[Adium-devl] Monetizing Adium

[Chris Forsythe]

Folks,

	Sorry for the flood of emails this week.

	So for a while now I've wanted us to be able to provide for full  
time development of Adium. SoC has proven that this is a good thing  
to do, take Andreas' project last year and this year for instance.  
The problem is that we need to be able to bring in a revenue stream  
large enough to be competitive in the work place, and to not void  
everything we've worked on with something like advertising inside of  
Adium.

	We've tried multiple routes to help us increase revenue in some  
ways. Donations are not enough. Revver videos actually do help us a  
little (the ad at the end generates revenue, which gets put into the  
donations account), but not a lot. We've tried getting VOIP software  
added to Adium so that we'd gain revenue for computer -> landline  
dialing, but that's proven to be difficult (not impossible).

	The general idea going forward is incremental increases in revenue  
streams. Specifically if we have a lot of micropayment setups such as  
Revver which allow us to make enough to employ at least one person,  
that'd be pretty darned cool.

	With all that said, we still need to become a legal entity. Augie  
has a coworker who was working towards that goal with us, but that  
conversation died off. I was thinking of setting up a Texas LLC since  
those are easy to setup, making myself and Evan "co-owners" so to  
speak. That'd just be so that we'd have legal status within the US,  
and so that the income wouldn't be taxed directly to Evan or myself  
as it is right now.

	There are other options, such as a 501c3, but upon advisement of  
Robert Levin before he died, I'm pretty wary of all the requirements  
of that (wouldn't mind someone else doing it, such as Augie's  
coworker who knows the system).

	So anyhow, point of the email. Can anyone think of revenue streams?  
We all know about the tshirt store and selling Adium plushies and  
things like that, but do you have any oddball, hairbrained ideas  
which we could utilize so that we can start paying people to work on  
Adium full time or part time? Ads within Adium will not be happening,  
just to clear that up right now. Neat ideas such as Revver would be  
great though.

Chris
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