PvXwiki:Financing/Archive

Background
This site was started around 14. April 2007 – the date of the purchase of the pvxbuilds.com. The day when I decided to go ahead and make a new home for builds from GuildWiki. Site wasn’t public until May but some people started to show interest early on and some of the got admin status and were actively working on the site policy and structure. Main turning point for the PvXwiki was Build policy and the whole process around it. There were a few candidates and voting process with a lot of arguing. After some changes and modifications it resulted in a system that we do have and use today. During this six month time with PvXwiki I have adjusted to the community needs and sometimes even changed my points of view when it comes to some questions. PvXwiki have affected my personal life and interest for the game. And it helped me to get new friends as well as some enemies.

As some of you may be noticed I have been away from the wiki for quite some time. I got a new job, moved to a new city, got a new girlfriend and living pretty much a totally new and different life. Now I have things like family planning and buying a new apartment on my mind. With other words it’s hard for me to blindly pay 150$ bills each month.

Problem
At the moment we have negative balance of around 818$ for hosting and 185$ for advertising (-1003$). And have to pay 144$ each month. For this site to safely function during the near feature we need to cover up the negative balance and create a positive one with money to pay for at least 6 month of hosting ahead.

Donations
First step to solve this problem was starting with donations. I got only one donation from admin of gwiki.fr. As there is no interest inside the community to donate I think this solution pretty much failure.

Advertising
Getting good ad’s to a site is way more complicated than most of the people think. In order to continuously have income from ad’s we need online game related ad’s that change from time to time and does not include gold selling ads. In order to get such ad’s one needs to bound connections with different companies that want to advertise on the website. It takes time and is not easy. Using service like www.AdBrite.com will simply produce way too many “bad” ads and it needs constantly look after. Google Ad-words produce almost non income and you need a lot of to get any cash at all.

Finding a new owner
3rd solution is pretty simple. Find a new owner for PvXwiki. Here our main goal will be to find someone who has the money, the time and the interest of keeping this site not only alive but also insure its feature growth. Single individuals are not an option here as it will result in the same situation we are in with me today.

Discussion
I want all of the community to get together and discuss what we should do. We have 3 options as presented above, we must choose one - if we don't the site will not be able to survive. It's up to you guys.

gcardinal 19:48, 11 November 2007 (CET)

Update 13 Nov 2007
Thanks for all feedbacks and solutions mailed to me. They are all look nice and have some good points, but most of them builds around one single individual.

And having such a big site bounded to one single individual can result in site close down if something happens to that person. It makes site extremely vulnerable. I have put a lot of time, effort and money into PvXwiki and my main goal is to keep it alive and online. I always tried to keep the hosting problems to myself so community didn’t have to worry about them.

As I see it currently only Wikia can ensure that this site will stay alive for years to come and that community doesn’t ever have to worry about it going offline. It’s a pretty solid organization I can trust. So as result of all the thinking I have entered the talks with Wikia about the transfer of the PvXwiki to Wikia.

I hope with experience from GuildWiki we can do this transfer fast smooth and painless.