Future of Slashdot (Part 2)

I am absolutely amazed at the volume of response you all have generated. I thank each of you for the emails (over 100 in the last 5 hours) and the posts to the comments section (also over 100 in 5 hours). I've been reading your emails now for the last 3 and a half hours and have reached some sort of conclusion. Follow the link below and I'll talk about it.

I think we're going to do banner ads. The majority of emails I received were sympathetic to what is happening and are willing to tolerate the inconvenience.

We are going to sell merchandise, but that was going to happen no matter what. I want a Slashdot T-shirt and it looks like you guys do too. Subscriptions just arent feasible right now, and donations would be unstable- bannar ads could provide 'X' dollars a week that we can plan on. This is important when it comes to buying a server or whatever we need.

Here is the deal:Advertising will not affect what I write. If I classify this site as a "Part Time Job" the only change is that I will probably spell and grammar check my articles before posting. Ideally I can find a partner (and several options are available here) to handle the 'business' side which will leave me and the rest of the team free to continue posting all the cool stuff everyone sends in. If anything, this will open me up to posting more articles.

Second, we're going to be as anal as we can be about the actual ads that get posted. I'll do whatever I can to make sure that they aren't tacky or animated. So that means we need to find someone who wants to advertise here. Let me just say that ideally we're looking for hardware or software companies and ISPs. Something relevant to the sort of stuff we're posting here. If you are interested, let me know.

Our banner ads will be as small as possible (dimensions and in bytes) and not tacky, and we're going to avoid animation. We'll place them as unobtrusively as possible. When it happens, remember to click on them. I mean, if we're sponsored by "Larry's Hard Drives" and Larry has something you need to buy, support them. Click their ad, buy their stuff. Maybe it'll cost a buck more, but let them know why you ordered from them. This will ensure that we can keep doing what we're doing here for a long time.

And If you are a company that thinks that 25,000 hits a day to the most tech savvy class of users on the net is a good idea, drop me a note.

Lastly, Thanks to everyone who posted comments and sent email. Thanks to the dozens of you who offered to write. And the dozens more who offered to help me code dozens of features that the site needs. And thanks to the 30 or so people who offered to mirror. And thanks to the 40 or so who chastized me for generating the pages on the fly- it was great when I designed the site: Back then I was getting under 1,000 hits per day. When I rewrite Slashdot, that will change.

I hope everyone can support me on this decision. It was actually very hard to make. I'm absolutely amazed at the stunning display of support you have made so far. It's obvious that Slashdot is just as cool for each of you as it is for me. This decision will let Slashdot continue to be cool in the future.