I smell bullshit

[Pescado]

Sites featuring advertising banners can very likely take in enough money to remain profitable simply because the cost of the actual hosting is, as I have proven, peanuts. If a site can take in maybe $20 a month from ad revenue, and this is probably a very low figure, they are making a profit off this.

I don't really see anything wrong with this, though. It's not coming out of my pocket. I just block all the ads anyway, not like I'd ever buy any of that shit.

[lemmiwinks]

Furryfox rocks on this. Blocking ads is a godsend.

[toomanyguppys]

Knowing what I know about Google Adsense and their rules, and knowing what I know about some of the supposedly kid-friendly content that is on TSR, I'm kind of surprised they've managed to keep the Google ads on their own site.  

As for the amount it costs them to have a Google Adwords ad of their own, that only depends on how much it gets clicked compared to how many of those clickers either turn into paying customers, or generate some money for the site by clicking on the google ads or other ads there.

Edited to add: If anyone has a sims2 site with google ads on it, hopefully they realize that they CAN block TSR's (or any other site's) ads from showing on their own site.  They may not want to--the TSR ads might pay well heh, but I thought I'd point out that they CAN choose to do so if they wanna.

[liegenschonheit]

On most small sites, Google adds pay out squat. I've tried it, and given the choice, I'm better off with an add free site and accepting the occasional donations that come in than trying to make any kind of revenue from Google. Seriously, on one site I hosted, with a low to moderate amount of traffic, I generated a grand total of like fifty cents in a month. Funny enough though, I've noticed that on larger sites that can generate some sort of payout from Google, Google finds some "violation" of terms to shut them down. Basically, its something of a scam to get nearly free adverts on websites.

Just say no to Google Ads. All the smart kids have adblock anyway

[Mac_in_Black]

Oooohhh, I hate annoying ads. Block em! Block EM! BLOCK EM!

[Pescado]

Just say no to Google Ads. All the smart kids have adblock anyway

Admittedly, people who wield adblockers probably don't represent the target audience for an ad anyway, given that they're likely fundamentally unwilling to consider the idea at all.

[sickpuppy]

Sites featuring advertising banners...., not like I'd ever buy any of that shit.

'In your face' advertizing pisses me off so much, such an annoying personal space invasion in an already stressful civilization barely worth living in, I make it a point to remember who/what the ads come from/are for and NEVER EVER buy their shit!

My one person sit down stike against that type of advertizing

[Delphy]

grizzelda,

If TSR having more upload options tham MTS2 is a reason for you staying there, then I am more than willing to enhance MTS2s system where I can.

[BlueSoup]

What are the TSR options for uploading?  I did it and I found it much worse than MTS2.

[Pescado]

 Besides, someone did the math once. The profit he makes off TSR is huge.

The math speaks for itself. Delphy claims about 0.07% donation rate. That means at least 700 subscribers per month out of TSR's 1 million, and this is a lowball figure: MTS2 doesn't require donations and people are not terribly compelled to give them, whereas you go nowhere on TSR and have no reason to even be there otherwise. At 700 subscribers per 2 months, $8.95 per cycle, TSR thus rakes in a yearly income of $37590/yr.

Operating costs, with intelligent hosting selection, are on the order of $100-$150 a year, which is how much it costs us to pirate all their shit and offer it free to the world.

Now, do you think 0.07% is a realistic subscribe rate given that paying is MANDATORY? And if not, how many orders of magnitude higher? 0.7%? 7%? The figure for 0.7% is $376K/yr. The figure for 7% is $3.76M/yr. Even the smallest and most lowly of these estimates is sadistically huge.

[Delphy]

I'm guessing extra stuff like specifying number of bedrooms, lot sizes, type of clothing, and all that stuff. (Which I'll be rolling into the next major MTS2 update anyway)

[BlueSoup]

I'm guessing extra stuff like specifying number of bedrooms, lot sizes, type of clothing, and all that stuff. (Which I'll be rolling into the next major MTS2 update anyway)

That'd be good.

[Delphy]

Operating costs, with intelligent hosting selection, are on the order of $100-$150 a year, which is how much it costs us to pirate all their shit and offer it free to the world.

TSRs hosting costs are at least on par with MTS2s - probably a bit higher since they have (at last rememberance) 10 servers whereas MTS2 has 7 (if you include S2C).  They also pay people for managing the site and servers and coding and all that jazz.

Not to put a dampener on your "$150 a year" thing, but in all honestly, you really couldn't run a site the size of MTS2 or TSR on that kind of money since you'd be looking at 1) shared hosting and 2) not much bandwidth per month, which equals crappy performance and so on.  Remember that you don't have as many concurrent users download stuff as they (or I) do.  Any website provider who has a vast number of people downloading stuff concurrently is going to want to shift you onto dedicated boxes, which ups costs.

That said, they do have a lot of ads (they are *everywhere*) and a lot of "omg sign up now!!!" stuff, which is really annoying, so I'd say they are getting a lot more than you think.

[Pescado]

Not to put a dampener on your "$150 a year" thing, but in all honestly, you really couldn't run a site the size of MTS2 or TSR on that kind of money since you'd be looking at 1) shared hosting and 2) not much bandwidth per month, which equals crappy performance and so on.

Well, I have unlimited and run at 3 TB a month right now. You had, what, 12 TB a month and pay a bazillion times more than I do? "Dedicated" server runs at around $300 a month on a low end estimate. For the price of THAT, I could purchase 30 regular accounts! You're just not thinking outside of the box.

Remember that you don't have as many concurrent users download stuff as they (or I) do.  Any website provider who has a vast number of people downloading stuff concurrently is going to want to shift you onto dedicated boxes, which ups costs.

I still 3 TB a month, you have what, 12? 18? That's not a large enough difference that I can't buy myself out by splitting it across more servers. Like I said, you're just not thinking out of the box. You're not thinking like a cheap, miserly bastard.

[Delphy]

Yeah but it's not about bandwidth at all Pescado.  It's about CPU load, database queries, server optimisations and just general concurrent users at any one time.

I bet if you checked the apache server-status you'd have hardly any usage there at all - for MTS2 it maxes out 200 MaxClients within about 20 seconds of starting the httpd processes.

Don't think about it in purely bandwidth terms - there are a lot of other reasons to have multiple servers.  Running MTS2 on a single server even with unlimited bandwidth would basically result in a completely unusable site and it'll kill the box.  I may not be as cheap as you, but I still do want to have a working website

Regardless though, with optimisations and improvements you can cut down the number you need, and make it so that things run better, thus not needing to upgrade so much (ie pay more for more powerful machines, etc).  MTS2 has been very static in terms of servers for quite some time - the only main change to hardware has been for the fileserver for a disk upgrade, but otherwise it's all been software changes.  I daresay if I didn't do it myself (or, like other paysites, I *paid* somebody to do it), it'd cost a hell of a lot, so I suspect that this is, in part, where paysite owners spend some of thier gains.