In the “About me and this site” page I wrote
There will be no commercials or other advertisements on the show or the blog. Unpaid exceptions only for humanitarian stuff or Open Source projects. People who are supporting the show (e.g. 23 with sponsoring the challenges or the people below) get mentioned and linked.
but now I am not sure if that has to be that way with the blog. The video will stay free of all ads.
This stuff costs me about 15€ (22US$) a month – and I don’t run out of dark chocolate and red wine by paying that. But it is the equivalent of a couple of good prints or a book or a cinema ticket. I am not complaining here – I was and I am prepared to put that work, time and money into the GIMP project.
And before you now start to write me a mail with an offer for space and bandwidth – we are talking about 1.7 TERAbyte a month with a good uplink speed. And the numbers are growing from month to month by 200 Gigabyte.
I got a nice mail (which I haven’t answered yet – sorry) asking for a PayPal account to support the site. And that made me think about some possibilities.
I’ll look into the Terms of Service of PayPal and other sources to find out (”find out” – is that correct English or a germanism? Mails please! 
) how I can use my account safely with a donation button. Exposing a PayPal account openly might be not such a good idea from a safety point of view.
I have started to design some stuff on Cafepress for my own use – I have to wear the proper outfit if I want to go to the Chaos Communication Congress after Christmas to meet the GIMP crew and a lot of other nerds. 
When I am finished with that I’ll publish a shop there.
These two options don’t change the “look and feel” of “Meet the GIMP!”. You don’t have to click on the shop or donation button and they will not be very prominent on the sidebar. But the third option has a bit more potentiol for annoying you: Google ads. A podcasting friend gave me some numbers for estimating the potential of the ads – and I guestimated at least 50% of my costs. But you will look at the ads while visiting the site. I’ll not plaster the page with ads but use something like this on the top of the page.
So here is my question: Ads or No Ads? Please comment here and use the poll on the sidebar.
I don’t care if you put any advertisements on your page, so do it and then continue your video tutorial/podcast project please.
By the way I think paypal provides a safe way for donation accounts, I see them everywhere and it is not possible to pay something with your donation account without the password.
I promise you I will not buy any shirts or stuff like this!
No need to buy a shirt!
And I’ll continue to do these videos – with or without ads.
All people need to know to donate via paypal is the email address of the account. You can set up an HTML form that makes this easier for the casual reader to do, but all the form is doing is making it easy to contact http://www.paypal.com with the account email address.
The “safety” part is the passphrase you use when you create the account. Make it good. Make it unique. Do not use the same pass phrase you use anyplace else.
Advertisements don’t bother me unless(!) they are very prominent in sight.
You’ve to make your own roadmap in case of meetthegimp.
How many shows can you make? Do you have enough subjects?
I must say. You treaten the monochrome theme in a very ‘entertaining way”.
(sorry if I use the wrong expresion, English isn’t my motherlanguage)
I can’t say it enough that I like your shows and I believe that they have promoted in a good way to use Gimp instead of expensive simular software.
It’s just my opinion.
To the 15 euros. Is it an option to open an open an account for donating a free gift for visitors of your site and stimulate you to keep going on?
If 1500 visitors pay you 1 eurocent each month you play equal
Regards!!!
Hello!
I never saw any problems in putting ads (as long as they are not too flashy and stuff) on websites or in fact podcasts which require a lot of time and effort to maintain.
Some people say their website/podcast is their hobby so why shouldn’t you pay for it if you’d pay for, say, golf lessons, but on the other hand a lot of people benefit in reading/listening/watching their stuff, so why not ask them for something in return by clicking on a AdSense ad every once in a while.
Especially in my case, your screencast saved me from having to get photoshop or any manuals, effectively saving me money. Clicking on ads or making a donation would definitely be something I’d do instead.
In my view, this only applies in cases of paying for server costs etc. and maybe a bit of compensation for time, I am not a big fan of making profit from blogging or podcasting. And I am aware that this doesn’t apply to you, but just to comment anyway.
Hopefully this somehow expressed how much I appreciate Meet the Gimp!
Hello Rolf
First, I just wanted to say that I am a fan of your screencasts. Keep up the great work.
I know what you are going through, believe me. I recently had to switch hosting providers due to our growth. I switched over to Host Gator in the States. They claim unlimited bandwidth but maybe that actually means 10-15TB per month. Our bandwidth is much better now.
Nevertheless, hang in there.
Thanks for the great podcasts!
As far as your English grammar is concerned: you do much better than many native speakers. (It is perfectly acceptable to say “find out how I . . .” but Ger’s statement should read “You treated . . .â€Â.)
Don’t care about a few non-abstrusive Google Ads or so. When you’re talking about traffic – why don’t you enforce torrents more? Offer the direct download only as a last resort and tell people to use the torrents and the traffic you need should reduce greatly. You can even host on the Vuze platform from Azureus (www.vuze.com), e.g.
Hi.
Ads won’t bother me at all. As far as you example-link is concerned, there are no ads for me at all. Probably because i use firefox with adblock plus. So i would go for Google Ads. But Paypal is also a good idea. I already donated a few times, and hadn’t any problems at all. And i see Paypal donation buttons quite often in the web, so i would consider it a safe way to raise some money.
