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

*promote the ptochocracy.

Self promoting this Sift Talk post - promote requested by original submitter dag.

And I was just going to put in a few millions, ah well, perhaps next time..

"Please do not dig deep. We know times are tough right now - and don't give anything that you can't spare."

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

^For you, we can make an exception - we'll take your last penny.

/ron paul

Even VS is asking for a bailout! Virtual hat? Falling revenues? Donations?

SMELLS LIKE COMMUNISM TO ME

The free market has spoken and your business model failed you, why should the public be forced to sustain something? Rabble rabble rabble...

/ron paul

Will send more coke money soon fucking addicts

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

^ Could you send more of those Kuwaiti notes as well? The Australian ones don't roll well.

I gave 10 bucks, that'll have to do for now.

Now, I don't want to be an accountant or anything, but $12k sounds like an INSANE amount for a webserver. Do you pay per MB?

I have a server in Denmark with 5gb space and unlimited bandwidth for under $50 a year.

There you go, have $10. As much entertianment this site has granted it is worth at least that.

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

^ It's to get us though the next 3-4 months. We'd rather not have to come back and beg for more next month. I think I mentioned this elsewhere but our current configuration is 4 very beefy boxes in a rack in Virginia. We also use a Content Delivery Network to host all of our thumbnails and other graphical elements. The fees for that are more variable than the servers because it depends on our traffic. But the CDN is great because it means all images download from a server near you.

Okay, I threw a little green your way. Don't spend it all on blow and whores. Again.

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

Thanks all. We're up to $75 already. There's just a bit of delay before the applet is updated.

There, have some of my oil money pocket change.

REFRESH REFRESH REFRESH! Must see meter rising! Wait...that's probably harming bandwidth costs. Okay I'll stop.

I grant upon you who've already donated my heartiest of thanks and to those who will donate in the future, a preemptive, mighty bump of the fist and a slap on the butt. You know, in a platonic, football sort of way. Don't get carried away.

I have given, and encourage everyone to share what they can spare for a truly wonderful community/cause

Affiliate links are a good way to fill in empty ad inventory. How about text Amazon affiliate links? These would also not be adblocked.

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

woohoo!, we've passed 1% - we're on our way. I feel like doing a Jerry Lewis song. Are there any Jerry Lewis songs?

gave a what I could right now.. hope you make it

$6.42 coming your way... why $6.42? Because that's what $10 Australian will buy you in the land of US these days... quite sad really Especially as I'm currently IN the US for work... stupid exchange rate.

I've chipped in what I can for now.

At this rate you should have it in 80 hours

I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you.

>> ^dag:
woohoo!, we've passed 1% - we're on our way. I feel like doing a Jerry Lewis song. Are there any Jerry Lewis songs?

Only this one.

*quality -> videosift is great, ill certainly consider donating.

"But the CDN is great because it means all images download from a server near you."

what about a videosift-theme without any thumbnails. just text, and vids ofcourse, but luckily vidsift doesnt have to host those (and maybe even take such a theme for every unregistered member? i bet that could cut quite a lot of bandwith?)

oh well, i dunno, just guessing..

paul4dirt cannot award a quality point for this Sift Talk post because paul4dirt does not have enough Power Points - ignoring quality request by paul4dirt. (You can always purchase more Power Points.)

oh crap, fair enough siftbot, ill just donate.

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

>> ^guessandcheck:
>> ^dag:
woohoo!, we've passed 1% - we're on our way. I feel like doing a Jerry Lewis song. Are there any Jerry Lewis songs?

Only this one.


Nice - This one is actually him - and comes with a bonus pedophilia joke!

HI, OK YOUR REQUEST HAS PULLED AT WHAT WOULD BE HEART-STRINGS IN A NORMAL HUMAN. i'LL SEND TWENNY-FIVE BUCKS. tHROUGH THE CREDIT CARD THINGY. hOPE IT'S SAFE..

My first post. Love the site. Donated what I can.

$50 coming your way. Don't spend it all on BBQ shrimp and boomerangs.

Tossed a batch of Euros your way.

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

Thanks everyone! We're at 7% with $856 in just over 2 hours - an amazing start.

I'll have 3 5$ shares of VideoSift corp. \o/

Yo Mon! I hab no money at this moment - but potentially, in the unknown but possibly immediate future, I may have MILLIONS of dollars. If this manifests, you happin mon!

To speak of present, I can only offer Laura ... NO! SORRY! You can't have her!! How DARE you even consider that possibility??? SHAME!!!

You CAN , however, have my children, 10 y/o Amber, 13 y/o Jared, and 16 y/o Lorielle. ... NO! Of course you CAN'T have our children!!! How could you even THINK I would donate them to save VIDEOSIFT??? O.K., take them all, if it can save VIDEOSIFT!! Take me! The value of the chemicals and metals that compose my physical body may not be worth a lot, but ANY amount should help in our current situation!! I, my woman love Laura, and my precious children are yours!!!

DFT and I just contributed 50 dollars each. Give what you can, y'all! Yay Videosift!!

ok, paid my sift taxes Can I go back to breakfast now?

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

>> ^dingens:
ok, paid my sift taxes Can I go back to breakfast now?


Yes, dingens - you are excused. Thank you!

So, $1000 in 4 hours.. we could run for president on this kinda money bomb.

*quality

Awarding dag with one star point for this contribution to Sift Talk - declared quality by ant.

There I donated a princely sum of 2 whole pounds, and I promise to click on more advertising, since I'm seriously interested in sending faxes by email.

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

Thanks Kerotan!

let us see your accounts.

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

^What accounts - our paypal account? We pay most of our bills directly from there. Are you looking to see the spreadsheet that I do every month?

Should have asked when the Aus$ was at parity

Anyway, $15 coming your way.

As soon as I figure out how this whole PayPal thing works (I have never done it before ) I'll send 10 Euro from Germany your way. I'm excited how much that'll be in USD.
I'm a MPE student and I'm currently writing my tests - I absolutly NEED VS to get me through the day and keep me from learning!!!

This site really rocks - it'll be the first time I donate anything.

>> ^dag:
^ It's to get us though the next 3-4 months. We'd rather not have to come back and beg for more next month. I think I mentioned this elsewhere but our current configuration is 4 very beefy boxes in a rack in Virginia. We also use a Content Delivery Network to host all of our thumbnails and other graphical elements. The fees for that are more variable than the servers because it depends on our traffic. But the CDN is great because it means all images download from a server near you.

