Re: [Consortium] Advertising Policy - linuxaudio.org

On Fri, April 20, 2012 11:21 pm, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: Do you dislike all advertising or just advertising that is on the web? What specific issues do you have with web advertising. It would be helpful for building policy guidelines. So far we have identified these concerns: 1: Tracking 2: Offending existing non corporate sponsors - Is this really an issue? which sponsors would stop supporting Linux Audio if we allowed advertising on specific sub domains? Don't Universities receive corporate funding anymore? Does that mean all bars and nightclubs that host Linux Musicians should also stop taking sponsorship to make ends meet? How far do we go if we decide that advertising is not an acceptable way of generating funds for consortium requirements? What is the pain exactly? There are just a few things that need to be done in order to make this happen. 1: Allow select subdomains to be hosted on different servers. So far no one seems to have a specific problem with that request. 2: Agree on a policy that sets specific guidelines for the kinds of advertising we would be prepared to accept. Just a simple discussion that can be had over the coming weeks/months. 3: Agree on a way to manage any income received. Pretty simple process as far as I can tell and doesn't require anyone else to make any effort at all. 4: Populate some pages with links/ads that meet our guidelines. Again this does not require anyone else's effort or time. 5: Get on with our lives and see where the experiment takes us over the next decade or so. SEO is simply a way to increase page ranking. It is a perfectly legitimate business practice and doesn't have to be spam. The page is an old page with a lot of useful keywords and a high ranking which makes it a viable location to place a link. This ad in particular is a single text link and would cause minimal impact on the content. In addition it has only been requested for a period of 1 year. I concede that this particular offer is a small start but the discussion is not about having pocket money for server maintainance at LAO. It about allowing ourselves to generate an income by leveraging some content that is hosted under the LAO domain as a product rather than a gratis service to the community. All the content I am proposing as suitable has been carefully compiled by me over the past 10 years and is released to the public domain. I don't see how advertising on *some of the subdomains/content* that we host is going to ruin our reputation. It is simply a way to increase funding and could actually motivate people to make more active contributions if we are able to reward them financially for their efforts instead of expecting everyone to work for free. That is a nice thing to do but not everyone has the luxury of having enough time/money to volunteer. 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. By the way I don't see anyone complaining when companies like Ableton sponsor events like the LAC and plaster their name everywhere. 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. We have a clear track record of allowing advertising and taking money from audio companies that wanted to support us financially so why should we be worried about ads on some of the subdomains. 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. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd