I'm a boffin now? Awesome!

I say keep shifting in whatever cash is available - those visitors who don't register or become charter are contributing in their own way that way. Though of course that only goes so far - might as well not lop it off while there's still something, uh, loppable.

I haven't done anything in the way of research but in the back of my mind I keep wondering about the costs of renting versus owning servers...

You should put the donations window back up on the front of the site. I know some people complained about it, but it's a nice constant reminder that websites like VS aren't free. It's OK for atheists to employ a little guilt now and then, when appropriate.

Put the price down on charter, or make a charter lite, that'll drive more to buy it and in the end get more income. The only reason I don't have charter is that it's simply too much a month. I already pay world of warcraft, so this feels like at lot to give extra.

other than that, I suppose a charity drive would work?

Donation window is a start, but I think I commented a while back about adding banners to the pages for charter members. I remember people scoffing at the idea, but if you're a charter member then you're already someone who wants to support the place so I think the majority of people on here are willing to help out in any way possible even if they hate you for calling them blankfistula.

Ahh, guilt.. I was just thinking of this. My charter is almost up and normally I would be able to afford to continue it, but with a baby on the way and the emergency room fees I've already racked up, I don't have the means to continue it. D:

Would it help if I clicked on the ads?

uhh. bake sale? kissing booth? insider trading?

i log out and click on ads. been doing that since i got here. i'll do it more often.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Putting ads on Charter accounts would not make a big difference - Charter traffic is probably less than 1% of total traffic.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Also, this is not a guilt plea for people to cough up. It's more just me talking about my concerns and maybe getting some groupthink happening.

I remember Charter being cheaper a while ago. If you go with charter for every 20 days, thats $182.50 a year. I know it's hard to justify these kinds of expenses. Fuzzy warm tummy feelings only go so far.

I would gladly become charter if it were more cost effective. I don't want to sound selfish, but my Roku/Netflix account which provides me with endless amounts of video entertainment is only running me $5/month. I try to keep my monthly subscription payment life running as low as possible, but if it were say $10/month, maybe more people would become charter?

Also, I think the entire "click-through" model of online advertising needs to seriously be scrapped. For TV commercial advertising, it's all about just having eyeballs on your product for a brief moment. There's no such thing as "click-through" with TV. So, why should there be for something like an ad banner?

Right now, the banner at the top of my page is for Equifax, and in that one banner there's enough info for my memory to retain stuff like "Free FICO score" which is definitely enough for me to remember to try em out later...just not right this moment.

Besides reading your blog entry, I noticed a discussion in the SiftLounge. Here are some thoughts:

• The charity status you would seek with the IRS is “501c3.” Was VS set up the states or where you are in Australia?

• Merchandising got mentioned and I already saw mentioned “totebags.” Here’s are some other items I thought of:

fridge magnets
huggies
keychains
mousepads
pens
posters
stuffed toys (siftbot)
t-shirts

• It may be easier for some users to donate a product or service useful to VS. In that case, a VS wish list posted somewhere may help.

• A charity organization I used to belong to did their best to get items donated and then did raffles. Of course then shipping to the winners would be an issue.

coffee mug! before SG has to scream it and knife someone.

i like that wish list thing.

This is just off the top of my head, but how about charging something like a penny or two per video submission for everyone. How many vids get posted every month? 5000? (speculative guess based on lucky's stats). Seems like that could easily bring in several hundreds or even a thousand dollars a month.

How many vids does a typical user post per month? 50? I posted 40 in the last month, and I'm probably less than average. So, the typical cost per user is less than $1/month, perhaps twice that for charters. The burden per user is negligible, but the revenue stream is substantial. And even better, it's sustainable and scalable because it's directly tied to the performance of the site, i.e., as the site grows, so does the revenue.

[edit] It just occurred to me that this would probably also dramatically reduce the # of dupes posted.

>> ^jonny:
This is just off the top of my head, but how about charging something like a penny or two per video submission for everyone. How many vids get posted every month? 5000? (speculative guess based on lucky's stats). Seems like that could easily bring in several hundreds or even a thousand dollars a month.
How many vids does a typical user post per month? 50? I posted 40 in the last month, and I'm probably less than average. So, the typical cost per user is less than $1/month, perhaps twice that for charters. The burden per user is negligible, but the revenue stream is substantial. And even better, it's sustainable and scalable because it's directly tied to the performance of the site, i.e., as the site grows, so does the revenue.
[edit] It just occurred to me that this would probably also dramatically reduce the # of dupes posted.


