On the 24th March we asked for help paying for the server, and lots of you generously donated enough to pay for the server for 3 months, that money ran out after the May 27th payment, so the June 27th payment I mostly funded myself.
We currently have £13 a month coming in from recurring donations vs a £78.98 a month server cost, so thanks to the guys who set up recurring donations, it’s most appreciated, unfortunately it falls well short of what’s needed.
I am currently in the process of buying a house, so if the site is unable to support itself (or at least better than it currently does) I might not be able to afford to keep it going.
So does anyone have any ideas on things we can do to bring in enough money to keep the site afloat?
I don’t know if anybody else fancies writing some music, but we could do a bandcamp type thing and sell an album of music people here have made, artwork etc…
I’ve done that on another forum and we made about 300 quid. It’s not a lot of money, but could help.
(Also it’s a load of fun.) The only thing would be if there were enough people who write music etc…
Have you thought about linking artists to amazon – as in, a click through. That helped out a forum I used to frequent (apparently)
Lol, like it.
I actually do have Amazon affiliate accounts (UK and US), but I don’t really know how I’d go about integrating it into the site in a useful way, or if anybody would even bother using it.
I can’t write music, but I’d be happy to be Bez to your Happy Mondays and dance around shaking my maracas 😉
YES. always important. Can you pull the face?
If you have an Amazon Affiliate account, what about adding affiliate links to the movie, music, tv show pages. It would be unintrusive, and would actually be useful. I buy most of my stuff through Amazon anyway, I’d be more than happy to buy it through this site if it helps.
In the case of the k-pop stuff, http://www.yesasia.com is the best international source of k-pop/j-pop/c-pop etc. Also I have seen them offering paid links on other sites so it looks possible there too.
I like the album idea. I’d be willing to re-record and contribute a song I wrote back in high school. (I have a copy, but the timing’s off and I’m well aware of it.) I’d also be willing to make a CD booklet with lyrics, pictures, things like that for the disc if all the artists would be willing to provide art. If we keep the link up and maybe try to do one every once in a while, and build up a bunch of them over the course of time, it could be some long-term income. (Even if not a lot of income.)
The “premium status” is a good, and tried-and-true, idea. It works for a ton of other sites, but there really needs to be some perks to the status to really make it work. Maybe when we get the 4k categories, we could limit them to premium members! (charging for bandwidth, you know :P) Or maybe give them access to any beta features before the general users get them. I don’t really know, we’d have to brainstorm and see what would work.
I also think we could try to partner with some independent productions, link to their project and provide all of the high-quality artwork here on f.tv exclusively—for a small fee, of course. A good place to get into that might to be just contacting projects on kickstarter.com and see if anyone’s interested.
Anyhow, that’s all I have for now. I might bring some back later.
Off the top of my head, I could suggest that if a user wanted to request a non-standard image (of a type or dimension that we don’t host) and was prepared to make a small donation, I as a mod, would be happy to meet the request. 🙂 Probably wouldn’t rake in much, or be very frequent, but it’s one possibility. I personally, am about 3 months away from paying off my credit card, so after that, I’ll try and up my subscription a little too 🙂
I like this idea. I’d be willing to do some.
I don’t know if this really would help to motivate the people to donate, but maybe a donation could give a user some kind of premium-status where his logo-requests will be done first. I mean: many people would like to have clean libraries with lots of logos and fanart, so maybe some are willing to pay for it. Open here would be who creates those in an acceptable time-frame..
The other thing: Did you ever try to corporate with TMDB? Maybe the movie-logos would be a great addition to their service and they could help fananrt.tv out with hosting.. Just an idea..
Ah and I forgot mentioning flattr, which makes donating much easier for many people and may increase the target-group (:
I think you have a really good point on the first issue Sven. 🙂 XBMC community forums have some sort of colour or label or tag attached to donors, I think it is about time that was implemented here too. Don’t get me wrong, although I do this from the goodness of my heart (not!) I like to see my name in lights! And who wouldn’t?! Just a recognition would go a long way to encouraging people to help out. A simple medal system would go a long way. 5 stars, 5 medals, etc, just to try and encourage and reward our users. 99% of the people on here realize, they are not going to get a any financial reward, nobody is in it for that, but a peer-based reward means a lot to our users – an acknowledgement from your peers that you are good.
