Nick

Thanks for making cohost!

honesty in times both good and bad is shockingly rare from companies, usually one or the other is preferred internally. thanks for keeping us in the loop!!

thanks for the update! really really glad to hear things are looking up.

Thanks for keeping us in the loop!

I can't remember if I mentioned last time, but I'll definitely throw in support for non-targeted, non-obtrusive advertising - specifically, of the sort where Cohost users pay for their own ads to be shown, so all of the advertising comes from within the community. A virtual petsite I encountered does that, and not only did they get a bunch of takers, it was apparently more profitable than running Google ads was. Here's their post about how they implemented that. It'll likely be trickier on a larger-scale social media, but food for thought!

Also some of the "ads" that people submitted were just plain delightful. Shoutouts to Frog of the Month club:

Thank you for the update! Glad to see financial posts returning with regularity and glad that the site is doing better. I fully agree with the comment above me on the user submitted ads, whenever you might get around to something like that

Hell yeah, shoutout to Good Numbers

I didn't comment last time, but I'd like to ADd my support for unobtrusive ads! Let's get Cohost solvent!

I've been telling everyone to move to Cohost for like, a year now. And one of the things people say is "it won't last, cause money". So any small amount will help, in my view, get more people on here! And I'll accept some not shitty ads if it means Cohost is stable =w=

thank you so much for the update!!!! very very glad to hear things are looking up

i add myself to the list of people who are ok with ads in cohost. I don't think ads aren't inherently awful, what sucks about them is every practice to min-max their effectiveness at all costs

also thank you!

It's also very cool that you are doing better too! Thanks for making cohost!

This is great news, congratulations to all of you building Cohost! Who is going to pay the bank transaction fees on tips, the tipper or the recipient?

goddamn!!!!!

WOOOOOOO YEAH WOOOOOOOOO COHOST POGCHAMP

THX for the info, keep up the good work !!

Oh HERE'S those Good Numbers I've heard so much about

The power of eggbug booty shorts...

thanks for making cohost!!

Thank you for the update!

I'm biased but as an independent artist, I'd definitely like the chance to buy adspace. I have issues with sites like Furaffinity and Flight Rising but the way that they handle ads is not one of them: it's almost always individual creators from within the communities and not, like you mentioned, Toyotathon or something. Lol.

I'm genuinely not sure if this would count as targeted advertising, but maybe we could give our ads "tags" so that they WONT appear if a user has those tags muted? Not trying to posit some algorithmic data-mining scheme, or something. The reason I suggest is because, for us NSFW artists and general niche content creators, it could be easier in ensuring that certain ads would only be seen by people who would actually like to see it. If that's not possible tho I understand.

Glad things are looking up for you guys!

holy fuckin shit!!

In addition to being able to subscribe in multiples of $5 we should be able to subscribe in multiples of $8 and get a lil "this dumbass paid $8" tag on our profiles

fuckin love transparency

i was bracing for the worst, i'm glad i was wrong!

Hell—and I can’t stress this enough—yeah

I’m so glad things are looking up! The last financial update was really worrying. Thank you as always for the transparency, it means a lot that the staff is willing to be open about these things

as long as the ads aren't for obviously fake or shadey products like fake mobile games or temu or whatever, it's fine. But I've never seen any site be completely truly good ads since the shutdown of project wonderful (other than the comicad network)

thanks for cohost!

thank you for being you, cohost! <3

back in the day, tumblr briefly had a monetization feature where you could pay $8 (lol) to pin a post, which means it would appear at the top of your followers' dashboards for 24 hours (and each follower would get a button to unpin the post if they didn't want to see it anymore). crucially, you could pay to pin a post you had not made, so I pinned this post (just the text from tumblr user aveytears, though I can't find an extant copy of the post with just that and nothing else). it was one of those days where everyone went apeshit over a funny thing, and I got the thrill of being the one who did the funny thing. I got a bunch of followers specifically because people wanted the post to become pinned to their dashboard. basically, this was fully worth the $8 and I'd do it again in a heartbeat here if this was a feature

thanks for making cohost!

I'm definitely in team "I want to see ads" but I do hope plus! users can still opt out.

