The cost of advertising and running this website

We had a look at our finances recently and this is what we found out.

1) Our two most successful adverts for this website only just about paid for themselves in the short-term.

2) The three newspaper adverts which over time brought in hundreds of new members from a certain country cost so much money they wiped out any gains from the fraction of members paying for a subscription. If the cost of Internet web hosting, services, software and time maintaining this website is taken into consideration, our services to members of certain countries is a financial loss.

Given multiple new people join us every day, it is a certain as eggs are eggs we will get one member per week who tells us our website should be free, because mainstream social media is free. Yes, the same mainstream social media sites who deleted your posts back in 2020 and 2021! (Our website is free to create an account, search for other members by country, region and city and to reply to messages sent to you by other members. Only sending messages to members who have never contacted you has a cost. We were a totally free website from March 2023 to July 2024.)

We do want this website to work. We are quite happy to consider giving members here free messaging for a while, if they promise to donate $5 – $15 USD to us later if they find this website useful or if they meet someone from real life from it.

Just to spell out why we are getting tired of people telling us our website should be free we will go through it step by step.

1. We notice some countries on this website have less members than others. We want to do something to help the existing members from a country such as Italy, Belgium or Denmark.
2. We advertise this website on Twitter (x.com) and specifically target those countries and the followers of accounts espousing natural health. Adverts cost money.
3. Our adverts specifically say what our prices are and that we do not use recurring or automatic billing. Once you pay you will never get automatically charged again.
4. People come to our website from those countries and create an account. Then they tell us we should be a free website because the major social websites are free. Yes, the same social media websites funded by billionaires, the stock market, government and university grants. The same social media sites we are paying to show our adverts! The free social media websites and messenger apps make backups of your messages encrypted with the company’s key or they upload your contact list of phone numbers to their servers.

At the time of writing, our price for a whole year is less than some websites charge for a single month.

It was very necessary to advertise our website in countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and Canada. Now we have hundreds of people from those countries. In countries where we have less members, we are continually seeing people create accounts, delete them within days and state they didn’t find what they were looking for. The brutal facts are unless you pay for advertising to get a decent number of members in, people will delete their accounts. We wish it wouldn’t be that way, but it is.

This website should be a cooperative affair. It is very possible to get more members from certain countries by online advertising, but the low percentage of members here paying for subscriptions slows everything down. The cost of an advert is trivial when divided by hundreds of members.