It’s far from a solution to our finacial problems, but it’s maybe a help?
i´d be happy to annoy all Nox users with a pop-up on startup to urge all users to donate some money. perhaps some will take notice, i think we have a fairly large userbase.
cheers.
perhaps it´s worth looking at pnggauntlet?
just checked some of the pngs from your site and it was able to reduce file size by 5-10%. not too much, but still noticable. on their page they´re saying that it is without quality loss.
http://pnggauntlet.com/
i have not too much knowledge about graphics, so sorry if it turns out that those programs are crap 😀
Yeah, we should probably look at something like that, but in all honesty, bandwidth isn’t really an issue, we use less than 1TB a month and have 15TB available before we even need to start thinking about it.
I could be usefull for users themselves to reduce the required memory of their HTPC.
5-10% probably won’t make that much difference, I’ve looked at something like this in the past, the only issue is it can be a bit complicated as you have to take the original file, duplicate it, perform the optimisation on the duplicate, if the filesize is smaller but not 0 (some error has occured) replace the original, else discard the optimised duplicate (sometimes they increase in size), there are also several tools so it might be a case of having to run several passes using different tools.
…and another suggestion: redirect to http://fanart.tv/blog when people visit http://www.fanart.tv so they see that help is needed 😉
not a bad idea, if only for a couple of weeks
are u one of the Nox Skin developers?
Yes he is 🙂
nice, i thought the name was familiar 🙂 My favorite skin. phil65 u have to make spinning movie discart support to your git 😉 it will make fanart.tv even more interesting to Nox skin users.
Please blink blink 🙂
It already is. You just need to know where 🙂
And i don’t want spinning discs when browsing the library
we do not make too much use of disc.png for movies that´s right. just doesn´t have enough images to make it an essential part for a viewtype, that´s why only InfoPanel vewtype allows to be able to see several movie discarts at once.
apart from that i don´t think that there is any other skin out there which makes that much use of all your nice images 😉
yeah or make some sticky news section on main page…
http://fanart.tv/blog now doesn´t work correctly anymore.
Should be sorted now, its because I set the homepage to the blog temporarily
80 £ a month. Why don’t you offer some kind of premium membership that give some kind of special offers, like access to private forums, more influence on how this site is running, 1 unike fanart.tv email, some online personal disk space….
lets say 20£ pr.year for a premium 🙂 everyone with a job can afford it 🙂
JDope….
The music idea sounds funny, but I think its not about, what the people who do the stuff for this site can do – its about what the users of that stuff can do. I mean there are many great people in here, who spent a lot of time in creating artwork for this site. But there are so many more people, who use that stuff and enjoy it using xbmc. Iam absolutly sure that this is going be THE site for their fanarts. I can see the community here is growing fast and the images are absolutly great. I think there are some ways to get some benefit out of it (not meaning to make money….just not spending it)
1. This website
We need to find a way, that users who download images in xbmc will visit the fanart.tv website. I truly think that most people who uses our artwork never have visited this site. If we can change that, the number of klicks will raise rapidly and thats what its all about. The key will be the download-process in XBMC. It needs a link to this site. I know that this is not completly in your hands but iam sure that this is the way to get people intrested in here. How to do that ?
CD-Arts are a good example for that. Iam absolutly sure that so many people out there have an MP3-Archive which is not tagged perfectly. So its always worth to take a look here, if you can find a CD-ART (a cover), which the API didnt find at all. I just think of a message-box, when you leave the CD-Art manager or a point in the menu which is linked to this site. The perfect way will be to get a point in the context-menu of an artist. You press “c” and there will be a button like “show fanart available”, which puts you directly to the artist page here.
2.) Donations
I think there wont be many people who will donate for just getting an image done. You have to keep in mind that we even cant be sure to find a source somewhere to do an image for the request. It think in the same way as in 1.) . you need to motivate the people who are using and enjoying this stuff. And sorry but its again the XBMC-API who is the key for that. There must be the donation-possiblity … also a button or something like that, which takes you again to this site. A special page where is explained why we need some donation and finaly a button to do that. I truly believe that there are many users who will do that. I mean if we just find 80 users, who are willing to donate 1£ – it will do it. And iam sure this can be done that way……i mean just 80…..out of 100.000 or much more ??