So you need 12.000 for 3-4 months? And after that? Would you need more again? I don't mind supporting the site, but this seems unsustainable. Have you checked other hosting and server options? Maybe you can find something cheaper.
Also how can Digg manage without donations? Their bandwidth must be through the roof.

>> ^dag:
Thanks Kerotan!


Don't mention it, just out of interest, what is this goal we are shooting for?, Is it amount of money to keep videosift running for X amount of time, or is just a number that dag thought would be cool to have.

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

>> ^cybrbeast:Also how can Digg manage without donations? Their bandwidth must be through the roof.


Digg manages by losing $5,300,000 in 2008. Unfortunately we don't have (or want) that kind of luxury.

It's true, lots of sites are hurting- I don't want to make too many excuses though. I also don't want us to have crappier hosting options that mean longer page loads.

I don't have the answer to our revenue problem - and from the looks of it, neither does Digg.

I'm hoping we won't need to come back to the well again in 4 months - we're trying to find alternative advertising methods and maybe something we can sell - but it's been pretty tough. :-(

there ya go, because i love you

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

Thanks heaps lavoll, you landed us at 10% of our goal in only 7 hours.

>> ^dag:
>> ^cybrbeast:Also how can Digg manage without donations? Their bandwidth must be through the roof.

Digg manages by losing $5,300,000 in 2008. Unfortunately we don't have (or want) that kind of luxury.
It's true, lots of sites are hurting- I don't want to make too many excuses though. I also don't want us to have crappier hosting options that mean longer page loads.
I don't have the answer to our revenue problem - and from the looks of it, neither does Digg.
I'm hoping we won't need to come back to the well again in 4 months - we're trying to find alternative advertising methods and maybe something we can sell - but it's been pretty tough. :-(

Ah didn't know that about Digg
And looking for alternative servers and hosting? I wouldn't mind VideoSift being a bit slower if it meant it still keeps on existing. Maybe you could even force people to host their avatar image themselves. Could save quite some bandwidth.

Thanks for all the hard work dag, I've made a small contribution to hopefully continue this great site.

I donated what I could last night, and I am glad to see the fundraiser has made lots of money already. We all will do whatever we can to keep this place running, I'd be lost without VS!

I'll donate more in 2 weeks, when I get my next paycheck

I'm getting Internal Server Errors everytime that Chip In button tries to redirect me to PayPal Oh well, I can't donate any kind of big amount anyways, will chip in more once my next paycheck arrives (since I'm freelancing atm that could take a while...or be tomorrow).

Edit: Ok it worked now... Not much but all I can spare atm...

$11.42 USD = $14.65 CAD. Neither number has any deeper meaning, but hope it contributes to keeping this most excellent time-sink afloat.

If you spend my contribution on hookers and blow, at the very least, please combine it with some other donation money. I shudder to think of the quality of either that $10 alone will get you.

Just chipped in through Paypal. I'm on VS when I SHOULD be working, so it's kinda like I get paid to sift anyway.

I want to say 'don't spend it all on weed and good scotch' but ... fuck that's what I'd do.

Me staying $20 worth of sober for videosift, when will this stimulus package get here???????!!!!!!!

good luck with this. there are millions of far inferior websites clogging the tubes that manage to make a fortune. it aint fair.

I hope this isn't like the Jerry Lewis MDA telethon, because they've been running that thing for 49 years, raising 1.46 billion dollars, and there's still no cure for Muscular Dystrophy.

Maybe we should start a car wash, with the hottest girls of VS in bikinis.

I guess you guys should start allowing self-promotion then.

>> ^wvfunnyman:
I guess you guys should start allowing self-promotion then.


Only in exchange for large cash donations.

It would add an additional element of drama to banning people who try and self-promote w/o authorization... they'd be stealing.

All you thoughtful pals touch me... right here. *points to heart (which is more in the center of the chest than beneath the left chesticle, btw)*

I think it's within reason to say we are too successful and too unsuccessful at the same time. After 3 years we should at least be able to pay our bills! But trust me that even while we're finishing all our cocaine and burying all our hookers in the desert, we are putting a lot of serious effort into new ideas to, at the very least, enable the Sift to pay for itself.

1/2 barrel of crude oil = $20 is headed your way. I also threw in that charter membership I've been procrastinating for some time now.

Here's a little loot. I want more people falling off skateboards, breaking legs, and faceplants.

$40 to the best video sharing site on the web, bar none.

i'll donate, but if we don't make the goal, i say we spend the money on a giant sift meetup, complete with weed, hookers, blow, boomerangs, scotch, and shrimp off the barbie. oh, and a copy of the movie airplane.

>> ^Farhad2000:
/ron paul
Even VS is asking for a bailout! Virtual hat? Falling revenues? Donations?
SMELLS LIKE COMMUNISM TO ME
The free market has spoken and your business model failed you, why should the public be forced to sustain something? Rabble rabble rabble...
/ron paul
Will send more coke money soon fucking addicts


RON PAUL WOULDN'T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS BECAUSE IT'S VOLUNTARY!

/Obama

We've already decided that Videosift is essential to the world whether you agree or not and therefore we will raise your taxes (or borrow from China and defer them to your children) and if you don't agree with this, TOO BAD, I WON!

/Obama

*doublepromote

Double-Promoting this Sift Talk post - doublepromote requested by rasch187.

A quick 20 to one of the best communities on the web. Not a lot, but I hope it helps.

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

Thanks everyone! Unlike Jerry Lewis, I sleep - and it was nice to wake up and see that we are 14% to our goal already.

I visit this site almost everyday and love it! $20 clams is worth it!

Good luck

Hi Dag et al,

Since you were so nice to Karene and I we have donated $50.00 US ($79.39 AUD).

We have our own dedicated server - costs us about $3,000 a year. I think it has unlimited bandwidth (our site gets about 1/4 of your traffic - handles it fine - I wonder what your monthly bandwidth is?).

And our philosophy shop easily covers these costs and enables us to survive if we live simply. So maybe there is an option for users to create a videosift shop at cafepress.

http://www.cafepress.com/philosophy_shop

It is a tough world at times - nice to see people helping out.

Good on you.

Cheers,
Geoff Haselhurst
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/
https://www.videosift.com/video/Sexual-Philosophy-So-Hot-and-Smutty-it-was-banned

PS - We are on the west coast of Australia.

this might be the solution to your problems, dag

"...and for 500$ dag won't reveal what blankfist proposed to usesprosac in a private message last week"

I actually impregnated usesprozac through a PM.. that's how dirty it was.

