Young Writers Society

Since 2006, the Young Writers Society has been funded more or less through advertising. Some months are better than others, but advertising has enabled YWS to operate continuously ever since the site temporarily shut down for financial reasons for a few months in summer 2006.

However, due to a few reasons, I'd like to try moving YWS from an advertising-supported revenue model to a donations-only revenue model. I honestly do not think donations will consistently cover hosting costs or make up for the loss of advertising revenue, but I think it will at least come close.

This is not something that would have worked even two years ago. However, YWS has been around for such a long time that we now have members who joined when they were 14, were active for a few years, but left as time wore on and are now in their mid-20s and donate occasionally to the site. There's also several people who donate every month through subscriptions.

Additionally, I'm increasingly worried about online privacy and the amount of information that is involuntarily stored. The advertising program YWS uses, Google Adsense, once worked by matching ads to the content of the page. But, Adsense now mainly works by tracking your activity and matching ads based on your preferences. As YWS' target demographic is 13-18, that kind of targeting advertising is a concern to me.

Last but not least, the site shutting down again for financial reasons is not in the cards. That happened in a very different time -- it was costing me over $100 a month to keep YWS running at a time when I was fresh out of college and paying for an apartment that was way too expensive for my salary. Revenue per month was also essentially nothing (ad revenue was about $10/month back then, and as payments weren't released until they exceeded $100, that meant a very long wait...).

Nowadays, it costs about $200 per month to keep YWS running. There's three separate servers: the main server, the WriterFeedPad server, and the secondary server for when the main server is down. The main server and WFP have recurring backups through Linode. Other costs include Cloudflare's paid plan, domain registration renewals, and the weekly payments to freakforchrist.

Over this weekend, I'll set up a donation counter to show on the front page sidebar. If you're interested in donating, click here to donate or click on "Become a YWS Supporter" in the footer.

I'm also open to suggestions of what to do with that blank empty space in the header now. I could just remove that area along with the logo altogether, but it's a useful space for announcements so I'd like to keep it.

Anyways, if you have any questions or concern, let me know!

Let me know if there’s anything I can do. I will go homeless before I let YWS shut down <3

Could we put a review feature box up there? Like show the latest review in a box like we do when we congratulate users for reviewing during Review Day?

Oh, I just had an idea - maybe a very short list of upcoming site events? Like "July 2 - LMS begins" or "July - Camp NaNo." It would help get the word out of what we have going on.

How about advertising YWS things? Like a story that hasn't gotten reviews yet. Or something in the forums or storybook section that wasn't noticed by many people.
Someone can take the responsibility of searching for such things.
I can't donate yet, since I am just a kid, but I will make sure to come back and donate once I am older. YWS is like a second home to me

Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaate. I just saw this completely by accident... and I'm one of the older members that you're targeting! Just so you know that this thread probably needs to be advertised better...

Anyway! I see it now! Will respond to it in a more active way probably sometime later this week... after all, even though I'm barely on nowadays, I do love YWS. <3

Aaah I was thinking about this the other day! And then I decided to come back. I'm in a tight spot with money now but I'd promised myself I'd donate once I climb back out of my overdraft.

Stupid question but - I'm still getting ads. Specifically where the donations scale is, they're overlapping each other... Should I be getting these? The banner ones are gone, but the one on the sidebar is still there.

I'm having the same issue as @StellaThomas - I was just about to go report it in Report a Site Bug. On the home page, nothing is blocking the donation bar, but on all other pages the sidebar ad is. This is on a Mac using Chrome.

I'm also seeing an ad under the donation counter on the sidebar. Only on my computer (laptop running Windows 10 in Chrome) and not on mobile. Seems to be on every page.

Should be fixed now! My apologies for that.

Hey @Nate! I don't know how much control you have over this, since the donation stuff is presumably managed by an e-payment provider, but: I don't have (or want) a PayPal account, and I can't donate by debit/credit card, because it won't accept my billing address as a valid address.

In particular: 1) State is required, but I don't have a State, because I'm not in the US, and 2) it won't accept my postcode because it's not formatted like a ZIP code.

Are you able to change it to accept non-US addresses?

I love that we're 5 days into September and the thermometer is already full. It makes me so happy that we have such a generous and wonderful community!

As a side note, it has disappeared for a moment but maybe it's just calculating the new donation amount.

I definitely didn't break it. Nope. Not me.

So, with the donations thermometer, I have it set up to disappear once the goal is reached. Also, any excess is rolled over to the next month. Thus, the thermometer will show up again in October, starting at $45 (13 recurring subscriptions, and $6 excess so far). (on a quick sidenote, maybe what I should do is add the thermometer to the main donations page -- that way anyone can see progress throughout the entire month)

Like Heather, I'm really amazed too at how quickly the goal was reached. I did not think it would even actually happen by the end of September. Thank you everyone for your incredible generosity.

For those who can't donate, don't worry about it at all. Remember, the reason why anyone donates to YWS is because of the great community here. So to encourage donations, go review and participate across YWS!

Also as a quick heads up, I am going to briefly re-enable ads for guests only sometime this month. The Google Adsense revenue is sitting at $87, and that $87 will sit there forever until it crosses $100. So, I'm going to show ads to guests only for about a week. The amount earned will go toward the October goal (so, October may actually start at $145).

@Rydia ->> But you were the one to break it!

@Cadi ->> It should accept non-US addresses. When clicking through to donate with a credit/debit card, there should be a country drop-down near the top of the form.

@Nate ->> I don't think it's fair to say that I broke it since you designed it to 'break'

I think having it permanently on the donations page is a good idea though and maybe a replacement info-graphic for when it's full just to say the goal has been reached for this month and thank you?