Quote Originally Posted by susikala View Post
I don't think that's the point, allquixotic. There are two problems here:

1. Many site owners believe that their users owe them something (this site's owner acts the same way). It's the other way around, a site thrives on its users. No users, and it will die.
2. Some people believe that you should turn off adblock if you like some site. That's not going to help unless you think money grows on trees. Money on the Net is earned because people click on stuff AND subsequently spend money. I can turn off adblock and click on ads all day, but I have never bought something on the Internet which was linked to me directly through an ad or an affiliation link. If I do get an affiliation link, I remove the affiliated part because I don't believe the person who linked me should be getting any money out of it. It's a poisoned culture.
Actually, Michael makes some fraction of a cent each time you click on an ad, even if you don't buy anything. He also makes money per ten-thousand (or hundred-thousand?) ad views, even without anyone interacting with them. The advertisers are willing to pay even for the off chance that one or two people out of 10,000 page hits are going to look at their ad and think about their company and products, even if they don't want to buy it by clicking the ad.

Quote Originally Posted by susikala View Post
I myself am a site owner. Admittedly, it's not a tenth as big as phoronix, but it has its fair share of users. I don't have any ads, and I ask people to donate. I don't get enough donations each month to cover the costs, but as the vps I'm hosted on costs practically nothing (less than 30 usd a month), it's no biggie.

The problem is that people pay too much for hosting and do not use their resources wisely. Practicularily in the US, VPSs are way too expensive. You can get a dedicated server in Germany for US VPS prices. There's no reason for these prices, other than to pseudo-justify having to place obnoxious ads (actually, all ads are obnoxious) on the site and pretty much treat your users like mindless sheep.
You don't have to lecture me on regional server costs. I know it for a fact. I've paid for hosting in Seattle; to get a decent beefy box costs about $500+ per month. To get the same or even better hardware in Germany (e.g. Hetzner) costs about $180/month. I've been "exploiting" the affordability of German and UK hosting for quite a while.

What you have to realize is that for a site as large as Michael's, a VPS won't do. Plausibly, one dedicated server might not even do, unless it's a quad-CPU second-gen Nehalem Xeon system with 128GB of RAM and an iSCSI attached SAS 10krpm disk array.... Yeah, that hardware is freaking expensive no matter where you rent it from (or buy it, or whatever). So people usually end up buying a cluster of servers instead. Fairly high-end servers. Like, 24GB of RAM, one or two Nehalem-ish Xeons, and either capacious or fast HDDs depending on their storage needs. Those type of servers cost about $250 a pop, even in Germany. In the US, you don't even wanna know.

Quote Originally Posted by susikala View Post
I don't care about Michael's lifestyle, that's his thing and has nothing to do with this site. To be honest, I don't care the least bit about benchmarking, either.
What you care about, and what Michael has to spend money on in order to take this site in the direction he wants, are two different things. If you say you only care about Honda selling you a steering wheel, and you don't want an entire car, are they going to break down a new Civic and sell you the steering wheel for $250? Or will they make you buy the entire car for $20k+. Yeah. What's more likely.

Michael's site is not juts about FOSS news. It's about that and benchmarking. Benchmarking costs money, because a large percentage of the hardware he uses, he has to buy. If he's lucky he occasionally gets a CPU from Intel or a GPU from AMD. But he has to buy system chassis, power supplies, motherboards, RAM, disks, keyboards mice and monitors, and all that other jazz. These are business expenses for him, on top of his server expenses and travel.

If you discard even all the stuff he spends money on "for fun" (e.g. lederhosens and German beer), he's still got quite a burn rate as far as operational expenses. Hardware for benchmarking, large-scale dedicated hosting (much larger than you're aware is even possible if you are thinking in terms of VPSes), and travel to important FOSS events. It's a lot of money, I'm sure.

You can't just take one part of Michael and just pay for that. If he can't fund his entire business, the whole thing will sink. You could wish all day long that he only do one particular thing and stop benchmarking or stop traveling, but that's not how his business is run, so it's too bad for you.

He has to pay for his business somehow, and while I don't think ads are the best way, I think there's a way to attain a happy medium by having ads that aren't irritating, and are as relevant as possible to the people viewing them. Maybe static banner ads (no animated GIFs, no flash) along the top and bottom that advertise Linux vendor things? Maybe Red Hat and Novell could pay for ads advertising their enterprise offerings. Oracle too.

A donation model of business will never work if that's your only source of income, especially not for a for-profit company. People talk a lot about donating on the internet, but in reality, people donate a lot less money (and a lot less often) than they say they will. Trust me, I run a site that gets donations, and I can't tell you how many times I've gone and spent a lot of time to do something to make someone happy, then let them see it, because they said they'd donate if I did it... well, I did it, and they didn't donate. Instead they just complained about the next thing that came to their mind, as if to string me along from one issue to the next like a fool, hoping they'll drop a pittance in my lap.

No thanks.