Based on codinghorror’s revelation that we are not on an enterprise plan, the Discourse pricing page, and the assumption that moderators are volunteers, the cost to run the message board should not exceed $3,600/yr ($300/mo).
That would be 120 subscriptions at the new price of $30/yr, or 180 subscriptions at the old price of $20/yr (I don’t know how many charter members we have but apparently the discount was 50%).
I believe Google AdSense pays about $0.15 or so per pageview on average. So if there was an ad on screen at all times for every person, an average of 2,000 pageviews per month would cover operating costs for the message board. Assuming your average site visitor visits eight pages per month, that calls for 250 active site visitors each generating $1.20/mo in ad revenue. That would be with all users seeing ads.
A more realistic scenario, with $20/$10 member/charter subscriptions and total revenue of $304.83/mo:
- 400 monthly pageviews from lurkers or signed-out users ($60/mo),
- 800 monthly pageviews from registered guests, or about 100 guests with 8 pageviews per month each ($120/mo),
- 50 member subscriptions ($83.33)
- 50 charter subscriptions ($41.50)
In this scenario increasing the base subscription price to $30/yr, assuming the same number of subscribers, nets an extra $62.67/mo in revenue.
I have reason to believe the message board is or could become sustainable. Unless my numbers are off, I’ve never been too good with numbers…
None of the above applies to funding a columnist.
~Max