The donation model has worked really well at Mastering VAST. It pays for hosting and software registration, but nothing for the time of the admins and mods. We volunteer our time, and are happy to do so, because it's a really cool place to hang, same as here.

Google ads really don't pay very well unless you get a lot of traffic, and I count MV's traffic as moderate. When we have had ads, they have been direct ads, from a single advertiser, and they have paid a decent amount for it. We had a similar model at sonikmatter before Mastering VAST.

I'd rather pay the donation than see a page covered in ads, but maybe a hybrid approach with a discreet ad here and there might work.

Puting ads on your site will open up the cookie highway though, which we've steered clear from as much as we possibly can.

Fran >>>  Best beer money we ever spent buddy!!! :)  When you learn to love a thing, you gotta be willing to support it.

And we're all NUTZ FOR KURZWEIL!!!!  Rah! Rah! :D :D :D

Gary ;)

I'll send a reminder after a year.

Thanks so much for the people that have started to contribute. It makes a big difference!

Regards,

Fran

Agreed that a $5 a year donation is a trivial amount of money to keep things operating.

I don't see it as Competing with Mastering VAST but rather as a complement to them.

If we can keep two such valuable services operating for literally the price of a bag of chips and a beer then by all means it's well worth the expense.

Fran we don't want to disrupt the matrimonial bliss that keeps the site running so literally anyone who spent $thou$ands on a Kurzweil keyboard can afford that kind of loose change to keep up the support we all so desperately need. :)

Gary ;)

Once a year would be great.

Regards,

Fran

Mastering  VAST is an amazing site with a tons of good documentation,  sounds and Kurzweil knowledge. I totally recommend everybody to sign up there. Ksetlist never had the intention to compete with that, and they know it very well.

Ksetlist is more a sound repository that is complementary to their site. Yes there is a discussion forum as well here, but I think it's also good to have some degree of diversity of sites. Humans are funny animals and each forum ends up having its own culture that some people like or don't. 

Also, The Keyboard Corner, although open to all brands, has helped me a lot in debugging problems of this site.

Anyway, if I can, I will avoid the subscription way to keep Ksetlist totally open. But I also have a wife... And we better not piss her off losing too much money...  :-D

Regards,

Fran

First off I'd like to compliment the new website and it's look and feel.  Much cleaner and more modern.

Secondly as far as donations and ads go my suggestion is to keep the minimal advertising and make the downloads available to contributors only.

There's a similar arrangement over at Mastering VAST and it has worked quite well for over a decade now.

Gary ;)