[Adium-devl] Monetizing Adium

[George Armah]

Hi,

I think at some point in time this question (or at least some version of 
it) should be thrown to Adium's users (via the website or some other means)
Its possible that out of the 100,000's there are a couple with $$$ to 
spare who would be willing to donate for some specific purpose if they 
understood why and what it
would be used for. Also, a lot of regular users know adium is free but 
don't know a lot about the behind the scenes sacrifices devs like you 
have to make to make it work.
If they are informed, they'll at least understand why Adium needs funding.

That being said, is it possible to create some sort of fund with some 
seed amount of money? Also, about how much would be needed to fully 
employ someone to work for Adium?


thanks for Adium and keep up the good work,

George Armah






Chris Forsythe wrote:
> 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 
> stream*s*. 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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