I believe that the more time I spend worrying about money the less satisfied I will be.

It turns out though that lately I've had to think about it quite a bit. You may or may not have read something about the bottom falling out of the online ad market. I can confirm that it has indeed happened.

VideoSift survives on a day to day basis primarily from the income provided by our online display advertisers in the banner up top, and the square in the sidebar. This provides us with a few thousand dollars a month in revenue - which in most months matches up closely to our expenses.

Since around December- and roughly corresponding with the financial crisis - our revenue has dropped significantly to the point where we may really be scraping to meet our monthly costs. We closed our side-project Dwigger partly because we couldn't justify the costs of dedicated servers.

The thing is - I'm not even sure Internet advertising works for an online community like ours. Who clicks on ads on a site like VideoSift? - I sure as shit don't, and from our stats, neither do you. I come here for the content we provide - Why would I click on lots of flashy links that are designed to send away - somewhere much less satisfying?

I would like to make a break from advertising - and I've been looking at other ways to fund VideoSift - because I will not let it fail.

I was very impressed with Wikipedia's latest fund-raising drive. I don't kid myself that we are an entity with the size or following of Wikipedia - but neither are our needs as great. We do have many things in common with a wikipedia type of organisation; We have a decicated group of people who enjoy working collaboratively on our content. We have worked together to create a compendium of video that is not every video on the web - but that is quality, accurately described and accessible. I would also say that as a community we are averse to commerical and marketing activities - which is probably why advertising has never really fit here.

At this point, it's just something we are exploring. We are consulting with noted Sift financial boffins and crunching numbers. The best thing about VideoSift has always been the amazing people that are automagically drawn here. I would rather put the future of the community in your hands than some anonymous ad brokers who continually refer to us as "Video Shift"