>> ^kulpims:
this might be the solution to your problems, dag
"...and for 500$ dag won't reveal what blankfist proposed to usesprosac in a private message last week"

>> ^kulpims:
this might be the solution to your problems, dag
"...and for 500$ dag won't reveal what blankfist proposed to usesprosac in a private message last week"


If I know navy men, it had something to do with feather-dusters, high-heels, and hard alcohol.

I would like for this site to succeed,

but I'd be lying if I didn't find it ironic that VideoSift is falling on hard times during this depression, given the economic/philosophical outlook advocated by the majority of the community here. It seems odd to me, to cling to beliefs when the world around you is crumbling at your feet.

My two cents, brainstorm different server alternatives and revenue models. This depression isn't going away anytime in the next decade.

That said, I went ahead and donated one dollar for every vote received on, what I consider, the most critically relevant economic video on VideoSift.
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Greatest-Economic-Myth-Government-as-a-Window-Breaker

This is a very worthy cause.

>> ^imstellar28:
I would like for this site to succeed,
but I'd be lying if I didn't find it ironic that VideoSift is falling on hard times during this depression, given the economic/philosophical outlook advocated by the majority of the community here. It seems odd to me, to cling to beliefs when the world around you is crumbling at your feet.
My two cents, brainstorm different server alternatives and revenue models. This depression isn't going away anytime in the next decade.
That said, I went ahead and donated one dollar for every vote received on, what I consider, the most critically relevant economic video on VideoSift.
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Greatest-Economic-M
yth-Government-as-a-Window-Breaker


This is bar none. The funniest thing I have ever read on Videosift.

imsteller, people would take you more seriously if you didn't act like such a douche all the time. Down voted for your smarmy video pimping. In the spirit of capitalism, supply and demand and freemarketology I'll give two dollars for every downvote of imnsteller's video (up to $20).

>> ^imstellar28:
I would like for this site to succeed,
but I'd be lying if I didn't find it ironic that VideoSift is falling on hard times during this depression, given the economic/philosophical outlook advocated by the majority of the community here. It seems odd to me, to cling to beliefs when the world around you is crumbling at your feet.
My two cents, brainstorm different server alternatives and revenue models. This depression isn't going away anytime in the next decade.
That said, I went ahead and donated one dollar for every vote received on, what I consider, the most critically relevant economic video on VideoSift.
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Greatest-Economic-M
yth-Government-as-a-Window-Breaker

Yes dag, I think if you are expecting people to fund the site then you should publish the financial accounts relating to the site, i.e. your hosting bill, wages and traffic reports. This could even encourage more donations, if people actually knew what they were paying for. Farhad's ironic reference to the bailouts was totally on target.

Anyway, $12,000 is a lot of money, I dunno why you would build something so completely unsustainable... It looks like you are going to be screwed again in a few weeks and I don't think you have enough loyal members to support the place.

As always, I suggest cutting off the guests and lurkers. You call this place a community but now you are asking for donations so that completely silent and inactive people can view the fruits of active members' labour 24/7. I for one am not prepared to pay for that, and I don't think the quality of my experience would go down if you excluded unregistered guests and leeching lurkers. I also don't really care that "sometimes lurkers turn into good members" if it costs thousands of dollars to do it.

It would be interesting to see your accounts and traffic and work out how much you could reduce your bill if you cut off the freeloaders instead of asking loyal members to pay for them.

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

^First off I don't think blocking the site to "guests and lurkers" is a good idea - 50% of our traffic comes from random drop ins and they do provide revenue through CPM ads

I provided some financial information earlier, here: http://blog.videosift.com/dag/Money-Stuff#comment-634752 though that is a little out of date - as our ad revenue has probably dropped another $1,000.

Our costs do vary some on a month to month basis - depending on our CDN bill mainly. I will not be printing off PDFs of our bills to link in here.

I understand that you are unwilling to support "freeloaders" and "leeches" please, please feel free to withhold any contribution to VideoSift.

^It's too bad dumb and inappropriate MINK comments aren't a form of currency.

dag without seeing your accounts i can't tell whether what you are saying is sensible.

if 50% of your visitors are random dropins, ok. How much revenue are they providing? Is it worth it? Maybe you are right, maybe not... all i am saying is i don't know because I can't see the accounts. That's fine if I am not paying, but if you want donations then I want to know what for.

So basically you are saying "Trust me. Give me $12,000". To me, and a few other commenters here, it seems like a lot of money for simply serving links to other people's videos. Maybe you should post some cost cutting plans?

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

I suppose I am saying trust me a little bit. You've been on the site for a long time MINK - you've probably got a pretty well formed opinion of me. If you think I'm running a scam and secretly getting rich off this site - please, don't contribute - and you are free to discourage others as well.

We're very open to ideas on raising revenue or cost savings. I've stated what our costs are and I've stated what our traffic is. Like I said I'm not going to upload our bank statements or bills.

We don't have a lot of cost cutting ideas - because to be honest, I don't think our costs could be a lot lower. We could migrate on to smaller servers and probably cut $1,000 a month - but the site would be inaccessible at times when traffic spikes during the day - and would be a bad long term strategy as VideoSift is still growing!

$3-4K a month may seem like a lot of money - but VideoSift is not a little blog anymore. We're serving 100,000 pages a day - and not simple flat HTML but data rich custom pages with lots of elements. We have 4 very hard working monster servers in a rack and substantial bandwidth used from our distributed CDN.

OK, we're not a massive site like Digg, but fuck - they lost 5.3 million last year - I think the fact that we've been holding our head above water up until now is pretty good.

I'm sorry, I don't agree with your idea about locking out new users - this goes against everything that is good about this site.

As far as income ideas - I'm trying to get new advertisers online and if anyone has tips on good advertisers or networks - please let me know. I'm talking with some now, but It's an arduous process because many ad companies over promise and under deliver.

MINK, come on. are you really suggesting that dag slaps all his accounting on the table for everyone to see?

if for some reason you don't trust his arithmetic, don't donate. he's not pointing a gun to your head. asking for donations is an uncomfortable thing to have to do and i'm certain that dag wasn't overjoyed when he realised he'd have to do this. there's no need to make the process any more shitty by asking to see an income and expenditure.

honestly, the fact that dag and lucky haven't managed to make shitloads of money from videosift is quite endearing. if they were making thousands per week i think the whole experience would be less intimate. that's not to say i don't want them to make shitloads of money btw. i'm just glad the site is run by people who obviously didn't start it with a financial masterplan only to sell the fucker to AOL a couple of years down the line.

ask for donations whenever you want.

