ThunderCatsLair.org Finances Thread 2011

Thought I'd make a thread I can update so everyone knows exactly how much is in the 'Lair Pot' that we make through advertising and affiliates. It keeps things transparent and above board that way ;)

I will update this thread on a regular basis! :)

Amazon.co.uk:
-£20.83 (June-August earnings, paid 26/10/2011)
-£5.98 (September earnings, paid 29/11/2011)
-£8.90 (October-November earnings to be paid in January 2012)
-£1.21 (December earnings as of 15/12/2011)

Amazon.com:
-£51.84 Paid 26/10/2011.
-£10.97 Paid 25/11/2011.

Google Ads: -£90.12 (June = £7.83, July = £23.60, August = £23.21 and September = £35.48) *paid end of October*

Next payment period: Total as of 15/12/2011 = £72.32 (October: £30.80, November: £29.03, December up to the 15th: £12.49) *To be paid in January 2012*

BBTS Cash: £110.23/$172.38 (payment for quarters Jul-Sept & Oct-Dec 2011)

BBTS Store Credit: $0.00 (the Jul-Sept and Oct-Dec payments spent on Bandai Toys for review)

Hollywood Heroes:
-£35.69/$57.36 for July/August 2011 advertising (seems Jordan sent 2 months as the money he sent was $60, before the fees)
-£37.07/$60 for September/October (oddly there was no Paypal fee...)

Total Earned Before Expenditure: £445.16

Cash Expenditure so far will be:

-£19.01/$29.99 (for ThunderTank order from Amazon.com) THIS HAS NOW BEEN WITHDRAW FROM PAYPAL TO MY BANK ACCOUNT (£19.01)
-£31.30/$50 for the SDCC Exclusive Lion-O (any left over money from that $50 after sales tax etc... will go toward shipping all the toys over to us)
-£4.86/$7.59 (for Thundercatslair.net registration, which now points to this site, I'll likely transfer this domain over to hostmonster so we get it free with our hosting plan!)
-£11.03/$16.86 (for the oddment the September order of BBTS toys cost after the $120.00 credit was applied, plus the $11.89 shipping for them)
-£198.00*/$300.24 HOSTING RENEWED TIL 19TH FEBRUARY 2015! (*denotes Paypal conversion)
-£13.16 (for Tower of Omens playset, ordered 19/11/2011 from Amazon.com) Half of cost (£13.14) was refunded on 1/12/2011
-£18.10 (for Lizard Cannon and Lion-O Thunder Racer, ordered 28/11/2011 from Amazon.com)
-£15.24 (for Tygra Thunder Racer from BBTS.com)

= NET Cash Revenue (after expenditure): £134.46 *including unpaid earnings*
= NET Cash Revenue (after expenditure): £52.03 *NOT including unpaid earnings*

*Above totals include money accumulated via Adsense and Amazon and in these cases we won't receive those funds until we earn equal or above the payment threshold (Amazon.co.uk = £25 and Google Adsense = £60)

Any earnings in red text will not be paid until next year so will roll over into the ThunderCatsLair.org Finances Thread 2012*

I atcually have a Paypal account set up for the site which i set up long, long ago. Not sure if it will be used anymore but i can provide the info so that money goes to that account instead. It is set up or the site and i think that one should b eused instead of under someone's specific name. Just my .02 cents

"MannysCollectibles, post: 43576" said:

I atcually have a Paypal account set up for the site which i set up long, long ago. Not sure if it will be used anymore but i can provide the info so that money goes to that account instead. It is set up or the site and i think that one should b eused instead of under someone's specific name. Just my .02 cents

As I said in the email reply I sent Manny, ideally that's what I wanted to do, until I found that I couldn't connect my bank account to a 2nd Paypal account. As I pay for hosting with a credit card, I'd need to have access to the cash to pay the charge on my credit card bill. Sending cash from Paypal into my bank account is the only way I can access the money upon site hosting renewal.