YES! This update fills me with joy and hope for the future, I will continue to feed money to the eggbug

"609%" Nice

we want eggbug to have some buzzin around money! thanks for making cohost

positive net income! wow!

but iirc you don't spread out the yearly subs right? so still looking negative for a couple months out after all the yearlies land? makes sense you're still going for financing. it's real nice we can reach out and touch sustainability tho!

i, as many others have said, 100% support non-targeted ads! ESPECIALLY if they are ads made by users of the site!

honestly i keep my ad block off on FurAffinity because i do really like the ads that users put up! even if they all dont interest me. fun fact, FA banner ads are actually how i found out about my local furry convention all the way back in 2013! so if they are non-targeted ads put up by the community, i most definitely support them! i encourage them, even!

plus with this community, i feel like a lot of people will be using them to post pictures of their cats and other fun shitposty things, along with genuine business ads!

And while a tumblr blaze-style system can be fun, id say keep it off of this site bc it really did turn into PVP there, especially with some people getting mad at anyone that would blaze anything in the replies of the post.

I would like to subscribe but I don't have a credit card. are alternate payment methods on the roadmap?

i definitely still love the idea of user-supported ads. like... i have no problem with honest advertising that i know is coming from Actual People and not some giant corporation trying to sell me insurance or a terrible scam or whatever. i think the biggest questions are where you display them and how you vet the people buying them.

i think it would be cute if they were old timey banner ad style... i miss the days where you could check the bottom of a page and find something actually cool linked down there via a banner or a bunch of little 88x31 buttons lol

so glad to see that things are looking better this month!! ḵ'a̱m g̱ooł waalsm, bless you all for what you do!

So happy to have found this place, and even happier to have been able to help be one of the Good Number Makers(tm)

Just a little +1 here for supporting the community ads idea!

in the grand scheme of things i would much rather have untargeted ads and/or community supported ads on cohost, than have no cohost (or struggling cohost)

these reports are super reassuring to read even when they're not good news, thanks for doing them! i'm glad it was good news this time, though

tbh you could definitely set the default tipping percentage higher and no one would care. like, itch io's default 10% is extremely reasonable & better than all competitors - and your competitor here is patreon, who takes a bigger cut than that anyway. everyone gets that you gotta keep the lights on

keep up the good work staff! thanks for making cohost!

this is amazing news! thanks for making cohost, and congratulations on net positive income!

TBH I really don't mind a self-served community ad. Provided that they are vetted, of course.

I also support "ads with tags" so I will more often see ads relevant to my interests. I don't consider that "targeted"; rather, think of it as "theme-relevant ads". Like, if you're reading a magazine about fishing, you'll definitely end up seeing ads about fishing equipment, and likely very few ads about, say, running shoes...

hell yeah

Throwing in my support for project wonderful style, user submitted ads!

WOOOOOOOOOO let's keep it going

pog

I really hope everything lines up to make this website Actually Sustainable. It would make me (probably others, probably also yall) very happy.

re: tips and user subscriptions, what steps are you taking to minimize payment processor fees? One of the big draws from Patreon was the ability to lump all your subs together into a single credit card payment, so the minimum amount of money was "lost" and the maximum amount split among creators. And that's something they've stopped supporting by default which sucks imo! there's better solutions than the one they went with (such as prorating the 2nd month's payment so you still have to pay for a full month up-front but the first renewal is discounted instead, and from then on you pay on the 1st in a single lump payment).
One other option is some kind of token system where you buy an intermediary currency and then tip/subscribe using that currency which can then be cashed back out, but that method means you're effectively holding money and might have to deal with banking regulations…
I've put a ton of thought into this because in the past I was in a position to help designing a platform like this, so I just want to make sure this issue is on your radar and that you're considering this as one of the core features of the platform in order to keep the maximum amount of money possible in creators' hands!

Thank you, once again, for making Cohost.

Have you considered that instead of banner ads you could give eggbug a little racing suit covered with patches from Brand Partners

I like the idea of gift subscriptions, keep up the great work :~)

as someone with a deeply ingrained, visceral, and at times violent hatred for advertising of any kind... I would not be too miffed about non-targeted banner ads on Cohost, especially if it's just a temporary thing while things continue to stabilize.

Thanks for making Cohost!

thanks for keeping us updated!! i echo many here when I say I'm totally fine and even encourage unobtrusive, untargeted ads. a pet site I'm on has them and I've turned off my ad blocker there because they're from the community and so pleasant

glad to here it’s on the upswing I would also be cool with non targeted ads

thank you for all your hard work and everything the team does! glad things are getting better!

Ah, we meant to but forgot.
Fluffies wanted to add our support for ads. We hate ads, we hate that the internet treats our attention and energy as a resource waiting to be extracted. Plus, ads are a malware vector. We are grateful for Cohost's stand against ads.