Not a bad idea on the micro-payment front. In reality, you'd need to give X "free" submissions or else the queue dries up entirely.

But if people "pay to play" and are charged a fee for submitting more than X per a given period, that gives the Sift some additional income and discourages queue bloat in the most "economic" way possible.

>> ^Krupo:
In reality, you'd need to give X "free" submissions or else the queue dries up entirely.

I almost wrote that originally, but I think at a penny per post, most users will keep posting like they always do.

I think the toughest part is setting up the payment. Do you pay right upon submission? Buy some # of posts ahead of time? End of month charge?

Pretty simple I think - prepayment is the way to go - just like how you can pre-pay for airtime for a cellphone or longdistance card.

The tricky part is figuring out the economics - overprice and you kill the sift, underprice and you're not getting enough cash in to keep things running smoothly.

I say start with pushing donations and see where that gets you, maybe put up a chart showing donations/cost of server per month. If that doesn't do it escalate.

I'm not sure how much merchandising would bring in, I know there are a few web services you can go through that will put your stuff on sale free of cost to you (I think) and then take like 98% of sale profits giving you 2%. You'd have to actually look into them to see what the real numbers are, but, if its free of charge to you I'd say go for it, the more sources of income the better.

I think it would be a poor idea to charge people to submit videos - that would certainly diminish the number of videos posted.

I suppose it would be another quality-checker, but I'm not sure I like it; I don't like being charged for doing a service.

Charging to post videos is just not a good idea at all. The lifeblood of the site IS the videos, so if you're effectively discouraging people from actually posting them... there goes your site. And saying 'but it's just a penny'... doesn't matter, it's the need to pay somehow, setup and account etc. etc.

It's all discouraging and would kill the site.

What do I think?

* Having just said paying to post videos is a bad idea, perhaps being able to pay 10cents or something for an instant extra posting slot when you've filled your queue might be a goer. There are those times when you have a full queue and you want to post that extra video... if there is a quick link to do so via PayPal... well... I could see that being used.

* I would do a one off donation again as I have in the past (It wasn't much back whenever I did it), but would never pay an ongoing fee... I just can't justify such expense.

* Merch is a good idea, BUT only if it's well designed stuff, and stuff that works on its own without a need to know what videosift actually is. Plus is it possible to lose out on that if you don't sell enough?

* Google (or google style) text ads somewhere more central to the page (between the video and the comments perhaps)? I don't want them to be overly obnoxious or really detract from the experience, but I DO know that I just don't even really SEE the other ads where they are. I really do click on google text ads sometimes, because they actually link to things I'm interested in... and being that we're watching videos with text tags that should nicely categorize them, surely there would be some good text ads that would come up and get some nice clickthroughs?

>> ^spoco2:
Having just said paying to post videos is a bad idea, perhaps being able to pay 10cents or something for an instant extra posting slot when you've filled your queue might be a goer. There are those times when you have a full queue and you want to post that extra video... if there is a quick link to do so via PayPal... well... I could see that being used.

We can do that now. All you need to do is buy two power points, and you can then use them to post a 4th (or 7th) video.

Good point, though, about discouraging posters. I guess I was just thinking that there are enough core users here now that would not change their posting habits if they had to pay $.50 or $1. a month to keep the place going, with the possibility of getting rid of ads entirely. Like I said, this was off the top of my head - not terribly well thought out.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

A lot of the suggestions centre around relying on our active members - but I think that our actual user base is much larger.

We do appreciate the contributions of Charter members - but from a cold, hard financial standpoint- our efforts in this regard have not worked out. I'm sure it has something to do with the Long Tail phenomenon - and if I had hadn't been drinking Guiness tonight I would expound a great deal on it. At the heart of it, we make around $370 per month on member contributions while advertising has provided at it's peak up to $4,000- now around $2,500. Our costs are around $3K.

It's all about using the long tail. We would need to get to those 2000/hour somehow, but it has to feel like they are being "taxed" as little as possible.

I think it's really hard to make scenarios where we can earn from "raw" visitors, because they are much less engaged in the site and thus, would just dissipate if there were any form of taxing.

One solution would be to make guests only have limited access to content, and buy access to be regular members - which would have to be much cheaper than charter. This could see an increase in users created, and certainly generate some cash flow from regulars.