Obviously in the event I step down from my current position, I'll send any monies owned by TCL.org over to the site account as 'a gift/donation' to avoid any fees when receiving it.

I'm also happy to move cash over to the site Paypal if/when needed such as domain renewal for example.

Just replied to your email Neil...two accounts works just fine being that you are in charge of the hosting side of things and I do the renewals for domains. matter of fact two accounts is better than one for ease of use of hosting and domain payments. :thumbsup:

Chris here...

This thread is excellent, thanks Neil for setting it up - great stuff! :)

If I could make one suggestion, even though I realise this is a bit of a pain because of certain payments being in different currencies, etc., but would it be a good idea to keep a "running total" of what's in the kitty (no cat pun intended!) at the bottom of the first post in this thread? :)

I personally believe that the two most important things to spend any funds on are hosting renewal fees and also toy samples from BBTS, etc. I also think it would be worth keeping some money stashed away so that if our hosting bill went up as a result of getting more hits, we have funds handy to cover this. :)

Again, thanks for everything you're doing here, Neil, and for your excellent work on this front generally - top man! :thumbsup:

Take care... :)

"He-Fan, post: 43583" said:

Chris here...

This thread is excellent, thanks Neil for setting it up - great stuff! :)

If I could make one suggestion, even though I realise this is a bit of a pain because of certain payments being in different currencies, etc., but would it be a good idea to keep a "running total" of what's in the kitty (no cat pun intended!) at the bottom of the first post in this thread?

Sure, once Jordan sends the money, I'll do a tally in both £ and $ :)

"He-Fan, post: 43583" said:

I personally believe that the two most important things to spend any funds on are hosting renewal fees and also toy samples from BBTS, etc. I also think it would be worth keeping some money stashed away so that if our hosting bill went up as a result of getting more hits, we have funds handy to cover this. :)

Yep I think before any further cash funds are spent on toys, we need to put the funds aside for another full year of hosting foremost. Again I also agree we need to keep funds in reserve for a rainy day too. We could easily splash the cash on more toys, but what good are toy reviews if the site is unaffordable to host? :(

With that first batch of toys from BBTS, at least we will have some of our co-owned ansd branded video content to share (even if it won't be everything) But then, would Dan review all the toys in one go anyway? We could always order more review samples such as the Sword and deluxe figures in September (if BBTS renew their ads with us again) ;)

"He-Fan, post: 43583" said:

Again, thanks for everything you're doing here, Neil, and for your excellent work on this front generally - top man! :thumbsup:

I just hope it all comes together....Jason is really excited about this. Initially I thought this new site was his own thing, but it sounds like it's a team effort. All he said is it won't be Pop Culture Network Part Deux....lol

I don't think Jason and Dan are friends anymore, considering he referred to Dan as his 'nemesis' :eek: Ah the drama....but then I now have a nemesis too! lol

Updated the top post with totals in £'s and $'s.

Also updated the revenue earned from Amazon.co.uk, Adsense and Hollywood Heroes.

Chris here...

"blackiecats, post: 43588" said:

Sure, once Jordan sends the money, I'll do a tally in both £ and $ :)

Thanks for doing that, that's awesome! :thumbsup:

"blackiecats, post: 43588" said:

Yep I think before any further cash funds are spent on toys, we need to put the funds aside for another full year of hosting foremost. Again I also agree we need to keep funds in reserve for a rainy day too. We could easily splash the cash on more toys, but what good are toy reviews if the site is unaffordable to host? :(

I completely and totally agree with this! :)

"blackiecats, post: 43588" said:

With that first batch of toys from BBTS, at least we will have some of our co-owned ansd branded video content to share (even if it won't be everything) But then, would Dan review all the toys in one go anyway? We could always order more review samples such as the Sword and deluxe figures in September (if BBTS renew their ads with us again) ;)