3.) Adobe ?
If we can increase the numbers of klicks here, why not trying to find a company who is willing to place their products here. For sure “Graphic-Products” will be the best choice. I mean we are talking about high-quality graphice here. So why not trying to get a company interested in offering their products here to do exactly that. (Adobe was just an example….maybe a little bit to big…but who knows)
Just some thoughts….not sure what can be done, but i think this site deservs so much more people to visit it, because to be honest…its just GREAT 🙂
All we can do is, to get the database growing as much as we can.
there are 407,000 unique users of the API 🙂 Some interesting points though, some of it not possible, but definately some thigns to think about
hey thats the point………finding a way to get the 407.000 people taking notice of the problem…..i cant believe that there are not 80 out of 407.000 per month which are willing to donate just 1£ for the work which is done here……maybe we can do something like scrolling bar at the top of this site saying : “Thanks to making this all possible to : ……list of donators…..”
We did have a list of donators, but the plugin didn’t work properly, I need to find a better solution, and then go through all previous donors and add them to the list, which will be a fair bit of work, hence it hasn’t been done yet
What about asking for a front page news item on xbmc.org if there is over 400k unique users of the api then it should be big enough for just one mention… That way it will show up in the default RSS as well and would create a little bit more awareness.
Also you have quite a few talented artists on board, so why not ask if they are willing to help create some kind of product line. T-shirts are the most obvious.
I’ve seen quite a few sites do this kind of thing
We do actually have a spreadshirt account, I’m waiting on a designer fried to do a new logo for us first, but this could be a pretty good idea.
Another option would be to create something like the “Fanart Association”, where members are involved with creating new standards and deciding on future ventures, events etc, members would vote on new members and pay dues to be part of the association, for example £15/mo, and maybe a one off joining fee, this would mean we would only need 6 members to cover the server expenses to begin with, but I don’t know if we would even have enough people interested to do something like this.
It would depend on how many members the association could get, but later on it might be possible to run with something like 10 management members paying £40/yr and 28 normal members paying £20/yr or something like that, if we were bigger something like that might be possible.
Yeah, with all the API users i consider this site to have huge potential. It just come to pushing on the right buttons 🙂
How come the site has no advertising? Have you talked with Google about it? How many hits does the site get?
Also, since most of your users never visit the site and use the api through xbmc or mediabrowser, make the api a premium member benefit. For a small amount, say $5-10, a premium user gets an api key which must be entered into their download plugin.
None-premium users can still download manually but will have no access to the api. This way the site is still available to everyone, but the folks who use the most bandwidth, via the api, will help pay for it.
I realize this will require some re-writing of the plugins, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
API-keys aren’t really secure.
Like in python these are easily extracted from the code
Also it would make our service less useful, so I wouldn’t really want to do that as it would probably adversely affect the site
Adding a nag screen to the add-ons would probably be a little better then limiting access. The nag screen would be disabled for donators, ie 1£/month or 12£/year would disable the nag screen. This would need an add to the api providing a list of active donators
I know I will be donating, it fell off my radar(I know, no excuse.. 🙁 ) And I will be adding a nag screen to cdART Manager.. And posting on my XBMC Thread.
Hmm hadn’t thought about that.
I see now the site has some advertising. Talk was made about Amazon. Don’t they have an advertising setup where if a user goes to their site from here, this site would get paid? There should be a ‘Buy This From Amazon’ link on every art page maybe. People follow those all the time.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/getstarted/
If people follow a link to amazon and buy something, the site gets up to %15 in referral fees. So if a user is looking at artwork for an album, sees another album they don’t have, they can follow the link to it on Amazon, buy it, and the site gets a fee. It would be work to set up, but maybe look into it?
automating the process is the issue with this though, i’ll look into it more though
Good idea
I think there are many good ideas here….but i still believe creating some traffic on the fanart.tv-page is the important thing…..having that traffic on your page you can take the next step…..for example the amazon one……….
