.

For example one comic which often touches on gaming issues, had 'buy WoW gold' ads....which the patrons of the site went batshit over. IIRC the comic had contact with google and such content was removed from their ads. Another site which deals with skepticism briefly had adsense and it put up ads for psychics, which again people found REALLY offensive. In that instance adsense was simply removed.

So you can get 'poor' match ups like that, but overall it's very unobtrusive, and google has a good name.

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Oh, and I'd make it clear to the community that it's simply to defray costs, I'd have complete transparency on 'teh monies'. If such transparency is too much of a PITA to upkeep then IMHO you tell the community you're going to pay for the site that way...and then no longer ask that the community pay for it, other than having a 'donate' button available, which you disable when you have X dollars ahead in the kitty to pay for server costs.

Or...go private and simply say its to pay for the site, and you're sure as hell not getting rich off it, but that's that. Sadly that's probably the 'easiest' way, though it removes the sense (and reality!) of community ownership.

No matter what the change is, someone will always bitch, but as long as people are honest and upfront, most communities weather changes well. I saw one very nice community die an awful death because an admin. was not upfront and forthright about cash issues, and people felt ripped off. In that instance though...turns out they were. (LumtheMad's site after he left).

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I will look into it. I am just picky about the site and don't want any ugly ads on it. I guess they (google) have plenty of options in their stuff, I run PHPNUKE and was hoping to maybe cram it into a side block. I think I am going to run it by the members first and see if they care or not. If not, I might give it a try for awhile.

Like I said, I'm not trying to get rich or even pay for the majority of the server, just 10-20 bucks a month would be fine. We have very generous members and we always meet and often exceed our donation goals.

Thanks for the help guys, I will let you know how it turns out.

Google Ads are just text, and you can customize colors.

And why god why are you using phpnuke? =( That thing has so many holes in it that it makes swiss cheese look like cheddar.

At least tell me you keep it updated.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

It was the system in place when I took over the gameserver/clan/website. I asked about it and the website guy (The Iranian) said that PHPNUKE was what he knew, so that's why we have it. I don't know a whole hell of a lot about it, we did get hacked last year, but our security was pretty loose. For example, the guy that set up my account (The Iranian) gave me the PW of "Lion". Yeah. So anyway, I beefed up security with a couple of add-ons and whatnot since we do have more than our fair share of enemies (the nature of the beast in the FPS world).

Well, since our only "incident" nothing has happened, and trust me, people are trying =) so thats all good. I think we are set for weekly or monthly auto backups and if not it's nothing that cant be lost - the only thing we have worth protecting is the forum shit and thats pretty solid.

I personally don't like PHP nuke for a variety of reasons, but I also don't feel like overhauling our website and shit either - so I get by.

Honestly, it works ok for us for the most part. Yeah, I'm sure it's not the best choice, but it is good enough. Maybe one day I will get a wild hair up my ass and do something new.

I've had good experiences with AdSense myself. Good configuration options as far as color scheme, lots of size choices, you can disable the use of image banners and stick to text in the colors you picked. I believe they've got PayPal payout now too, and they've been reliable for me as far as paying (I use checks tho).

As far as sites that may not be desired, you can filter URLs (which may take some work if you want to filter all say WoW gold ads).