Why We Decided to Display Ads on Some of Our Websites

In this post, we will explain the reasons that led us to introduce ads on some of the websites within the Sapling-Toss network.

TL;DR

We are going to display ads on new Sapling-Toss websites.

Wowchievement will remain ad-free for the time being. Only new, unreleased websites will be affected.

This isn’t a final decision; we want to test this as an economic model.

The primary goal is to cover hosting costs. Extra revenue would help develop future projects.

Context

Since we started developing Wowchievement, the tool has been free and without any form of monetization. The primary goal was to use it ourselves; if others found it useful, that was a bonus.

The site quickly gained traction from Reddit posts, and many feature requests emerged. It was awesome seeing so many people caring about the project. A lot of time and effort went into fixing bugs, adding missing content, and implementing new features.

We continued improving the site for the TWW pre-patch. When TWW was released, we added the renown tracking feature, which increased traffic to the website even more. Traffic peaked when Wowhead published an article about the website. A few minutes after the article was released, Wowchievement crashed due to too much traffic.

Up until that point, the website was hosted on a small VM in the cloud costing around $10 a month. At this point, we had to decide whether to take the project seriously or keep it as a pet project.

Doubling Down

Seeing the growing interest in the website, we decided to move forward with improving the hosting.

Our infrastructure until then was cheap but not practical for fast deployment of new versions and, most importantly, could no longer handle the website’s traffic.

This is why we switched to a new infrastructure design that allows us to sustain more traffic, iterate faster, and easily release new projects. A good example of this new infrastructure’s success is the “did-my-husband-bruto.com” website, which took less than 20 hours from inception to release.

The new infrastructure costs significantly more than the old one. Between continuous integration and hosting, we spend around $70 a month.

Since we are two people splitting the cost, it is more than manageable. However, as we aim to release and invest in more projects, we expect costs to rise.

We don’t want to end up in a situation where costs become an issue.

Exploring Our Options

As mentioned, the cost is currently manageable through our own funds. However, we want the Sapling-Toss network to be a viable project long-term.

This is why we want to explore our revenue options. We want the Sapling-Toss network to be self-funded.

Since this will be our first monetization test, we don’t want to implement it on our flagship website, Wowchievement. This is why we decided to test ads on a new, unreleased website. The goal is to see what kind of revenue it can generate.

What Will Change

On Wowchievement, nothing. We will release a new version in the near future, but the website will remain ad-free for the time being.

Only new, unreleased websites will contain ads. This will serve as a test to see if ads could be a long-term solution for making the Sapling-Toss network self-funded.

Final Note

We ourselves don’t like ads; however, they remain the easiest and fastest way for us as website creators to generate revenue and ensure the long-term sustainability of the project.

We will closely monitor the outcome of this test. Based on the results, we will decide whether to pursue ads further or look for another way to generate revenue.