But the truth is, we have no issues with Cohost adding (unobtrusive, untargeted) ads, and we would happily set Cohost as the only website in our allow-list. We care about this space, and we are willing to give it some of our attention and energy if it will help it survive.

Furthermore, we actually enjoy certain ads. The kind of ads that only exist within small communities, put up by members of that same community. In the past, when we see some fur advertising a project or their shop in the FA or e621 banner ads, we've thought, they that's pretty cool. We're happy they are giving themselves some exposure. Same goes for comics that advertise themselves in TopWebComics! We never really minded Project Wonderful either and we would be happy to return to that simpler era of the internet. Like, gosh, we know we have our nostalgia glasses on, but we would absolutely not mind if Cohost had ads where its own users could advertise their projects. We'd might even go as far as to say we'd enjoy it! Bring back the old internet please.

Thank you for the update, and gosh it makes us happy to hear things are better. We know this is a shit job where everyone criticises your every decision, but. Thanks for the openness and candidness about the financial situation, and fuck the haters.

this site is crazy because its like "what if we ran a social media site but as human beings and we were even mildly transparent" and i thought that it wouldnt happen and yet it has happened

Last thought on the topic:

With the kind of community response you've gotten, you could make ads opt-in, for all users! Not just those with Cohost Plus! That way, you can stick to your ideals, respect everyone's decision on what they want to be exposed to, and still get a considerable number of ad impressions and a source of income. Yeah you would have to manage internal incentives to not funnel users into enabling ads, convince users this helps cohost, and convince advertisers their ads are still being seen. But, like. Opt-in ads is... a rather radical idea that very few places dare to try. Maybe it has a space here.

put me down as another voice in support of unobtrusive, untargeted advertising.

I am another non-ads enjoyer but I am also a "Cohost continuing to exist and people being able to eat and stuff" enjoyer, and user-submitted ads like SA or Royal Road are a pretty good, non-disgusting option.

There'd also be a certain old-school vibe to implementing traditional banner ads.

Tumblr just dropped some of their financial info in the name of transparency and proportionally? Cohost is doing way better. I think that's something to feel good about.

LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOO

Glad to see things are getting a bit better, I was quite worried. Long live Cohost!

I support a "blaze" like feature, it might be even more successful here than on tumblr. It's also kind of a really unique selling point of a centralized Website vs. the fediverse. You can't pay the fediverse $4.20 to force 1000 people to see your cat.

hurray for good news! Adding fuel to the fire here but I also would pay for the ability to show cohost users my gay ass game and possibly future projects. And I think paying for Twitter, Facebook and most google ads setup is a scam.

love what ur doing so far! gonna keep posting here

As a quick clarification, your reported opex of $26.5k is about 58% of the $46k you reported last month, and is actually less than what you reported paying in salaries last month. Is that number expenses not including salaries?

Edit: is this possibly because you pay out employees twice per month? So those expense numbers only take into account half a month of payroll, the second half of which would happen on the 14th or 17th?

I was telling some friends about my interest in tips and user subscriptions, and one of them mentioned that Co-host uses Stripe for payment processor and Stripe generally doesn't allow adult content. I am personally not creating 18+ content, but could Stripe's stance affect the development and roll-out of tips and user subscriptions?

Re: ads, I'm not opposed to non-targeted ads as long as they are not disruptive to the user experience. I use ad blocks so if there is a ad-unblock reminder that appear in the place of blocked ads, that would be great.

I am supportive of untargeted ads and would whitelist cohost in my adblocker to support it as long as A) introducing ads didn't threaten nsfw content on cohost (most sites that allow ads sanitize themselves for ad revenue) and B) they don't include visuals that might trigger seizures. I imagine many users would also add a "C) ads aren't nsfw" provision.

if you launch ads (chads) i will pay to chadvertise pictures of my cat. she's cute and i think it's important that more people see pictures of her.

thank u !!

With a screen as wide as mine, there's a lot of empty space on each side of the Post Roll for those tall vertical ads. I feel like y'all can definitely pull a Flight Rising- their ads are unobtrusive, nicely fit in with the site design, and are largely advertising cool ass webcomics.

as a society we've come to seriously undervalue people being open and honest because we're so used to everything being owned by five corporations to the point that vulnerability from creators is viewed as manipulative. Fuck that.

Sometimes I feel like people took the word "parasocial relationship" and just understood it as "people communicating while being vulnerable is bad, actually" and I want to scream