Maybe a stand-alone art downloader app that premium members can use? Username and password could be in the app and verify user status ie; premium member. If the user is not a premium member, they are taken to a page where they can start an account and make a donation.
Most of us have XBMC or Mediabrowser I suppose, but people could use an art downloader for music for example, and that might attract other types of users.
I totally hate standalone apps. The whole reason i made Artwork Downloader is to get rid of that.
There is already an cdArt Manager that handles the music section.
Not every user is a media centre user though Martijn.
@catamount not a bad idea, but I personally don’t know anyone with the skills to create a standalone app that would be willing to do the work for us.
If anyone does want a stand alone app give http://themetabrowser.com/ a try, seeing as they were kind enough to donate some licences for our facebook competition 🙂
yup that’s what I meant, only for people who don’t use xbmc or mediabrowser. I’m thinking more for people just to get images for their music. I personally don’t play music in mediabrowser, I just use WMP for that. Mediabrowser/XBMC is for movies and TV (to me). Point is, it might get just plain music users interested.
Anyway I’m just throwing ideas out there – they may not all be great or workable.
Kode, have you thought about posting in the mediabrowser and xbmc forums just to remind people that your site needs donations to survive? I mean, go right to the users because many of them might not actually visit this site.
Also those forums might be a good place to ask coders for help writing an app, especially if donations are involved.
Fanart.tv could maybe corporate with My Movies.
Would it not be possible to charge users for access to the API, while leaving access via the website free? I’m sure many wouldn’t mind chipping in an annual fee for using the API as opposed to downloading artwork manually off the website.
Lots of good comments since last night, and some of them (such as making this blog the front page) are already working. I have to agree that increasing site traffic is of utmost importance, and the best way to do that might be asking XBMC coders who use this site to link to us in their projects.
I also want to point out that I’d pay some money to be able to influence new categories and art types. 😛
Hi Kode,
This is Soultaker from MediaBrowser – Are you interested in selling FanArt.tv?
You can reach me on the MediaBrowser CT if you wish to discuss things further.
Take care bro,
-ST
Maybe quite obvious, but there’s no advertising on the home page (blog). How about putting some there and perhaps also some in the popup Window that appears when you click a logo.
Also maybe put a popup Window telling people to turn off their adblockers to support the site.
Adds everywhere is like selling your soul.
Personally i would’n’t visit a site anymore when it is littered with adds and pop-ups.
There are better ways i hope
I’ve tried to keep the ads on the site as unobtrusive as possible, that’s why some sections don’t have any, and the ones that do, hopefully the ads that come through are more like extra content that might be useful to the user, dunno if I succeded, but the thought was there.
Can’t say that I disagree.
So one totaly different idea……..
you ever thought of the next step…for example including biographie for artist ?
I realy dont know, if thats the way this page should go, but it would be a perfect browsing page for everyone then….
Just an example of what i think could be intresting (Artist page for example) :
Name of Artist
Date of Birth
Date of Death
Biographie (language buttons)
Number of Cleararts / Fanarts / Thumbs
Discographie (maybe possible to link the Musikbrain-Datas ?)
Disographie can look like this :
Cover CD-Art
1974 Kiss yes no (maybe a dl and replacebutton if its a “yes”/upload if its a “no”)
1974 Hotter Than Hell yes yes
1975 Dressed to Kill no no
……………..
(btw. this would be a good option anyway if possbile….it makes it easier to see what kind of stuff is missing….)
It maybe be the totaly wrong direction…..but its just an idea i had. It would combine so many websites in just one perfect site. And for sure this will create a lot of traffic. I know this sounds like a lot of work……but you asked for ideas and this is one of mine 🙂
oh well … bad formating :
Disographie :
…………………………..Cover….CD-Art
1974 Kiss………………..yes……no (maybe a dl and replacebutton if its a “yes”/upload if its a “no”)
1974 Hotter Than Hell…yes……yes
1975 Dressed to Kill…..no……..no
So make it another music info site like this one that just started?
http://www.theaudiodb.com/
If the server cost about £80/month, if 80 people give 1 €/£/$ per month, it’s OK.