David
P.S.: Thanks for the awesome podcast.
Ads suck. Badly. I don’t understand how people can say that they aren’t bothered by ads. Donations on the other hand are a nice way to get your costs covered. Works very well on the gimp.org website.
Hi there.
I won’t feel bothered either if you go on putting some ads on the site; I’ll keep watching -and recommending- your tutorials.
But I don’t like the paypal thing at all; my wife who works as freelancer for customers all over the world had an paypal account and she had to cancel it (and lose the money) because paypal does strange things with some customers.
I won’t go into details here (something not so different from your flickr little problem after all), but when my wife got troubles with it I googled a bit and found out other people having as well had some issues with it.
What I mean is that for me is fine if you put some ads -fair enough if it helps you with the expenses of this wonderful stuff- and be careful if you go on with paypal.
Salud!
I like the video podcast because it is very useful for me, and because it has no advertising. I would not mind ads in the blog, but video ads would be painful.
Hello,
in my point of view, PayPal is a good way to receive donations, but please mention that PayPal charges fees for receiving money with it (also in the case of sending money).
Besides it’s a common known fact that donations often won’t be enough; I experienced that there will be a bigger amount of money coming in just after you established the donation system, but over time the money flow tends to stagnate.
Only really big projects can finance themselves only from donations.
And as you say, the projects traffic is constantly growing so were will be even more expenditures in the future.
Ads can be really disturbing on a Website, also mention that a lot of people use Ad-blocking-systems and possibly will not see the Ads at all.
Did you already thought about get sponsored by somebody, I don’t know if there is a fund by the ‘Bundesregierung’
; or possibly you could find a company or a rich individual that would support your effort.
Besides I really appreciate the energy you put in this project, the opensource community could really profit if there would be more people doing stuff like you do.
Armin
Hi Rolf,
It is completely understandable that you wish to be compensated in some way. As a matter of fact, you spend much time to prepare this weekly show. PayPal might work and it is not annoying at all.
As for ads, well, a few in the side or top bar is OK with me. If they start to flood around the side, frankly speaking, that will be annoying; not to mention ads in the podcast show.
Sponsors could be nice, especially if you manage to get sponsors involved who otherwise would not think of open source or GIMP. But also here danger lurks; if sponsor time eats substantially from the podcast time, it is as annoying as ads.
My two cents, Serge
Thanks for all the feedback.
I’ll stay away from ads. It’s giving up too much – my initial decision not to put ads online was a gut reaction, but right. This way it’s my project with some of you helping me by giving ideas, videos, blog postings and comments.
I’ll check out PayPal fees. And if they don’t take too much away then I’ll publish that.
I don’t need the money – I see it as my donation to the GIMP project. And my hoster has no volume fee – so the amount will stay in the same range.
But your reaction has been very supportive – you are nice people!
As far as the subject of ads or no ads is concerned. You’ve already stated that you will continue with this project regardless of cost (within reason, of course). So, what would the ads do for you? I suspect that you wouldn’t be happy in the long run with them as they will eventually start to crowd your message. On the other hand, if you were to make an occasional plea for help, I wouldn’t mind putting something into an envelope and helping you out. I don’t like PayPal for reasons of my own and wouldn’t use them but there are other means of sending money.
I agree 100 percent with George.
Whether or not you put some ads on the site, if you were to need some help I’d be glad to lend a hand, but anyway I refuse to use Paypal.
When the first adds came on the sites I use, I didn’t care. Often they where even relevant and therefore interesting. I didn’t mind those. Some years later it all changed; they started to blink, then they started to make sound, then they started to follow the mouse – and you could almost think they where at war with you. I downloaded (free and open s.)proxomitron, and have used it ever since with all my browsers. No adds whatsoever will show up on my screen, and I can browse faster then before(since I dont download all that crap).
I don’t think that ads that are both relevant and not irritating by blinking and so on, will bee any problem for most people. For me – well, they will not show up on my screen anyway:-)
I know it’s an old post and the question got resolved a long time ago but I wanted to offer my point of view anyway.
I use AdBlock on Firefox with default filters so I wouldn’t see any ads at all on the sites I visit. I do realise, though, that money earned with Adsense and company sustains a lot of useful sites that wouldn’t have the means to pay the hosting and traffic fees otherwise. Due to this I disable AdBlock on each and every site I consider worth it (and I end up clicking some of them, quel horreur!). So distrowatch.com, tuxmachines, all the linux blogs and this meetthegimp page here (unnecessary as it turns out) don’t get their ads blocked. Thus it’s not actually up to the administrator of a website to decide if I am getting any ads or not in my browser window – it’s entirely up to me.
Come to think of it, any site giving itself a trouble to ask the users if they would approve ads on the site would make it to my AdBlock whitelist. For decency.
I agree with and also do almost everything Tengu mentioned in his posting. I have not read all the posts here however I went searching for the PayPal button myself after watching the first few episodes. I realize that many sites depend on ad revenue to help pay the bills and others rely on over priced merchandise. This said I have not to date purchased any site related merchandise (even though I liked the items) due to the inflated prices even though I understand it is more of a donation than anything. If you do decide to use PayPal in the future I will be sure to donate.