Announcing Ads on the Mix Challenge community page

[Mister Fox]

Hello everyone, the following topic is definitely more on the serious side of things.


Since the move to a dedicated place in March 2017, I tried to keep the Mix Challenge homepage and forum ad-free. Reason being, that the old place was fairly overloaded with advertisements (which also made it a bit slow).

In turn, the Mix Challenge tried the Patreon / Donation drive route, to keep things running and advertisement free (except for the License sponsors, of course). I had hopes that this would at least cover the minimal maintenance fees/expenses (that I currently pay myself). However, this sadly still doesn't cover at least the server costs, and we're also far from serious/simplified Social Media automation. The latter eating a lot of my spare time for preparing stuff several times a month, on top of the currently already existing workload "behind the scenes".

Let me state at this point that I am more than grateful for all Patrons, investing their hard earned money into this community. I can not thank you enough for this. Every penny counts to keep things alive and running. As of the moment of this post, the monthly financial support via Patreon is roughly 5,80USD (incl. all fees deducted). However - that's less than 1/4th of what is actually needed to keep at least the basic gear box running and greased.


Adding advertisements to the forum is therefore slowly inevitable.
The plan is, to implement them sometime ...
(edit: date redacted, I try to run this place as long as possible without ads)


But before everyone is up in arms about this, let's take the wind out of your sails...

• yes, we do have license sponsors (once more, a huge thank you to all companies), but they do not offer "financial sponsoring" as well
• the ads are planned to cover the basic maintenance costs first and foremost, every penny counts
• planned ads will be handled in a decent manner (current idea: only in the header and the footer section)
• there will be no "page-wide blockers" to restrict your access to the page, as I highly dislike such schemes myself (especially at news outlets)
• there might be a possibility to unlock a "clean forum skin" for you to select via the user account in turn for a certain amount of monthly donations (e.g. via the "Donation Hall-of-Fame") - however, this is a topic up for debate

I am being honest with you on this part. I am not making any money off of this - at least not in the short terms of things. In fact, neither of the staff did since the existence of the Mix Challenge in the year 2014. We all worked out of out spare time, free of charge.

As you know, handling the community is currently a one-man-show, and in Q4/2017 I sometimes invested (up to) 50+ hours/week of unpaid work into this! So please, once advertisements are implemented into the forum, and you enjoy what the community has been doing in recent years, consider not using an ad-blocker.

I'll keep you all informed on the status of this implementation.

[Jorgeelalto]

Damn, 50+ hours a week, that's too many. In that case, ads are more than justified. In fact, if they are about audio engineering and musical instruments it's not so bad.

I support the idea.

[OctopusOnFire]

It's sad that the monetary support is so low. As I said when I first joined, there are paid websites with similar theme and less content. And not precisely cheap. I don't think 1€/month would harm anyone's economy.

I'm not against ads, I'll whitelist the site on my ad blocker, but I don't think they'll cover for the costs. The only thing I can think of is putting more content in the vault to encourage people to contribute, and give access to it with a minimun donation (1€). The problem, of course, would be the time it takes to create content, but I'm pretty sure many newbies would pay to see a 30 min video of Mr Fox going through, say, last month's mix and explaining some techniques. Maybe a section to discuss good reference tracks for a mix, a VIP section with short, like 5-10 minute tutorials on de-noise, de-essisng, sound design, etc.

I don't know if spending time on social media is worth the effort, being as saturated as it is, and what little attention people generally pays, and moreover, being a niche activity as a mix challenge is. I think it would be much more efficient to focus on getting advertised by actual "mixing coaches" for beginners. You know the sites, Warren Huart, Joe Gilder, The pro audio files, The recording revolution, Jon Tidey, Kenny Gioia, Ian Shepherd.... I doubt many of them would do it for free, though, and it would take time to contact them, ask for a little promo and negotiate the terms.

[Jorgeelalto]

It's pretty hard to get people to pay for a web service. Well, in general, to pay for a digital service, a program or similar. It's like, you cannot see it, touch it and have it in your hand, so you cannot easily see the value of it.

Anyway, I think the idea of making videos is pretty good, if I remember correctly it was already there or Fox was thinking about it, but it could be pretty interesting indeed. Not only about mixing but since we have Songwriting, Remix and Mastering challenges there could be multiple series about synthesis, composing, mixing, a bit of premastering... Honestly if you need help with some of those I would like to (disregarding my obvious spanish accent ).

[Mister Fox]

Yes, I did talk about a possible video series - although for a different project. So we have to differentiate here

The videos I've been thinking about for the "Mix Challenge" page are supposed to be more or less visual "manuals" - to explain the rule set. Think of the Spectrasonics video manual for Stylus RMX, Trillian, Omnisphere, etc. The other videos (what I've been talking about on KVR Audio back in the days) are a private project (related to my freelance Audio Engineering work), unrelated to the Mix Challenge community.


Either way - I appreciate the feedback on that end. But at present I have neither the time nor resources to even think of going the route of offering Patron-only bonus videos.

[Mister Fox]

This thread has been started in the (hidden) Patron Vault end of November 2017.

Thanks for reading and commenting