Our original plan was to make Clicky a pay service that wasn’t too expensive but paid the bills and provided us with a little extra money. This still may be the route we take, but we’d really like to offer our service for free, and we know our users want that too.
We see two options. One would be to use an ad service like Google, but there’s a big problem with that. 80% of our visitors use Firefox, and I know a lot of Firefox users also use AdBlock – myself included. So we don’t see that as a very realistic solution.
The other option, which seems a lot more realistic, would be to have a few sponsors, who would pay us a fixed amount of money every month in exchange for prominently displaying their ads on our site. Like what TechCrunch does in their sidebar, although our rates would be a little more reasonable than the $10K/month that Michael charges. 🙂
We have a VERY targeted user base – people who run web sites, whether they be blogs or otherwise. If you are interested in being a sponsor, please contact us. If you know someone who might be interested, please point them to this post and to our contact info. Time is a big factor, so we need to hear from you within a few weeks if this is going to be the route we take.
