Members are requested to offer their ideas for ways in which Stories Space might induce income streams for the site. No idea is too silly so please share any and all thoughts you may have. As well, offer your pros and cons about ideas others have suggested.
My own thoughts:
Place a "Donate" button on the cover page. It may well not get much, but some is better than none.
SS could charge an annual membership as the mother site does.
Seek financial sponsorship from publishers. Give rights to advertise their services.
SS could issue a challenge to members to provide a theme-based poem or story, which would be compiled and published for sale. Proceeds to go entirely to SS.
Any other ideas or comments?
I'm thinking about this for my other site right now (the one where I admin). We also don't have an income stream. Day-to-day costs are covered by the admin team as donations and only amount to a couple hundred US a year (for software maintenance and web hosting). However, we need some additional money for work related to a major upgrade and I'm thinking of ways to get the membership involved in funding that.
One idea I had was to invite donations and have a sponsor's page where anyone donating > $5 or $10 or whatever gets listed with a link to their profile. I was just going to do alphabetical order and not print the size of the donations so it wouldn't turn competitive. Of course, that link would be more valuable here since a link to your profile is also a link to your stories.
We also have some requests for additional functionality like a way to have blogs on the site that would cost extra $$ so I am looking at "stretch goals" where if we raise more than needed, we will promise to implement those. Basically, hey, if you folks come up with an extra hundred bucks over and above the cost of the upgrade, we will add x and y.
Don't know that the second one would really apply here but the first could be tried.
