Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: nubbles526 on December 22, 2007, 08:49:11 am
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Has Hard-Light made any money from the google-ads? If so, how much? And who keeps the money?
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Most likely, yes. And most likely for Kalfireth.
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i very much doubt the money is kept for very long, its probably all spent on keeping the site up and running.
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The money is spent exclusively on hosting. When we have a surplus of revenue, we save it. When we have a deficit, we dip into our savings. Absolutely none of the money is ever given to any of the HLP admins.
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That's what they say but I reckon it's only so they don't take a pay cut now me and Tolwyn have joined. :p
Seriously though running HLP is fairly expensive. Generating false clicks won't help (Google take a dim view of that) but donations will. :)
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How exactly can Google tell what is a false click as opposed to a normal click?
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How exactly can Google tell what is a false click as opposed to a normal click?
Multiple clicks from the same IP address.
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Google already knows all about you, anyway.
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;7
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We better behave, otherwise we would end up as HC. Google got pretty pissed at them.
we dip into our savings
Our? Who are you talking about? (Probably there isn't a 'our', but only goob. Should change it to
we dip into my savings
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Actually I don't see any of the money, though I sure as hell wouldn't complain :)
As Goob says though, HLP has its own financial set up - it doesn't belong to any one person - it's HLPs entirely. No one person has ever profited, it all goes to the website.
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Yes. "Our savings" means HLP's savings. If HLP earns excess money, it goes to HLP's account. Not to any one person's.
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HLP has run a surplus?! :wtf:
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HLP has run a surplus?! :wtf:
Not really. When a surplus is recorded, all funds are channeled into the HLP Hidden Volcano Fortress account. It's slow going, but the Base should be operational by the year 3000.
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When BTRL was released, the burst of activity ran up a surplus. We've been slowly using that up over the course of the year.
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I'd like to see what happens when BtRL full is released. :shaking:
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Not as much as when the full WCS campaign will be released, because WCS is actually hosted here.
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Since Game Warden and HLP are hosted on the same server, that doesn't really matter.
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Phooey. So us and GW have the same fund, not a "you get half and I'll get half" thing?
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why bother running them as separate sites at all? wouldn't it be easier on the server to merge the forums and hosting accounts into hard light?
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That's what I've wondered. Possibly a conflict?
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Actually, it would probably be harder on the server if it were one big site. It would have to index and sort a much greater number of posts, and, unless the SMF forum team has made some breakthrough computing that I'm not aware of, such operations do not scale linearly.
Not that I think that's the reason they are still seperate sites. That reason is probably as simple as the fact that they've always been seperate sites and have developed vastly different styles and clientel, some of which would certainly be lost in a merger.
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Indeed. HLP and GW are separate identities who are in a "co-hosting of convenience". There's no plans or even thoughts to merge the two; we're just both benefiting from sharing a dedicated server.
As for finances, some clarification is in order. All the Google ad income goes to MatthewPapa, who also pays for the server costs. There's a slight but definite trend for costs to be higher than ad income each month, which is where your donations come in. Donations towards HLP hosting go to my personal PayPal account, which I have refrained from using for any other purposes for this reason. Every once in a while, MP will post that he needs this or that amount to cover server costs for that month, and I transfer it to him from my PayPal account.
It's not pretty, it could easily be misused, but that's how we've been working things. If anyone at any time wants to know how much we have stored up from donations, let me know (via PM since I don't read every thread) and I'll post it for the public. Google ad income is another story, however; during our short stint when the Google Ads were running off my Google account (before they saw the click fraud and disabled my account forever... :-/ ), one of the legal agreement things was that I could not reveal ad income to the public. So we can indicate general trends, but we can't say that we're getting $X.YZ off every click. IIRC, that amount varies based on what ad is being clicked on anyway.
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On HC it said that it was average .30c.
@Shade: We have 45000 topics, GW has 2500. I don't think that that would cause a server overload.