I bought the $20 charter member thingie because the donation thing kept showing Australian territories even though I picked United States as my country.

Pfff!
I am not suggesting dag is stashing away money!!!

He obviously has nothing to hide in the accounts. (so why not publish them so that the community can comment on ways to improve the situation? for example these amazing richly dynamic pages... do we really need them? are they worth thousands of dollars? are there techies in the community who can suggest improvements? would people really vote for a super new feature if they saw how much it costs to keep the CPUs running? are unregistered guests really paying their way?)

I am simply suggesting community auditing and collaborative problem solving in a very difficult financial situation, in order to encourage more donations, including mine.

Pardon me!

MINK - just to be clear, i wasn't implying that you thought dag was stashing money. i just don't think it's necessary for him to publish his accounts in a pulic forum. i know i wouldn't, even if there was nothing to hide. which there isn't. honestly.

That .42 cents at the end is annoying me so I have chipped in $13.58. And bought 10 powerpoints as well.

I hope you make the target but I hope even more we can get a long-term solution.

I can only suggest a porn channel at this stage. Reassign Blankfist to run it.

i think it's strange that people would demand transparency, democracy and community in every area of site administration except spending the money which they donated.

nope, i can't figure that one out.

i mean i thought this idea was really "dag".

>> ^MINK:
i think it's strange that people would demand transparency, democracy and community in every area of site administration except spending the money which they donated.
nope, i can't figure that one out.
i mean i thought this idea was really "dag".


Personally I don't agree with democratising every area of the site and have argued for the benefits of a benevolent dictatorship. Hence I don't need to see the numbers nor do I particularly want to.

Thus I, like others, am donating on trust. I've been here a long time and derived alot of enjoyment from the site and I'm prepared to do it on that basis.

I've dipped into my World of Warcraft funds to help out. My Undead Warlock will just have to go on hiatus for a couple of months.

Maybe you could tell us which provider is hosting the Sift, and maybe some people here know of cheaper alternatives.
I still think having people host their own avatars would save a lot of bandwidth. Graphics usually are the most bandwidth intensive.
Maybe there are other ways to cut costs or to get more money. Maybe selling some T-shirts and other Sift paraphernalia.
I will donate but I'd like to see the money used as effectively as possible.

As usual mink, you've got some pretty twisted views of this site and the Internet in general. Really, lock out non-members? This is a website that we hope to succeed eventually. How on earth could you seriously suggest that we essentially kill the website from all traffic? Real good plan for Internet success there, mink. Maybe we should save on bills by banning you because all your trolling comments take up a lot of space in our database.

Btw, do you also believe that every site on the Internet that has a "donate" button in their sidebar should detail all their finances? Do you rummage through Goodwill's dumpsters looking for financial statements to know if you're giving away your stuff to a worthwhile cause? Before you stick your spare change into the donation box at the counter of your local restaurant, do you start a letter-writing campaign to the organization to find out how they plan to spend your coins? Do you do a background and credit check on a homeless guy before putting a dollar in his cup?

We are not asking people to purchase stock in a company. We are not brokering a business transaction. We are not negotiating with the community. We are simply asking people if they are able and willing to donate, whether that willingness is based on financial information we've already shared or just their personal good feelings for the site. If you think it's worthwhile, then that's great. But if you don't, then don't donate. Just don't waste everyone's time with your little high horse act like King Mink is so magnanimous to demand full accounting for the poor, incompetent community when in reality you're just being a complainer as usual.

Dag's been very forthcoming and honest about the site's income and overhead. If that's just not enough information for you, too fucking bad for us. Pardon me while I cry a little. Just please quit you're inane whining and demand-slinging. You're clearly the only regular who gives too little a shit about the site's future to ever contribute a penny without us flying over and giving you a handjob in return.

(I don't know if it has been suggested before or not) Since you're open to ideas, here is one that worked really well at a site I used to help moderate and that also had huge bills to take care of.

Have you ever thought about giving users the ability to give charter memberships to anyone as a gift? Like a small link on each profile. For example: 'Give mauz15 a charter membership' It can easily fit below each user's avatar. And basically when you click the link it will redirect you to a page where you can pick which plan, or what number of powerpoints you want to give as a gift. After that it will redirect you to paypal. At the end of the transaction, a confirmation message is sent to the user, and another message is sent to the profile of the user who received the gift.

This is a video site/ community, which means there are many social connections going around, and I am sure that many consider each other friends, etc. This makes it very likely that a user will want to give a charter membership, or even a powerpoint to another user just because they are friends, or because that user reached diamond level, or maybe it is their birthday or their first year on VS, etc, etc. I don't know how big the userbase here really is but from the amount of social interaction I have noticed, I think it could work and it does not hurt to try it out.

Also, make the Support link more attention grabbing. Separated from other links; and at the very top. The spot where the powerpoints are displayed is a good example.

That is all.

Oh and pretty awesome how the level of donations has progressed so far.

As crazy as the idea of shutting off the site to non-members is, I think MINK is just trying to brainstorm ways of saving this site, so I think it's not fair to shoot him down like this.

As far as opening the financial books of VideoSift.com goes...I don't really care about it. I'm sure other hosting options are being considered and weighted. Switching the host is not a decision that is to be taken lightly anyways. But the idea in itself is not that crazy (again, I'm not in favor of it). Non-profit organizations that accept donations (like Goodwill) do have to open their books to the public, at least they do have to in many countries. But again, I'm not interested in the details of that.

What I would be interested in is the system this site is built upon, namely VaroCMS. If this site was built upon a well-known system, such as Wordpress, Joomla, etc etc I could rest assured that it operates very efficiently, without a lot of bandwidth or server power going to waste. With the closed-source system VaroCMS I'm not so sure.

Here's a small example of what I'm talking about: I just visited 5 user profiles, all of them charter members. None of them has a custom CSS in use, but for each individual profile I visited, a new .css file was cached locally. Ok it's only 10kb per .css file, but stuff like this keeps adding up. Waste is a thief...

I'm not trying to pin lucky to the wall. Building a complete CMS from scratch by oneself(?) is such a ginormous task that I shudder at the mere thought of it. That's why I wouldn't have considered doing that for a site like this in the first place. The question now is how can the site's system be optimized to save even the last drop of bandwidth and servertime? Again, with a closed source system like this it's all in lucky's hands and that's alot of work he's not getting paid for.