Say if you had to pay $1 a week or something in advance to maintain your membership that is posting videos, comments, talks and so on.

This would increase the entry barrier for new members, but if they are "punished" by not being members, it will feel like they are really getting something for their bucks.

>> ^dag:
We do appreciate the contributions of Charter members - but from a cold, hard financial standpoint- our efforts in this regard have not worked out.

That's just what I was thinking of with the idea above. Revenue from members is so small because it's limited to such a small number of users. If you can tap the entire user base, or at least a large portion of it, while at the same time making the burden on any individual user minimal, then I think you've got a solution. I'm sure there are solutions other than my proposal that can accomplish the same goal.

The more I think about it, I think Krupo's got the right idea. Allow 1 post/day for all users; after that, it's a penny/post. Do you have any data on how many users post more than once per day? I'm pulling 1 post/day and 1 penny out of the air. Obviously you would want to base those numbers on some sort of analysis of usage patterns.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

^I would hate to put much of a restriction on posting through a tax or otherwise. Quality posts from lots of different people are the "fuel" of the site.

Well, obviously it's not a popular idea, so I want push it. But it does seem clear that you need some way of tapping revenue from most of the user base without driving them off, right? If not ads, and not pay-to-post, then what? I think merchandising is neat, but it won't generate the kind of revenue you need. Not to mention that you have to front the capital to have the stuff made. I think donations are susceptible to the same limitations as charter memberships.

I'm sure you guys have looked into licensing VaroCMS, right? Or is that owned strictly by Rommel? (Pardon me if that's going too far into your business details.)

Maybe you should post this in SiftTalk - might get some more attention and more smart people coming up with ideas.

You have to put up restrictions on regular, non-participating users, so they will feel they must participate.

For instance, you can only see X videos through here unless you login.

Registration could then cost a minimal amount or something.

The vast majority won't cough up the dough unless they get something in return. That could be removal of restrictions.

After skimming just a few of the comments above, here's a little thinking out loud:

In order to engage lurkers as well as veteran members, I think cash is the biggest incentive; everyone's not going to pay to submit videos when all they get in return is... well, just a submitted video on the Internet.

What if there was some kind of a profit sharing system on VideoSift in which participation was completely optional... Like you pay to participate in the program, and users earn "points" based on the performance of their submissions. The more you contribute, the more points you earn. And in turn, points can be redeemed for cash (or merchandise?).

Maybe instead of just dealing in cash, users buy "points" and when they submit videos (and comments?), some "points" are deducted. Then maybe for every x votes they receive, they are credited y "points". At any time, they could redeem their stockpile of "points" for ca$h. Maybe?

Of course for the Sift to profit in this, more participant posts will have to fail than those that succeed otherwise we'd be in the red.

I don't know... Again, I'm just thinking out loud, typing the details as they occur to me. But the idea in general of some kind of a profit sharing program might work. I think to persuade people enough to play, they will have to have some kind of possibility of a return.

It's probably a shit idea. What do you think?

[edit]
Of course, the best solution is a system in which people pay to participate and don't require cash in return. I'm drawing a blank.

the best I can think of helping the Sift is by promoting it on every god damn social network and link aggregator out there. maybe we could do like group actions and promote VideoSift on digg and other places like it?

Do you do much in the way of affiliates? We might not be ad clickers (I just clicked an ad!) but I still buy stuff from various online shops. That's not going to stop. There are Videosift channels for books, geek, comedy, music and tv among others. I'm sure there are opportunities for both regulars and just-passing visitors to click on well targeted affiliate links to buy a DVD or something, particularly if you associate it with the content of a given video.

Then build up some aggregate stats to show other vistors e.g "what books Sifters have been buying in the Books channel" to give the links more context and weight.

Ok, obviously charging for submissions or comments is bad idea. Some type of power point things might work (put up a paypal and have some cheap exchange rate).

You really should also look at all those awful facebook type games and other webpage games that you get bonuses by doing things like registering at some coupon page or those silly things, they must make referral money.

I really think the sift needs more ads mixed in as videos (at least for non-logged in users). I think you should have a donation link up there one week a month.

The problem is always getting past the dead zone of a $30/month level of traffic and when you have enough to make a profit. I don't think digg and other stuff will work, more traffic makes the problem worse. Is it more the dedicated server expenses or the traffic or is it 50/50?

