After doing some more research, the biggest reason I can see as to why to not introduce advertising is that advertisers pay for unique impressions. Those impressions pay at most $0.02 per click, the averages will likely be much less than that, and then they only kick in at a predetermined level, for example, you must have 100 click-throughs. That means that given the current membership of about 2000 members, each member would have to click on at least 1 and many would have to click on 2 distinctly different advertisements each month, just to raise $50.
Imagine the average daily users at 28 ... that means every user would have to click through 90 unique advertisers each month, 3 a day, everyday .. just to raise $50. Will there be 90 unique advertisers on theswamp? I don't think so ...
My objections, for what they may be worth, are that this advertising schema has been shown numerous times to be unprofitable, unreliable and unsustainable. As unpopular as it may be, the offer to host theswamp, given the amount of expected bandwidth usage in the forseeable future, hosting would cost about $30 per year, excluding domain registration.
I know of at least 3 different offers to remove the cost of theswamp and these have been rejected. One was for free hosting for at least 1 year, one was for $30 annual hosting, and one was $60 annual hosting. These were rejected because it would not allow Mark to manage the hardware, upgrade software and tinker with the hardware as he saw fit.
There is nothing wrong with this, but in the interest of full disclosure, I think the membership should know there are other solutions to the cost of hosting theswamp.
Given the wishes, or rather, the lack of serious objections to advertising on theswamp, I suspect it may well come ... just remember, once it is here, very likely there will be no going back. Once theswamp is indexed in google, it will remain there forever, there will be no going back.