>> ^lucky760:
[snipped - alot]....You're clearly the only regular who gives too little a shit about the site's future to ever contribute a penny without us flying over and giving you a handjob in return.


God that made me laugh.

If MINK had started with the more interesting content in his "pfff.." comment instead of the terse "let us see your accounts." he might have gotten off on a better footing.

Wait... WAIT!...

I know how we can save the sift!

BAKE SALE!

Virtual muffins all round!

I am completely broke right now for the first time in about a year, typical! But I am perfectly willing to compromise any pride I had left and ask someone to donate for me (for now). I'll get back to you on that one

Done.

One suggestion: Some of the flash ads can cause performance problems when viewing the site on slower computers, for example at work. I.E. video does not play properly because flash ad is hogging the CPU. To encourage people to disable ad blockers it might be worth adding a profile option to disable flash ads, might increase impressions and/or clicks.

I may be a "douche" because of my extremely dry or ironic humor, but in many circles, including the faq:

"Please do not down vote a video because you dislike the Sifter who submitted it; this is entirely unacceptable. Instead, vote solely based on the quality of video content. If down voting or any other member privilege is intentionally misused, the offending member will be temporarily banned for no less than 2 weeks. A second offense will result in a permanent ban."

your actions could be viewed negatively as well. Not only did you just downvote a video you haven't even watched (or did you watch the 23 minute video?) you are bribing other people to downvote the video as well.

I came here with nothing but my personal opinion and a monetary donation. At least I can claim the moral high-ground:
http://www.videosift.com/member/imstellar28/voteddown


>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
imsteller, people would take you more seriously if you didn't act like such a douche all the time. Down voted for your smarmy video pimping. In the spirit of capitalism, supply and demand and freemarketology I'll give two dollars for every downvote of imnsteller's video (up to $20).

wow lucky, you do protest too much. i just started to feel sorry for you.

Sorry imstellar, but you will get no moral highground today. If you can buy upvotes, then I can buy downvotes. Plain and simple. My offer is obviously a better value. Instead of complaining about market forces, why not make a more competitive bid? That's how the free market works, sweetheart.

PS: Although I give you a hard time, I've got nothing against you personally. These are downvotes of principle.

Please re-read my post. I donated based on the number of votes it had ALREADY received, I did not say I was going to donate based on future votes. I was not bribing people to vote for my video, I was donating an ironic amount (the magnitude of which happens to be similar to other donors). Big difference.

I did it primarily for my own amusement, but Farhad2000, to some extent, realized this and got a chuckle out of it. Sometimes its the little things in life that keep it interesting.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Sorry imstellar, but you will get no moral highground today. If you can buy upvotes, then I can buy downvotes. Plain and simple. My offer is obviously a better value. Instead of complaining about market forces, why not make a more competitive bid? That's how the free market works, sweetheart.
PS: Although I give you a hard time, I've got nothing against you personally. These are downvotes of principle.

^I don't think Farhad was laughing 'with' you.

The primary reason why I started becoming active in Videosift was to be able to leave comments, by either flat out deject other people's opinions, randomly shoot out cuss words or simply resorting to personal attacks (my favorite).

Second main reason why I joined the video sift and 'STAYED' was the level-up system. I wouldn't have stayed this long if it weren't for all the 'achievements' that I could get, such as the bronze, silver, gold stars and the power points.

Frankly I was very disappointed with Videosift 2.0 when they started downplaying the sift powers. That's also around when I kinda gave up getting more stars for myself to get 250 Diamond. There was no point in getting them, and it seemed a bit too far of a goal.

I'm a gamer at heart, and these two traits (multi player & leveling up) have drawn me into Videosift I believe.

So I don't know about the rest of you guys, but for me and my breed, these were the traits that successfully got my attention, and kept me here. Hopefully you guys could build up on these strong points.



This gives me an idea... Hmmm I should make a sift talk out of this.

Anyone know how long it takes before the fundraiser amount updates? I need instant gratification.

"Someone" (ahem) here has donated on my behalf, and I thank them very much. I will be back with more as soon as is feasible!

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

We're at $2,080 - 17%. Thanks everyone for your contributions.

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

I'd just like to say a little bit about hosting. Some seem to think we are paying way to much and should find cheaper hosts. Many people seem to know a really great cut-rate hosting service. I'm against changing hosts for a couple of reasons:

1. You get what you pay for. We have some experience with cheaper hosts, the problem is that the low price leaders work by volume - new accounts pile into the cheap plans and suddenly your bandwidth has gone and support tickets take weeks to get a response.

2. We're really happy with our current provider and don't want the headache of moving town. Everything is configured exactly the way we need it - the engineers have helped us work out the intricacies of load balancing to backend private IPs and making it all work smoothly.

I just kicked in $100, but I wanted to respond to at least one comment in this thread.

"What I would be interested in is the system this site is built upon, namely VaroCMS. If this site was built upon a well-known system, such as Wordpress, Joomla, etc etc I could rest assured that it operates very efficiently, without a lot of bandwidth or server power going to waste. With the closed-source system VaroCMS I'm not so sure."


AHHHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....

As a web developer I can tell you unequivocally that what you say about Joomla and Wordpress is WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Here's a google search for "word
press performance problem" you may note that there are 6.5 million results. Wordpress is famously shitty at managing high volumes of traffic.

and here's the same search for Joomla. Smaller number, but I think that has more to do with Joomla adoption. You have to really really hate yourself to want to run Joomla. Beyond that wordpress and Joomla are not really designed for the type of site that Videosift is. Wordpress is a blogging solution, but I would be willing to bet deputy dog can tell you about his growing pains as he became reddit / diggs favorite poster of all things list related.

Beyond that though working with Joomla is like signing up to be kicked in the balls every time you edit a file. I have NEVER worked with anything I liked less than Joomla and I've test driven every major frame work, CMS, what have you out there.

Varo is lean mean and committed to running Videosift. These other technologies are convenient for small scale sites without large user bases or dynamic content, but they can really become a PITA when you are talking about managing large dynamic communities. I promise you that the cost of ownership of Varo is much much lower than trying to shoehorn a bull like Joomla into doing all of the things we know and love about Videosift.

A long long time ago in a galaxy far away we ran Pligg, which is a digg like CMS. We moved away from it because it was a pain to edit, and the decision to do that has ultimately empowered all of the major functionality boosts that Rommel has added since then.

I say we take the money and invest it in a high risk loan.