I think you should turn of the filters and some features if it saves a lot on CPUs (not that down sizing is a good idea, but more efficient??) Or even a IP based bandwidth quota that probably would only effect a few people, and just a static page that says come back in 4 hours..

Every 10th video you click on the expand twistie and you get ajax ad frame instead with a SKIP>> thing. It's not that annoying and people can be charter if they care. I've always thought charter was too pricey.. I just don't know the sweet spot.

Anyways, I think the internet ad $$$ is going to get worse (but then again Amazon is the only ones making money). So I thinking it's like US dependence upon oil.


Do you think doubling the traffic will help? Doubling the ad clicks? Or just reducing costs and living off of donations and charter.

I think you should go look at the early fark model or g00ns forums and how they got over the 'hump'. (But that was in good economic times).

If I have to pay to submit a video i will stop posting videos. Sorry, it's the truth. If I have to pay, and then that money goes to people who submitted really popular videos, with the hope that I will get money from new popular videos... then the site will become a ponzi scheme.

LOL!

>> ^Thylan:
coffee mug! before SG has to scream it and knife someone.
i like that wish list thing.

Hey, forgive me for sounding simplistic on this... but it seems that success should be paying for its self here.

If VS is a hit like it seems to be... then you shouldn't be having this problem.

If you are providing an entertainment..a service, then folks should pay. Membership should cost at least half of what Charter membership costs.

You're not doing anything wrong; it sounds to me like you want to get away from a heavy reliance on the tanking advertisement dollar. I'm afraid you'll have to get creative...

(BAM1)You could try to encourage yearly membership by giving cheap goodies away along with membership (plus access to member's only pages, and members only merchandise deals). DVD's and CD's are super cheap (as long as you have copyright permission... or are clever about things). We obviously have sift members who wouldn't mind putting an hour or two into editing a dvd or what-have-you. Nerdy stickers and fake tattoos can be bought in bulk, made from designs donated by the community. Note that these items are also easy to ship.

(BAM2)Different levels of paying membership would be easy to implement, again where you offer some prize package for a given donation.

(BAM3)You could even potentially have some terrible super-powers available to heavy donors ('Be Dag for a Day'), or give paying members the ability to set up funds with admin approval towards specific actions (BAM4), like 'If we raise this amount of money Lucky will remove (some comment troll)'s accounts' or 'Lucky will add this feature if we raise this amount'... lord knows I've wanted to nuke a few trolls, and would pitch in a buck or two... though this may encourage the admins to stop putting in features on their own, and to start trolling in their free time.

edit; I've numbered the ideas, in case anyone wishes to refer to them specifically

God Dag it's so simple. Just lobby for government bailout money. It's the American thing to do.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

^You're right Farhad - I'm sure Bush would think that the Sift is too big to fail.

The truth is we are very darn successful by some measures- just not monetary ones. Our traffic continues a steady, inexorable rise - we're pretty well known in the media and we have a fantastic, dedicated core group of users.

None of that translates to a business model or financial success. The only solace I take is that there are many, many sites out there that are suffering from that kind of success - and have not figured out how to make it pay.

The difference with VideoSift is that we haven't taken any funding money at all. We could have during the height of all the craziness - but in retrospect, I'm glad we didn't.

I see now many sites with a quarter of our traffic and even less of a revenue stream that were funded to the tune of several million dollars - folding like cardboard houses in a hurricane.

So, the nice thing is that while our financial cupboards are bare - we are unencumbered by debt or angry investors demanding blood. It's up to us to figure out how to survive in the current environment - please keep the ideas flowing.

Well, the cost for regular membership in itself is probably a bad idea, but I like mixing it with lucky's idea; that submissions, community participation and so on should be redeemable only as regular membership. For instance, you can buy a charter membership, or you can participate so much in the community that the charter pays for itself.. (x days for a quality comment, x days for a sifted video and so on) this would drive up user competitiveness I think, but it may lower the quality of the submissions too.

If you merchandise one of these http://www.videosift.com/talk/The-end-of-human-kind with a sexy sifbot logo on it, I'm sure there would be a market..

I should mention I read science magazines a lot, and they're set up in a similar way to the sift (content and sifting/editing is nearly free - presenting and sharing content is not). Group licensed memberships, individual membership, some advertising (including job listings that are related to the material), and real world events (conferences) are the bulk of their profits. Its not a completely analogous situation but you could look more into what they do for ideas.

