[Consortium] Advertising Policy - linuxaudio.org

[Robin Gareus]

On 04/21/2012 02:53 AM, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> 
> On Fri, April 20, 2012 11:21 pm, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
>> if i may:
>>
>>
>> i share ico's sentiments expressed earlier in this thread, and also
>> aymeric's wrt to advertising on the net.

+1

> Do you dislike all advertising or just advertising that is on the web?

/me dislikes all advertisements. They're evil, deception, brainwash,
corruption,..

If I want to find information, I go ask for it; I don't want it pushed
on me by the one who pays most.

<ot>
Belgium and France have recently banned public commercial ads with the
reasoning that a person has the right to roam the public space free of
[commercial] interest. IOW Everyone must have "equal freedom of opinion
and speech" regardless of funding. The only ads currently remaining in
Paris are for cultural benefit (cinema, exhibitions, TV, language
classes, telco and - of course in France - wine, food & cognac :)
In Paris audience-counting-devices are banned by law and illuminated
advertising of all forms is restricted. This makes the city a much nicer
place!

I hope other countries will follow, and I do oppose public community
sites - such as linuxaudio.org - with ads.
</ot>

[..]
>> let's not go there. the whole thing is a bureaucratic nightmare and the
>> prospective gains are in no relation to the pain.
> 
> What is the pain exactly?

Bureaucratic overhead.

[..]
> SEO is simply a way to increase page ranking. It is a perfectly legitimate
> business practice 

There are a lot of perfectly legitimate business practices that I deem
to be immoral or unjust and those should not be encouraged or supported.

..another drop in the ocean.

> I don't see how advertising on *some of the subdomains/content* that we
> host is going to ruin our reputation.

IMHO it's not about reputation. It's about the ideals and standards that
we want for the LA community. The message to companies should be:

"We don't want your money, we want your support, your cooperation and
compliance. - We're happy to link to your site - esp. if it offers
useful information, specs or software - but we won't sell links."

> Considering the state of the economy and that there are several people in
> the community that we could potentially help make ends meet if we had a
> regular flow of income to keep them motivated I think it is a callous
> disregard for our potential as a community focused organisation if we
> restrict ourselves to the high ground and expect people to do everything
> for the love of it.

Love and enthusiasm is the basis for any successful project, commercial
or not. I also seriously doubt that we could even pay half a full-time
developer with advertisement campaigns: our ~35k unique visitors per
month don't wag the tail of any industry.

http://stats.linuxaudio.org/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=total


There are quite a few LAO developers who manage to get a steady income
with linux audio -- linuxaudio.org however is a x-project community
portal. The knowledge exchanged on LAO is worth a lot more than
advertising could pay for.

> By the way I don't see anyone complaining when companies like Ableton
> sponsor events like the LAC and plaster their name everywhere.

As I said before, the support was for the institution that hosts LAC,
not linuxaudio.org itself. In case of LAC, linuxaudio.org provides
hosting for the event which has always been under the auspices of
someone else. In most cases the commercial support was also made by
contributing equipment, bandwidth, etc and was very rarely a monetary
contribution.

nitpicking: the contributions were are also _not for advertising_, but
for _supporting the conference_. - From the contacts that I know they
were paid using HR and/or Support budget - not advertisement-budget - of
the companies in question.

> If anything
> people were very happy with that association and have even gone so far as
> to publish the keynote from the director of Ableton explaining why he
> *will never support* a Linux version of Ableton Live.

[citation needed]

I'm curious. I've been at LAC'07 and while I remember a panel
discussion, I don't recall a keynote with that message.

Anyway why is this bad? It's good to know the POV of others - especially
if you do not agree with them.

> We have a clear track record of allowing advertising and taking money 

Certainly not. If anything: we take specs, bandwidth and time as
donations and thank by mentioning the donor.

> Especially if these pages are
> considered old and unuseful which clearly is wrong if we expand the
> allowable uses for content hosted under the LAO domain.

I disagree. It'd be a step backwards.
In a commercial context, you'd need to shell out at least 500-5000 times
the money per year of what you have been offered so far to even come
close to what we currently have.

2 cents,
robin