On 3/16/06, Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> wrote:
From a different thread:
they're looking for "sponsors", suggesting "an annual fee of $1000", or even all the way up to $350,000, which buys you a "thank you" from within the browser of the one million of their clients you've sponsored...
I don't know about their millions of clients but the PG website is now ranked top 3000 at alexa.com and serving ~250K pages to ~50K hosts a day. We have a Google page-rank of 8. To get that spammers would feed their mothers to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
We could put an ad space at the top of every page. I'm thinking of text-only ads, no distracting images. We could cycle ads like this:
Did you know that you can help producing ebooks investing just ten minutes a day? www.pgdp.net
Sponsor PG and get your web site mentioned here. See: www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/sponsoring
We thank the Curl Up and Dye hair parlor for their kind gift of $1000. www.curl-up-and-dye.com
Do we want to do this? And what rules should we put in place?
I really like the idea of having rotating ads for DP, the various PG affiliates, ibiblio, and our other clearly-defined "partners" (at one level or another, see http://www.gutenberg.org/links). Maybe you could work on this, Marcello? No need to delay, and we already have a few banner graphics for both DP & PG. In fact, I remember we used to lead with an occasionally-rotating graphic. I'd be in favor of some clear criteria for other organizations. Including Wikipedia would be nice. Places like the Linux Fund. But it's hard to draw a line. For such organizations to submit artwork and request being added to our rotating banner would be a wonderful service that PG could provide. But those criteria are a little sticky...
Is selling ads compatible with the non-for-profit status?
No, we can't sell ad space at all. Neither PGLAF, nor ibiblio. This would need to just be free, and just for non-commercial messages. (They could be for commercial entities... but not "buy our stuff" messages.) But for not-for-profit, it's a wonderful idea, and on-mission for PG. In the US, we have "public service announcements." That's the type of model we could easily pursue. -- Greg