More Bandwidth and Revenue Needed

[SuperFusion]

Ari, your idea would most likely discourage people to upload AMVs if they have to pay a certain amount of money just because their vid got popular. Imagine how much Koop'll be paying just for his vid to be hosted.

[KaneDragon]

Does one have to create a Paypal account to send money over Paypal with credit/debit? I don't like how one apparently can't remove the primary credit card associated with a Paypal account unless one replaces it with another...

And user info, etc... goes under the "Notes"part?

[Pwolf]

i think preventing people from downloading or uploading video based on donation limit is going against the so called "free service". i think Phade wants (correct me if i'm wrong) to keep the service free but encourage people to donate. not force people to donate by limiting how much they can download or upload.


Pwolf

[downwithpants]

two words: sex sells. provide local downloads for hentai mvs to donators only (donators with credit cards to screen for minors?).

otherwise i gotta agree with the position on rationing more bandwidth per donator than per leech. a lot of the other perks sound like good ideas for incentive to donate, although i'm against limiting absolute number of dls, buying banner votes, and forcing opinions.

a speculation: perhaps the recession in donations reflects the national/global economy? a lot of people are probably donating to charities to aid katrina victims, and, over the past year, the tsunami victims in southeast asia. maybe donating to the org seems trivial in comparison to the disaster funds.

[godix]

Some of these suggestions are missing something.

The one thing we want to avoid is the perception of "exchange of money for videos"

Any attempt to say you MUST pay to download at all, download more than X number of vids, or download certain type of vids (IE hentai) goes directly against what Phade has already stated. Since Phade has said he's opposed to this I suspect none of these ideas will go far regardless of their possible merits.

As far as creators paying for uploading, that's encouraging exactly the wrong thing. Last I heard the most downloaded vid on the site is IWIWAL. If AD had to pay for each and every one of those downloads he would have a very strong reason to make the video unavalable. I suspect the last thing any of us want is the best and most popular videos to suddenly be unavalable for download. I think anything that would encourage people to not make their videos avalable is a bad idea (the one exception to this, the org should make it so if you try to upload a Naruto or DBZ video you end up on a page that laughs at you for five minutes then the words 'Hell no, we got enough of this crap' pop up. Dare to dream and all that)

[SarahtheBoring]

I'm wondering about patterns. Is it that a few people download a whole ton, or more the pecked-to-death model where a ton of people download a few things? That'd have an impact on what to do about it, I'd think. Bandwidth caps on members would slow down the former, and the latter... well, I don't have a good solution for that.

You don't even have to answer that, it's probably privileged info; just brainstorming.

Since I am a terrible, evil person I'd lower the filesize limit to 50MB for everything but donators, who would get 100MB. Nearly everything I download, good or not, these days is like 85+. Because it can be. Since I'm evil, I'd hit people where they actually care about - video quality - and a) cut bandwidth in half and b) drive up donations, because people would kill their mothers to get better video quality.

Of course, MEPs throw that all off, because they can't get by on a smaller filesize. Can't moderate every MEP, too labor-intensive. Also the pitchforks and torches and death threats would get pesky.

And there's also the factor that what's causing most of the bandwidth is probably ten hojillion downloads of a handful of really popular/good videos, which are probably made by donators anyway, soooo it wouldn't really solve that much.

I'm also evil enough to think "uploads for donators only," but that wouldn't work because of the international currency complication.

you're all very lucky I'm not in charge.

[Quiet Cannon]

One of the things that I thought was discouraging about the donation page was that a member had to donate at least $12 to get the donation level “Not really a leech”. I know that any small amount can help, but looking at this kind of makes it seem like anything less doesn’t really matter. Ex “I have $5 here that I can donate, but if they're still going to think of me as a leech, then forget it.”

[Flint the Dwarf]

Since I am a terrible, evil person I'd lower the filesize limit to 50MB for everything but donators, who would get 100MB. Nearly everything I download, good or not, these days is like 85+. Because it can be. Since I'm evil, I'd hit people where they actually care about - video quality - and a) cut bandwidth in half and b) drive up donations, because people would kill their mothers to get better video quality.

I like it. But, as you said, it very likely wouldn't affect much because once the creators of all the popular videos donated (if they haven't already), the flood would resume. And even still, we're only talking a 30 mb difference from 50 mb and the seeming average 80 mb.

Ex “I have $5 here that I can donate, but if they're still going to think of me as a leech, then forget it.”

Do words really bug you that much? You still get the perks and the 'Donated' status. And you don't have to have the title displayed in your profile.

[Quiet Cannon]

The words don't really bother me so much. I was just using that as something of an example of what someone might think when they see that.

[derobert]

I think a good idea would be to place a bandwidth cap on non-donators accounts to like 20kb/sec or something.

I'm not sure how, technically, we'd pull that off....