>> ^jonny:
>> ^dag:
We do appreciate the contributions of Charter members - but from a cold, hard financial standpoint- our efforts in this regard have not worked out.
That's just what I was thinking of with the idea above. Revenue from members is so small because it's limited to such a small number of users. If you can tap the entire user base, or at least a large portion of it, while at the same time making the burden on any individual user minimal, then I think you've got a solution. I'm sure there are solutions other than my proposal that can accomplish the same goal.
The more I think about it, I think Krupo's got the right idea. Allow 1 post/day for all users; after that, it's a penny/post. Do you have any data on how many users post more than once per day? I'm pulling 1 post/day and 1 penny out of the air. Obviously you would want to base those numbers on some sort of analysis of usage patterns.


Crap, I was sleepy last night when I wrote that allow me to clarify...

>> ^spoco2:
Charging to post videos is just not a good idea at all. The lifeblood of the site IS the videos, so if you're effectively discouraging people from actually posting them... there goes your site. And saying 'but it's just a penny'... doesn't matter, it's the need to pay somehow, setup and account etc. etc.
It's all discouraging and would kill the site.


Don't get me wrong - we ALREADY CHARGE for posting more than 3 vids at a time. It's the charter. The idea would be a fee for pushing past a certain # of vids in the queue - i.e., a lower threshold.

The proposal: you still get one or two at a time gratis, but if you want to stuff the queue, you could buy the privilege (which charter members essentially already do with the 6-limit).

Here's the fun part: make it DIRT CHEAP to go from, say, 1 to 2. Like $1 a month. $12/year. Get 100 people to sign up for the $12/ultra-light-charter, boom, you have, um, $1200.

Obviously we would need about 30,000 people @ $1 each to cover costs for the year. This gets easier if you add additional "ladder steps" - $2/$5/$10 options to pull in more support.

I don't think we should push higher than the current "gold star full-ass charter" in terms of price... but you can give people 'a la carte' options to get closer to those features without taking them all. Customized user name, one fee, blog, another fee, URL, another, etc. So you can go bare-bones "Just let me have more powerpoints and queue slots" to the fancier end... allow "gift certificate" purchases for others, etc.

What I like about the somethingawful goons approach (mentioned above) is that there is LOTS of flexibiliy. One-time fee for certain benefits, higher fee for whatever.

Heck, you embrace a one-time "lifetime contributor" fee for the "1 to 2" jump, and have other ways of

The two key things to keep in mind is that:
1. Sifting stays FREE (at a basic 1/vid at a time level).
2. This enhances *qualitycontrol by encouraging people only to submit the best submission they have.

I also recommend, to avoid diluting powerpoints into an orgy of self*-promotes, that 2 powerpoints would also be redeemable for a free queue slot (for those who make quality contributions but for whatever reason don't want to go ultra-light-charter or anything along those lines - that's cool too - this is how we reward quality).

Just brainstorming - let me know what you think.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

^ I like the thinking - but I still feel that the volume in the queue would be diluted and therefore there would be smaller base of content to Sift from - potentially bringing down the overall quality.

We could charge a monthly flat rate of say $5 a month to join VideoSift. This would have the dual effect of making a small barrier to entry (to reduce trolls) and providing us with income.

I've also wondered if people would be interested in a "VideoSift Projects" which would be a special queue where members could submit their own works - and if they were deemed worthy, could be promoted into the main queue by others. There are a lot of people who would like to get their content on VideoSift - this would give them a legitimate way to do it.

Perhaps. I forget my vid-per-page count, but the queue is currently 9 pages long. Is this the target we're aiming for?

If the queue only had 4 or 5 pages worth of vids, would this improve matters?

I'm not insisting it's the only way to go, but reducing queue size (except for those buying-in) may be an increasingly attractive option as the Sift grows in size in the future. I wouldn't brush it off completely...

A pure flat rate to join the Sift would, if anything, drive away more Sifters, I would think. I think what's key is to have a voluntary aspect, and a progressive scale for those interested in additional perks but who don't want to spend a lot of money - $5 is lunch money for some, and an entire monthly silly-fund for others.

Lots of new stuff here to think about, but I wanted to make a few quick points.

Some free level of membership is certainly necessary to encourage new user participation and registration, and to retain many of the current users.

