(Note — I'm posting this again so it'll show up for RSS users. — Mark)
Boing Boing has been growing really fast. If you click on the Extreme Tracking counter at the bottom of the page, you'll see we had 871,305 visits in March, a record month. In fact, every month is a new record month for Boing Boing. The truth is, we get a lot more visitors than the Extreme Counter indicates. Our raw web statistics show 3.5 million visits for March.
As a result, our bandwidth bills are going through the roof. If traffic continues along the projected curve, maintaining Boing Boing will become unaffordable.
We've been thinking about what we can do to survive — and more importantly, survive in a way that keeps the award-winning spirit of Boing Boing going, so it works for readers and the editors.
We've brought in our friend and colleague John Battelle, one of the founding editors of Wired and the founder of The Industry Standard, to work with us. He's looking into a variety of ways to help us pay the bills and make enough money to re-invest in Boing Boing. We're considering a number of models – sponsorship, context-sensitive text-ads, etc.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, we'd like to hear your ideas for keeping Boing Boing alive and well. What interesting models have you heard of, or thought of? Are there any other Web sites you know about that have a nice approach for paying the bills?
We've opened up comments for this one. Have at it. — Mark Discuss