Varo is lean mean and committed to running Videosift. These other technologies are convenient for small scale sites without large user bases or dynamic content, but they can really become a PITA when you are talking about managing large dynamic communities. I promise you that the cost of ownership of Varo is much much lower than trying to shoehorn a bull like Joomla into doing all of the things we know and love about Videosift.

Like searching by channel? How efficient is it really to search through all the channels, letting users browse through pages and pages of results instead of pinpointing the places that should be searched in the first place? Look, what I'm trying to say is that building one's own CMS will always leave out basic functionality here and there. Some of it will result in uneccessary traffic. The great thing about that Google Search you posted is that while there are problems with Open Source CMSs, there are also people working on solutions to these problems. All that weight is on Lucky's shoudlers (and possibly your own, since you seem to have some insight into VaroCMS).

I don't share your bad experiences with Joomla, especially not with the editing part. However, you might be right when you say that they're unfit for this kind of community. I'd argue that you could tailor most Open Source CMS's to anything you want, but if you say that this would be more work than building VaroCMS from scratch I'll gladly take your word for it.

But what I won't believe is that this site's system has no room for improvement. If you're telling me that there are no ways to make this system more efficient and use less bandwidth and server time, putting it above and beyond all the open source cms's out there then I'd have a hard time believing you.

I don't want to clog up this thread, but let me say one more thing. I have great admiration for lucky and all the great work and effort he has put into this site and this community. I'm not trying to badmouth his work. But when all I hear is that this has been a one-man project from the technical side and then see some core functionality missing I have to start wondering how efficient the backend of the whole thing is. It might be great for all I know, but you can't blame me for wondering about it.

Hey Campionidelmondo,

You are certainly right that there is room for improvement. There will always be room for improvement. I'm just saying that I don't think any large scale website that I know of is running on stock software. I would like to define large scale as more than 80,000 page views a day.

Yes you can certainly bend a CMS into doing whatever you want, but I think you ultimately are losing performance when you do that. Our SQL querries / tables have been optimized to do exactly what we need them to do. If you take the underlying schema for an existing CMS and bend it to your will you are probably also having to do certain things on the back end that destroy any original performance boosts.

Ultimately though the issues with videosift performance have more to do with the amount of dynamic data on the page. Take a look at just this page, there are over 100+ comments, numerous users, and 5 or 6 distinct sidebar data panels. That's a lot of querries to run regardless of the hardware.

I think ultimately a key factor in understanding the need for beefy videosift servers is a quick look at the total number of indexed pages from google. Right now it's hovering just under a million but in reality there are over 3 million possible pages if not more than that. Google will ocassionally trim their results. Anyway you shake it that's a ton of data. You only get about 211,000 for techcrunch.

I chipped in 1 NOK for each star in my shiny new Golden Hundred, totalling $14.60.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
imsteller, people would take you more seriously if you didn't act like such a douche all the time. Down voted for your smarmy video pimping. In the spirit of capitalism, supply and demand and freemarketology I'll give two dollars for every downvote of imnsteller's video (up to $20).

In the spirit of liberal acceptance of those who are different, I upvoted the video.

In the spirit of liberal guilt for having potentially harmed the Sift with my choice, I've donated $20.

PS: I also couldn't pass up the opportunity to cost imstellar a dollar.

I don't know if this would help or not, so I'm just going to throw it out there:

Add a games section, which has been suggested several times already. It might broaden this site's appeal, and that might mean more memberships and/or a way to broaden VS's advertising appeal. Might. Hell I don't know, but it's worth thinking about.

And before the purists scream "This is a VIDEO site!", let me say this:

1. We have Sift Talk and channel Talk posts, in which people discuss just about everything under the sun. And the subjects often don't have a damn thing to do with videos.
2. This site has blogs. What do blog posts have to do with videos? Unless there's a video in it, probably nothing.
3. We have a chat room. Where people chat. No videos present, nor even possible.
4. We have a crossword puzzle. Last I checked, a crosword puzzle is a type of GAME.

So this site has already branched out beyond mere video posts. Are games that much of a stretch? As mentioned before, we wouldn't even have to "sift" them. Just have a game room where the games are already posted and people can play. Maybe make it so that games can be suggested and/or voted on, that way the good ones stay and the lame ones go.

Like I said, I don't know if games would help at all, but I think we have to start being creative with suggestions on how to broaden this site's appeal.

I don't have any money so I sent you canned goods...but I was hungry so I opened them first and took a little food out of every can then put the remainder into disposal tupperware.

Oh, can you please send that tupperware back when you're done with it? Thanks.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
I don't know if this would help or not, so I'm just going to throw it out there:
Add a games section....


Good Idea. There are sites like http://www.mochiads.com/ that offer numbers of simple minigames, where revenue is earned for every play or something along those lines. Add a comment section on every game so that there is interaction that can make people competitive, etc. People are more likely to play a game with a single ad that shows up while the game is loading, than to click a normal ad.

I don't think it would take too much just to try it out.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
I don't know if this would help or not, so I'm just going to throw it out there:
Add a games section, which has been suggested several times already. It might broaden this site's appeal, and that might mean more memberships and/or a way to broaden VS's advertising appeal. Might. Hell I don't know, but it's worth thinking about.
And before the purists scream "This is a VIDEO site!", let me say this:
1. We have Sift Talk and channel Talk posts, in which people discuss just about everything under the sun. And the subjects often don't have a damn thing to do with videos.
2. This site has blogs. What do blog posts have to do with videos? Unless there's a video in it, probably nothing.
3. We have a chat room. Where people chat. No videos present, nor even possible.
4. We have a crossword puzzle. Last I checked, a crosword puzzle is a type of GAME.
So this site has already branched out beyond mere video posts. Are games that much of a stretch? As mentioned before, we wouldn't even have to "sift" them. Just have a game room where the games are already posted and people can play. Maybe make it so that games can be suggested and/or voted on, that way the good ones stay and the lame ones go.
Like I said, I don't know if games would help at all, but I think we have to start being creative with suggestions on how to broaden this site's appeal.

So you're suggesting we sell out? To shame, kronos, to shame.

A few comments from a probationary.

I'm one of those nasty bags of mainly water that use adblock. I've nothing against VideoSift and infact I'm rather tolerant of ads but it's the psycho flash ads that pop up from time to time that drive me nuts and so the block turns on.

