More Bandwidth and Revenue Needed

[celibi87]

ithe onlyt reason i havent donated is because i am on a college budget. maybe when i get my next paycheck then i could donate but im really hurting for money each month and its not like i go on this site every day and download millions and millions of vids. i make vids but i limit myself on how long they are and how much they are in size. maybe if you gave me a little more incentive maybe i could pitch in 5 bucks but all i see is that im throwing money into something that might die off...

[shinji13]

I have only donated $6 and for the 700+ videos I have downloaded and oped I am a leech (but I will donate 10 bucks or so soon).

Anyway here is some suggestions:-

-You could get sponsors, I dont know how this works but this site is getting very large and I am sure there has to be some company willing to sponsor amv.

- You could remake the store, but instead of what you had in it before you should just have your own store (not cafepress). And buy shirts, sweat-shirts, mouse-pads, themed computer cases, etc. In bulk and sell them - *sponsor the fact that all money made from the products will go to supporting the site*. I would personally buy a t-shirt with Anime Freak, or AnimeMusicVideos.org, or some other slogan and surrounding it having anime characters etc.

Of course a store like this would require a lot of thought on marketing and of course business laws, but it could be expanded on (you could possibly select someone to be executive and they could make a thread.. everyone on the org could post their ideas and the executive of the project can organize everything together and work on the idea).

Well its just a thought .:shrugs:.

I also think bandwidth cuts would be a good idea, and incase your not doing this already are you making cuts in the code? Even though it wont help much it can still save a few bucks and that all adds up ^.^

[Flint the Dwarf]

Did you know your whole post is bolded?

[derobert]

maybe if you gave me a little more incentive

Any suggestions?

[rasilverstorm]

^ Yes, some people legitimately cannot afford to send $1. But if you are high-school-aged or older and not on welfare, you can generally afford $1, an envelope, and a stamp per year.

Yeah, and what about people who don't use $ as their national money ? It becomes quickly more complicated for people out of USA to make a donation, as the money isn't the same, and the sending fees can be much more expensive. I know that Absolutedestiny offered to receive donations in euros vy checks from editor in Europe, and convert it into dollars to make the donations (I don't really remember the details) but that kind of things can be only done exceptionnally. Also, donating throught Paypal needs to create an account, and I believe it's not free, so not everybody would like to create that account for a single donation. Things would be much more easier for international users if the org had his own credit card payment system.

I can't speak for any actual statistics, but I do not believe that 99% of the .org population is below high school age or come from foreign countries. The fact that the roughly 1% of the .org population that do donate typically give much more than $1 is a fact that we should all be grateful for (ie. think about that the next time you see someone with a Donated status).

PayPal is free to sign up with, but they require you to register a bank account or credit card number to withdraw money from.

If you don't want to use PayPal and really wanted to send money, you could always go to your local bank and get your currency exchanged and THEN mail that. However, we understand that this is inconvenient too and probably not the best way to guarantee that the donations get to us.

I don't know, but for outsiders like me (I live in the Netherlands) it's hard to donate, specially cuz I don't got paypal, and honestly I don't want to take it either... Maybe there could be something like a backaccount made for it where people from outside of the US can donate on. Just an idea but I hope it helps.

[xiao_tai]

well i guess i am one of the moocher users that has kinda realised that really 1 buck isnt really that big a deal.

i havnt got a pay pal account but im going to look into it


what i want to ask is beng an australian and the site being maintained by americans the conversion rate thing....


do you know if im able to direct deposit cash from my australian bank to your american account? the whole thing is a little new to me so i have no idea

thats kinda why i said i was looking into pay pal scince i here they take care of all those issues for you


anyway please get back to me

Xiao Tai

[xiao_tai]

im not sure if Animemusicvideos.org frequent the anime convention scene or not but have you thought about contacting some of the stalls
and asking them if they would be able to place a donation tin at there stall for you

if they seem hesitent why not offer a percentage of the takings or somthing.


oh also i am slowly puting together my website and scince i hope to have this place host some of my videos in future i will place an add down the side of the page encouraging people to donate to your site other then that

ive got nothing....

Xiao Tai

[Esrhan]

I wouldn't hesitate donating a certain amount to the org but at the moment there are no convenient or satisfying methods to do this. Checks are slow and take ages to process, money orders are unknown, I tried giving PayPal a try but they didn't have that good connections to my country and money in a letter is a risk.

If there were options for credit card payments then I think that would ease the whole donating situation, because they are globally used as well as convenient to use. Though as mentioned before many times such an option is not available at the moment for given reasons.

I believe the most obvious task, would be to focus on getting the credit card payment option available for the people. I'm sure I would donate via that.

[alpark]

Some are complaining about paypal. I am in the US and don't like it either. What about using clickandpledge.com? They take a little more of a cut and for those that have paypal accounts, they can still use them.
Just a thought.

[FerioDh]

FerioDh: That is very considerate of you to provide you own video hosting. However, do you only download non-local videos? If not, you are contributing to bandwidth use. Why not take the annual cost of hosting your videos, divide by two, and donate that amount? You would cut your hosting costs in half and help this site at the same time.

Hmm. Well, I put out about 8-10GB per month in video downloads through my hosting, and I have a TOTAL library of 3.16 GB that I have downloaded from the org. (Over the years, I have downloaded about another half gig on top of that, which I haven't kept around for whatever reason.) I guess my point is that I feel like I'm contributing sufficiently to easing the load to have payed my dues, and I'm not necessarily a downloading fiend. Again, not that I should get any perks from this, but it's just another reason some people (like myself) may not be donating. The suggestion of cutting my costs and moving everything over here is reasonable, but I'm not sure it's best for my situation. The question is - will the site continue to be understanding of other modes of contribution, or will donation be more enforced? I feel that, whatever comes out of this discussion, it's best to keep some flexibility for the many different reasons some people may not be donating, because some of us are still giving to the community.