But the claim that this is a charity site is just wrong. It's a pirate side where f95 serves you ads and asks you to donate from what they make a lot of money.
I'd just like to address this briefly.
We make no claims that we're a charity, however we aren't a "for profit" site. No attempts are made to make a profit from the site, the only interest we have are to break even and cover our operating costs.
Ad revenue is awful, for a multitude of reasons, including: the vast majority of users have adblock and we don't force people to disable it, we only allow a limited number of banner ads - no popups/notifications/popunders/etc, we're a pirate site, and we're a porn site. Add all of these reasons together, and you get a site with a lot of traffic but awful ad monetisation, which, as I said, we are fine with because the goal isn't to make money, and thankfully although awful, our ad revenue does cover all of our server costs.
Regarding donations, these cover more one off payments like server/hardware upgrades, software licences, and any outsourced development for the forum that I don't have time for. No donation money goes into the pocket of anyone, instead it's kept until it's needed for the above reasons.
When we have an excess of money, we give it away. For example, we operate the free community render server, giving newbie developers free access to a 3090 to render with, and we hold end of year contests to boost smaller devs with hundreds of dollars in prize money. We have other things in the pipeline too, which aren't ready to be announced yet.
Now, if we wanted to make a profit and actually properly monetize the site, you would see a number of changes, eg:
- Popunders/popups (this alone would quadruple ad revenue at the very least)
- Forcing users to disable adblock (even though this would cause a drop in traffic, the revenue would be astronomical)
- Promoting of monthly donations/subscriptions (eg, to disable ads)
- Using K2S and other sites to get affiliate money
Which of course, we aren't doing.
Finally, this may be hard for a lot of people to believe or understand, but whilst I have no moral qualms with the free sharing of content, I do find "piracy for profit" to be unconscionable. Nobody, be it admin, staff or moderator gets paid. This is a hobby, not a job.
Believe what you will, this will be the only time I speak on the matter in this thread, to prevent thread derailment.