Dag - Reducing the size of the queue should improve overall quality. This has been a consistent theme in all of the discussions about queue bloat, raising or lowering votes to publish threshold, expiration time, etc. Or did I misunderstand what you meant by diluting the queue and bring down quality?

Krupo - I may not have paraphrased you very well, but I think we are definitely on the same page. Whether you're charged per vid over the base # of free posts, or pay a monthly fee to get that extra slot, the concept is basically the same. And as you point out, it's just expanding on the notion of the charter membership and buying power points to get an extra queue slot.

The idea of à la carte membership features kind of already exists, in that we can buy power points 5 or 10 at a time. It could definitely be expanded, but I think more importantly, it could be better advertised. How many users realize they can spend a few bucks to post extra vids, or get a self promote, etc.? More to the point - how many users have actually bought à la carte power points (that weren't already charter)?

1. Make the support link(s) more attention grabbing. The support, donate and buy powerpoints links are too subtle in my opinion. Maybe a new user notices, I don't know but I completely forgot where that support link was if it wasn't for this blog entry.

2. Like many have said, offer a simpler (lighter) charter option. And/or offer more benefits. Those 'benefits' have never interested me, and I don't think I am the only one.

"* Absolutely no ads
* Personal Blog
* Six (6) concurrent submission slots in the unsifted queue
* Two (2) Power Points per recharge period
* Personal subdomain for your member profile, e.g., siftbot.videosift.com
* Personalized colorizing for your username text and comment background
* Fully customizable CSS styling for your member profile
* Participation in the Sift Lounge chat room"

For instance, if I wanted a blog, I would go to a site specialized in blogs. The sift blog as it is, seems too simple I think.

What if besides being able to have 6 submissions you can also have the option of converting number of submissions available to time in the queue? For instance, if I want a a video to last 4 days in queue instead of 2 then I sacrifice 2 or 3 of my available submissions in order to extend the time for that particular video.

My point is, some of us don't care for a colored username, access to a chat, a simplistic blog, a subdomain or a custom CSS. A custom CSS sounds nice but if you dont know CSS then you won't care. Could you offer a more customizable profile, w/o necessarily having to know CSS? or maybe offer more themes for charter members besides dark and nublu....

I don't know, just brainstorming.

Charging people for just joining will drive people away.

The solution just struck me; charge Ant for every downvote.

While I was going to sleep in the middle of that bloody power failure, another thought occurred to me which I meant to share in my last post: we can also become more creative with invocations.

In particular, cash-money invocations.

Like pay $X for a "Mega-upvote". So the vote counts as double.

To prevent flagrant abuse (and make it just subtle cash-based abuse):
1. keep the cost sufficiently high
2. design it such that that "double-vote" only counts when the NEXT person votes on the video. This avoids having your own vote (on your own submission or on another vote) count as a "Double(Triple?)-MEGA-VOTE".

Potentially destablizing, potentially awesome.

Would anyone pay money for such an ability?

*MEGAUPVOTE would finally count for something (maybe make it worth 11 or 12 power points... so you HAVE to buy the powerpoints b/c otherwise you can only gain 1/2 "free points...")... or you could hoard 10 powerpoints from enough comment upvotes..

anything possible on the cutting-costs front of the equation? (cheaper servers, maybe share resources with another videosite) 3k a months seems like quite a lot of money and with the ad-market going down and (by far) most of yr money apparently coming from ads i don't believe there's an easy solution, a 6000+ dollars a year gap is just too much to bridge with fundraising, selling merchandice etc i'd think.

"We could charge a monthly flat rate of say $5 a month to join VideoSift. "

tbh even if videosift had 100 times the userbase or 10 times the functions it has now, i'd say it still wouldnt work.

or maybe videosift needs to grow bigger, let people set up different language versions where u get a part (lets say half) of the money coming from the ads. dunno if thats easy to accomplish but might be neat, free extra ad-revenue and others doing the work.

sad but true, the most obvious solution would ofcourse be to make a pornsift....

(however, with the ad-market in crisis even that might not be to easy)

meh.

lol actually just found out a few threads below there is already this 'pornbumper' thing...erm, lol, you guys are pretty damn funny.

FYI - check out www.videosift.pl

You need a really rabid fanbase... but they'll still face the same funding challenges - and being newer and smaller, will have an even tougher time than .com