So why not create a small subscription with paypal. Everybody pay just 1 €/£/$ each month or 12~15 €/$/£ eahc year.
And why don’t create a donator key to be add into API to be able to download stuff from XBMC ?
paypal (with recurring payment option) is already on the site however few have donated.
Like already mentioned a donator key could be easily abused by others. It need to be locked on username/password
What if you talked to some skinners and perhaps the movies that don’t have any logos could say “There’s no artwork for this title. Please consider visiting fanart.tv and add some.”
That might get some more traffic to the site and you might find some more contributors as well. Shouldn’t be a problem since the skinners probably want the site up as well.
Just another idea I got when reading here that some users HATE ads and some would like the idea:
Build a custom minimal homepage users could set as their browsers homepage.
You could add a google-search (google has affiliate-programms where they pay per search) and pay per view banner on it.. That’s the way Firefox collects money.
I would be very happy to set something like this to my new browsers homepage.. Whenever I open a new Tab, it makes ching ching for you (:
By minimal homepage I mean a an additional site.. something like fanart.tv/customHome.php or something like that, not fanart.tvs ACTUAL homepage
I am more than happy to pay for the services the community provides.I would love to contribute but Photoshop is something I have never grasped!!
With 407.000 users using the API, the majority presumably through artwork dowloader why not exploit this traffic rather than the lesser number who visit the site.
Martijn could you sell some advertising space on the artwork downloader finish report?? With 407,000 views I’m sure someone would pay to have their name there
I would like to see some kind of status of the donations for this site. Perhaps it’s already possible, but I can’t find it? Like: This months donations is £77 of £80. This way I would feel a lot more comfortable to donate.
The problem we have is finding a good plugin that does that, there are ones that have similar functionality, but because we already have a couple of monthly subscribers it seems to break the IPN functionality of any plugins I add.
What is it you are uncomfortable with? The site has *cost* me personally over £700 for things like hosting and other costs (such as the domain, version tracking, chat software, etc) even with every donation counted, so if you think I’m profiteering from the site, you are a bit far from the mark.
I do agree that we could do with something better, but I don’t have the time to develop something, most of the free ones are crap and if I have to pay for one it needs to be right.
If you have any suggestions or want to do the leg work to find something suitable though, please feel free 🙂
If you don’t mind saying, what’s the biggest revenue stream this site has? At the moment I’d hazard a guess that it’s the donations. Of course it’s not ideal to rely on donations alone to meet the operating costs so the natural angle would be to try and make the site self-sufficient, to monetise it in other ways, so it can sustain itself.
Some have mentioned advertisements and I don’t think unobtrusive advertisements would be out of place. Most people use the APIs for the data, and those that visit the site wouldn’t mind some adverts here and there.
With that however you still have the issue of driving people to a site who’s primary function is to serve people who don’t, and don’t need to visit the site. Not an easy task. Perhaps though efforts could be made to partner with the more viral and web-savvy artists out there and offer to host their new, or even old, artwork at high-res. They would then tweet/blog their new artwork and could link to fanart.tv etc to generate hits? The announcements could be incorporated into the front page news section. Hopefully that would create the perception in the online music community that this is the place for artwork on their favourite artists. *shrug*
There’s a website that I visit from time to time called RapGenius which is another lyrics website with the USP that their users will explain the often complicated slang and references used in hip-hop. What sets them apart however is they seek out the artists themselves to explain some of their lyrics via verified accounts.
Mashing up the two ideas perhaps we could come up with something that will generate hits to feed the advertisements.
That link doesn’t appear to be functioning; the URL is http://www.rapgenius.com
@red I like the ideas, and yeah, it’s not even close, donations are pretty much the major source, adsense pays out enough to pay the hosting costs every 4-5 months on a good run, 10-14 months on a bad run, with the average being somewhere in between (although it has picked up a bit in the last couple of months, whether that was down to us asking people to support the site, or will be an ongoing thing remains to be seen).
If we could get any artists to agree to that it would be pretty awesome, but I wouldn’t even know where to start, and then there’s also the possiblility you would also get the side effect of the less viral and web-savvy artists becoming pissy about them being on the site.