I thought about becoming a charter member but balked at the cost. All the goodies associated don't matter to me. All I want is to not see flashing, moving, or blinking ads. Text ads are great I don't mind them. So just how much do you get for an impression of a flash ad? If it's small like $0.01 each then what about offering people the option to remove 'media rich' ads for $1 per month and maybe grant them a status above probationary (Say "Supporter" or something). You have to consider that people like me are non-revenue already.

I'll probably never submit any clever vote worthy video but it bothers me that I still have that dang P by my name.

That's not such a bad idea. Give probies the option to pay money to remove their P

There are some posibilities here. Some flash games could be great for community competition. Like legacy mentioned above, I also love the game aspects of videosift - the "levels" and associated new powers and such - this is something that could be highlighted much more.


>> ^kronosposeidon:
I don't know if this would help or not, so I'm just going to throw it out there:
Add a games section, which has been suggested several times already. It might broaden this site's appeal, and that might mean more memberships and/or a way to broaden VS's advertising appeal. Might. Hell I don't know, but it's worth thinking about.
And before the purists scream "This is a VIDEO site!", let me say this:
1. We have Sift Talk and channel Talk posts, in which people discuss just about everything under the sun. And the subjects often don't have a damn thing to do with videos.
2. This site has blogs. What do blog posts have to do with videos? Unless there's a video in it, probably nothing.
3. We have a chat room. Where people chat. No videos present, nor even possible.
4. We have a crossword puzzle. Last I checked, a crosword puzzle is a type of GAME.
So this site has already branched out beyond mere video posts. Are games that much of a stretch? As mentioned before, we wouldn't even have to "sift" them. Just have a game room where the games are already posted and people can play. Maybe make it so that games can be suggested and/or voted on, that way the good ones stay and the lame ones go.
Like I said, I don't know if games would help at all, but I think we have to start being creative with suggestions on how to broaden this site's appeal.

I'm against putting minigames on videosift. Here are my main reasons:

1. It has no effect bonding the community, except for maybe comparing the score rankings.

2. Diverts attention from our main focal point, the videos.

3. Unnecessary options only cause confusion and extra work with minimal results.


When I mentioned about gaming aspect of Videosift, I meant that as in playing an online game and being part of the gaming community. It's like playing an RPG as if Videosift WAS the game and I was playing my own avatar called 'legacy0100'. But introducing flash mini games to videosift, that's completely different.


We do have the blogs and the chats and the crosswords. But these are tools to aid our socialization. Crossword for example, developed by one of videosift's members and the questionnaire is relevant to facts about recently popular videos or a popular sift community persona.


Mini games from other sites don't exactly build onto strengthening the community nor does it have any relevance with video sifting.


Videosift's strong points are its very personable community & all the exclusive personas (the westy, the ant, the choggie, the zonbie & Lady death, the Dysto & issy etc etc). The ability to personalize your own appearance in the community, as well as viewing the person's avatar directly right next to their posted comments makes a very personal community, and keeps the place, if not most importantly, a 'Highly Active' community.

We want members to participate, say what they have to say, agree or disagree. We need them to make this place stay active. Mini games don't promote these traits, in fact, mini games would isolate each members to come in videosift, see minigames, play them, and leave.

They would not discuss, they would not vote, they would not do anything of that sort (when was the last time you've seen a clash of idealistic discussion break out while playing a flash mini game?)

So mini games, I say nay.


P.S did that sound right? I'm half asleep right now o_-

I really advocate a imposition of a buy in for being a member of VS along the lines of Something Awful and Meta Filter. It was $10 bucks for those sites.

But the exact level of restriction would have to be played around with i.e. what is public (Top15 maybe first 5 pages of content) and what is restricted (unsifted, search, video thumbs, top of all channels and other functions). It seems to have worked well for both examples I mentioned in maintaining a community for the long run.

The traffic will continue to grow. I think this donation drive while admirable, is a band aid solution for a longer term problem.

I don't know where my money went BUT I sent it somewhere. Maybe it will eventually arrive at VS.

I'm wondering if maybe your current CDN can be replaced, maybe only in part, with the Coral Cache? It certainly seems graphics could be pulled from there rather than a paid server, seeing as most of them never change.

Perhaps non-members should be served cached pages rather than dynamically generated. They're not going to be voting or commenting, so there's little reason for them to see the page in its absolutely-most-up-to-date state. I bet the vast majority of them don't even look at the comments so rather than load them up from the get-go, add a link to display them. Or maybe, combining it with the cached-pages idea, serve them a cached page that only shows comments rated 5+. Let them click a link for "all comments" which will actually display the dynamic page.

I dropped a 20 spot on you. Thanks for all your efforts with the 'sift.

*promote

Promoting this Sift Talk post - promote requested by burdturgler.

Had $20 sitting in my PayPal account from part of my fantasy football winnings so I boomeranged it your way.

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

Thanks everyone - we are now at 20% of our goal in just 72 hours.

Indeed! Thanks for giving us the warm fuzzy feeling that a lot of people like us. You really, really like us.

I tried to donate a kidney, but paypal wouldn't accept it. Suffice it to say, I won't need to shop for food tonight.

^ ^ ^
did you try inserting it into your A: drive? I think that's where organs go, now that 5 1/4 diskettes are (recently) obsolete.

Mink sounds like a politician whose policies are dangerously alienating. Reminds me of the Republican party of recent years...bunch of angry old men who've lost touch with reality and all that is truly important.

That having been said, I shall donate my firstborn to VideoSift. Since I am not currently with child, I'm off to find someone to bear the conceptus. Cheers, and thanks to all who donated!

Do you have illegal immigrants in Australia? Because you could always get them to...you know what? Nevermind.

Unbeknownst to most people, siftbot actually feeds on children, which means the donated money in the end will go to the local orphanage near dag's hometown. That orphanage needs the cash - you wouldn't hurt an orphanage, would you? Put a dollar in the box!

Have some mo money. Weed is recession proof.

I sent you some cash. Long live the Sift!

I chipped in $25 and haven't gotten my little donor icon.

>> ^Mekanikal:
I chipped in $25 and haven't gotten my little donor icon.


Yeah, the chip-in function isn't automatically associated with the donor icon thing. I was hoping for that too but as I understand what dag explained, they'll have to manually fix up those associations.

Wouldn't hurt to start slapping on some golden sift icons on the donors, eh?

Also, this should not be overlooked:


>> ^Farhad2000:
I really advocate a imposition of a buy in for being a member of VS along the lines of Something Awful and Meta Filter. It was $10 bucks for those sites.
But the exact level of restriction would have to be played around with i.e. what is public (Top15 maybe first 5 pages of content) and what is restricted (unsifted, search, video thumbs, top of all channels and other functions). It seems to have worked well for both examples I mentioned in maintaining a community for the long run.
The traffic will continue to grow. I think this donation drive while admirable, is a band aid solution for a longer term problem.


