You may have noticed that we don't have a lot of ads on VideoSift. There is a small block of unobtrusive text link ads, but beyond that nothing, nada. We've tried ads at various times, Adsense, Tribal Fusion, Casale, etc. The one thing that they all have in common, is that they suck- horribly. (guess I won't be getting an Xmas card this year)



After about a week of cringing at the epilepsy inducing "punch the monkey" type adverts we always take them off. They are an insult to you, Sifters - to assume that you would be dumb enough to click on these monstrosities, and they generally stink up the high-class joint that VideoSift has become. ;-)



So, here's the rub - as VideoSift is still growing mightily, our bandwidth needs continue to climb. Charter memberships help a lot, and we thank you each and every one - but it's not enough. We are doing around 2.5 million page views per month, and this would probably be higher but the server spends some hours every weekday in the red zone.



Beyond infrastructure costs- although VideoSift is a labour (obsession) of love - we would like to fund talented people to work full-time on improvements and upgrades.



So, how do we fund VideoSift to keep growing? We put our thinking sifters on, and wanted to put forth an idea for feedback.



What we had in mind, is a pay-per-post "Incubator" channel. Submitters would pay a one-off fee to submit to this channel, and Charter members would be opted-out by default. (though they could opt-in via their profile).



I don't think this paid content should show up in the general queue because it would cause confusion around the self-linking policy. So there would be a distinct "incubator" queue area, and if any paid content got 10 votes, it would be published on the front page - again, hidden from Charters unless opted-in, and clearly marked as paid content. I think this kind of ad scenario is appealing because it puts the community in control of what is quality "sift-worthy" advertising. As part of the terms that the advertiser would have to agree to - they must accept that members would be free to comment negatively about the video, or down-vote it out of existence.



At this point it's only an idea that we've been discussing - but with our current growth rate it's becoming increasingly obvious that we have to do something. We would be very open to hearing other revenue-earning ideas as well.