In January, RPGFan came to you asking for help. Knowing that our financial situation was dire, we decided to finally give in and ask for help instead of continuing to lose even more money. It was especially bad considering the fact that our projections indicated that we would max out our bandwidth by March and would have to either pay more or cut out some of our content. Well, March is beyond us now and our projections were right. If we hadn't closed our pics section for a couple of days for renovation, we would have gone over our bandwidth limit, and before April ends we will have to set up a second server so that we don't go over the limit.
Now, I'm sure you are all wondering if our donations campaign was successful and what's going to happen with RPGFan. Well, here's the answer to that question: RPGFan needed $2,700 to pay for our server from July 2001 to July 2002. The % you were seeing on our donations button on the navbar reflected the percentage of that goal reached. You probably noticed that we've been stuck at around 53% for a while, but something unexpected happened and we now have 100% of that amount thanks to an incredibly generous donation from one of our readers in Germany. I have to say that I am very pleased by the amount of support we got from our readers, whether it was financial or just by sending us compliments and encouragement. I didn't think that we could possibly reach our goal through donations, but you guys have shown how incredible you are by helping us reach that goal, allowing us to breathe a little and invest more money to keep the site alive in the future. We thank you all for that.
Now, obviously this does not mean that RPGFan is saved. We were able to recoup the money that we had lost for the last year or so but we WILL have expenses in the future, such as the continuing costs of our server(s) for the next year and the years after that. That is why we are going to leave the donations button up for anybody who wants to help and contribute to the future of RPGFan. We are also heavily looking into various ways of making money so that we don't have to rely strictly on donations. Affiliate programs for soundtracks, RPGFan merchandise, future ad campaigns and a few other projects will go a long way into possibly allowing RPGFan to stop losing money and at least breaking even. But for that, we will need your help too. If nobody buys soundtracks from our affiliates, if nobody buys merchandises, if nobody visits our site anymore, we obviously won't be able to make that money, so we still need your help in a more "indirect" way.
We will be posting a section that will detail all the different ways that you can help RPGFan without necessarily buying more stuff, but by changing the way you buy things so that it helps RPGFan in the process. Just remember that RPGFan isn't looking to generate revenue for ourselves; we simply want to break even so that we don't have to PAY for running this site. If we ever happen to have more revenue than expenses in the future, we will simply keep it for any future needs (if prices of servers and bandwidth go up) or put it back into the site by giving out prizes in contests or other such things.
In any case, RPGFan is out of "immediate" danger thanks to you and now that we have recovered our losses from the previous year, we can go ahead and invest more money to ensure that the site stays up for at least the next year and then we'll re-evaluate our financial situation in a year and see how things went with our various projects to make us break even.
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Updated: 04.14.02 - 7:34 PM |
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| Rudo |