Seriously - this is important.

If you want the Sift to grow, you want the new joiners to have encouragement to make some contribution for "beyond basic" access.

At somethingawful the search is disabled for non-registered/paying.

Since one of the reasons for search is to find dupes, makes sense to make that something registered users only have access to (besides, google search is pretty good at finding our content anyway).

Old URLs wouldn't be locked, but people wouldn't casually barnstorm through the whole sift without at least a picture of dag (or Charms? ) politely inviting the visitor to join up if they like what they see...

We need a poll on which prominent Sifter would be the best 'endorsement' for such "join us" ads....

Are you suggesting that we spam issykitties face all over the interwebs?!? No Krupo no...(imagine me getting sucked into a whirlpool right now, and you kinda get the gist of how my voice should sound when reading that sentence)

*promote
I pledge to donate $20 this weekend

Promoting this Sift Talk post - promote requested by cybrbeast.

$20 more dollars since i just got paid :-D
I don't mind the cash but cant spare much more.
Dag and the others in charge, please please save the sift!! :*-(

I used to be a professional project manager. It seems we were the first people to go in the great recession/depression of 2008-?. Now I am back to basic research using my (previously unmarketable) training as a physicist. However, I have been fielding calls from several of my former writers/editors who have been saddled with project management responsibilities. It seems that the world is quick to judge who is unnecessary, while equally quick suffer the need for particular services.

It is from this place that I beseech all of you who supplement/forgo cable and/or satellite TV because of the bounty of Videosift: For gods' sakes, think of the sift as the professional service that it actually is!

Think of this as an opportunity, as a community, to make a statement about the viability of niche media services. Do we really want to to be slaves of Network TV in perpetuity, so that our children inherit a media ecosystem that rewards programing with 1-5 million weekly viewers with immediate cancellation? In the age of the internet, thousands, or even hundreds, of individuals should be capable of supporting professional services/programing (without corporate overhead).

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have NOT made a financial contribution to the sift, nor am I a charter member. This is due to two factors: (1) I am losing my current position on July 31st (corporate cowards backing off from basic research), and (2) because I am already actively donating to the Rebel FM and CO-OP podcasts. Forgive me for prioritizing content creators over contend aggregators, but the sentiment is the same: I want niche media to succeed.

Myself and LadyD have donated a total $80 - I wish £ was worth more right now...oh well

I must ask, are you guys getting concerned now that the donations have seemingly pretty much dried up?

There was the initial spree of the regular crew and now it's pretty much sat at the same amount for a while now. Is the sift going to have to close up shop?

Am I going mad, or has the meter actually gone downwards lately? I clearly remember seeing it up in the $2700s, but at the time of writing this it's standing at $2402.10.

Maybe I'm just confusing numbers. It wouldn't be the first time.

How are the other ideas going? CafePress t-shirts and whatnot? I hope we haven't hit a plateau.

*doublepromote

Double-Promoting this Sift Talk post - doublepromote requested by burdturgler.

Right, just donated $20. But guys dont forget, for the ones who can't afford it, even donating a dollar, two or three would be great! It all adds up, imagine if every memeber donated $1

Ay, just in,
Online concert video channel Fabchannel.com ceases its activities as of today, due to bad economic prospects within the music and online advertising market.
http://www.fabchannel.com/blog/2009/03/official-press-release-fabchannel-stops-its-activities.html
We can't let this happen here!

Some ideas to raise/safe costs:
-Could we maybe use eBay to sell VideoSift paraphernalia? Giftshop..
-Introduce new types of membership (semi full member etc.)
-Create a new more professional video journal front page (or create a new URL for this!) - with a new video section (RSS feed?) and hot video section (RSS feed?); a member redacted feature section, direct access to the channels and a sponsored video section with occasional prizes to be won.
-Marketing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_marketing

*doublepromote

Double-Promoting this Sift Talk post - doublepromote requested by Zifnab.

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

>> ^spoco2:
I must ask, are you guys getting concerned now that the donations have seemingly pretty much dried up?
There was the initial spree of the regular crew and now it's pretty much sat at the same amount for a while now. Is the sift going to have to close up shop?


I have to admit that at this point it's looking unlikely that we will hit our goal. We're not closing shop - we will not go down without a fight - we're working on other ways to tighten our belt. The donations that have come in- and are still coming in- will give us a bit of breathing room at least for the next month or so. We're very thankful for all of the contributions that have happened so far.

I just added $20 to the pot - not much, but I hope it helps; I'd really hate to see a community like this shut down

When I'm rich I'm gonna become VideoSift's rich uncle...until then, here's another $30.

Videosift is fantastic. I love the concept, and the community's not bad either. Good luck Dag, here's my little contribution.

Heck, you should feel special. I've never even donated to NPR!

Yay, 3000. All hail the administrators. They know best what to do with our precious, precious moneys.

*promote

Promoting this Sift Talk post - promote requested by Issykitty.

Personally I feel I owe the place, more now than before. The last few days have been a challenge to everyone I'd guess and I didn't deal with parts of it as well as I should have, it was important but more so to me than to others and I should have slowed down a bit and recognized that. It was all but fixed a short time later anyway.

Now the "all but" part is gone too, I'm not sure who I have to thank for that but... Thank you. I was happy enough with the fix before but that was a damned nice gesture and I do appreciate it. Giving anything hurts, activism and income aren't a good combination, but in this case it's worth a little bit even if it's just a gesture.

Another $20 in the form of a charter membership. Fix this up, I dont know how much more I want to pay just to bicker with quantumushroom.

Bickering with QM is included free of charge.
Consider it a bonus. Or a duty. Or a privilege .. or maybe a waste of time.
In any event .. all sales are final!

I'd love to donate, it is worthwhile, but my wife has forbid me to spend even a penny since our account is at -400 and credit card bills are eminent.
She's been off work for practically a month due to illness so until things pick up, just know that I'm not ignoring the issue!
-Sorry folks

... now..., how much does it cost to gas in my van to get to work....? (awe Crap!)

Yep, economy is rough these days.

I know this is an old thread, but I intend on throwing some green to the sift every couple of weeks. I really love this community and I think its my obligation to help. I am in a more lucky economic place than most people though.


The more I can get 6 videos at a time the better. I do need that ever popular promote.