I have been thinking for some time about how to create some income to cover my bandwidth and production costs for Winecast. After the iTunes launch, my traffic has increased 400% and I will have to pay for additional server bandwidth to keep the show available. Not a problem for me, but should this trend continue, I will need to think about ways to start to cover these costs. For those who don’t understand the economics of a website, the owner pays a monthly fee for a fixed amount of downloads from the site per month (commonly referred to as “bandwidth”). Since audio files are relatively large in size, this adds up fairly quickly.
So I’d like your help in deciding what to do here. On the right menu I have placed a short poll with every money generating idea I could think of to support the show’s costs. Have a look and vote for the option you would support. Be honest, please. This does not mean that I will abide by the majority vote, but I wanted to get a sense for your opinion. I will be talking a bit more about this on my next episode to be posted shortly.
Thanks in advance for your help!
One option is to use a .Mac account to host the most recent shows, then shift them over to archival storage on another host with a lot of space. .Mac doesn’t have any explicit bandwidth restrictions and some more popular shows were using this method to reduce bandwidth costs.
It’s rather effective because the majority of downloads are recent shows while the archival shows are accessed rarely.
Tim,
I like the idea of charging a small fee to download the shows via iTunes, since this is the main source of your bandwidth strain. Yes, people can come right to your blog to download the shows for free, but the insistence of slamming people with the iTunes service should be offset with some sort of “ignorance premium”.
Hey Tim,
I’ve been away, just got back recently and saw your great new site and this poll …
I would avoid getting a sponsor if at all possible … it will hamstring your capability to objectively rate wines and/or skew the material on your shows to “sell” what the sponsor has on offer. I suggest you click on over to the ThisWeekInTech show (twit.tv); they went with a voluntary donation model and it seems to be working so far … they did it precisely because it wouldn’t tie their hands editorially when reviewing technology.
And thanks!