Again I agree, and to be honest I think Pop Culture Network's videos will be "bled out" slowly, I don't think they would release videos of everything straight away (if they did, I'd think they were silly to do so). Whatever, I think we've made a good call here and it will help us get some content out at a time when ThunderCats is hot! :)

"blackiecats, post: 43588" said:

I just hope it all comes together....Jason is really excited about this. Initially I thought this new site was his own thing, but it sounds like it's a team effort. All he said is it won't be Pop Culture Network Part Deux....lol

I don't think Jason and Dan are friends anymore, considering he referred to Dan as his 'nemesis' :eek: Ah the drama....but then I now have a nemesis too! lol

LOL, yeah, if Dan is now Jason's nemesis as he puts it, I can certainly relate that to our situation with MannyF! ;) Not that I'm remotely worried, but I wonder what Dan's reaction will be when he finds out Jason is doing our video reviews?? ;)

Take care... :)

"He-Fan, post: 43642" said:

LOL, yeah, if Dan is now Jason's nemesis as he puts it, I can certainly relate that to our situation with MannyF! ;) Not that I'm remotely worried, but I wonder what Dan's reaction will be when he finds out Jason is doing our video reviews?? ;)

I'm sure it will all be fine anyway. I do think we should advertise Dan's videos too, but maybe just on the forum?

Oh and I've updated the totals. At this rate, with Adsense it should only take about 8 months of advertising to get over £60 and be paid :) Well so long as we can keep doing around £8 per month ;)

About to update totals, but will say yesterday (likely due to the 9 minutes leaked thread) we got nearly 6000 page views, which generated £2.78 in Google ads revenue!

So far this month we earned £4.44 so far, which is great considering we earned £7.88 for the whole of June! So in just 4 days we've earned over half of June's whole total! :eek:

Right now it looks like 12 months of Google ads revenue could fund the hosting alone! Hopefully our current package will be ok for the future traffic we get. If that is the case, then we can keep funds in reserve to keep this site online for a good couple of years without worrying about the bills :)

Chris here...

"blackiecats, post: 44286" said:

About to update totals, but will say yesterday (likely due to the 9 minutes leaked thread) we got nearly 6000 page views, which generated £2.78 in Google ads revenue!

So far this month we earned £4.44 so far, which is great considering we earned £7.88 for the whole of June! So in just 4 days we've earned over half of June's whole total! :eek:

Right now it looks like 12 months of Google ads revenue could fund the hosting alone! Hopefully our current package will be ok for the future traffic we get. If that is the case, then we can keep funds in reserve to keep this site online for a good couple of years without worrying about the bills :)

This is all fantastic news, I'm thrilled to hear this! :thumbsup:

I think what's working out well here is that even if we get increased traffic which forces our hosting package up, we should hopefully get increased Google ad revenue at the same time - whilst the two won't completely balance and we'll still have to dig into advertising funds, it's good to have something like the Google ads in place that work in this way! :)

Take care... :)

"He-Fan, post: 44288" said:

I think what's working out well here is that even if we get increased traffic which forces our hosting package up, we should hopefully get increased Google ad revenue at the same time - whilst the two won't completely balance and we'll still have to dig into advertising funds, it's good to have something like the Google ads in place that work in this way! :)

Take care... :)

I actually didn't think of that! :) I might look into what we'd have to pay if traffic did go mad!

EDIT: According to Hostmonster we have unlimited space AND bandwidth (is it bandwidth that usage increases the more people log on?)

The only other add on I can see is 'Dedicated IP' which is $30 per year... I'm not really tech savvy enough to understand what we'd need to pay extra for if the site suddenly went crazy with visitors?

The hosting cost page is here:

https://my.hostmonster.com/cgi/help/price

Chris here...

"blackiecats, post: 44291" said:

EDIT: According to Hostmonster we have unlimited space AND bandwidth (is it bandwidth that usage increases the more people log on?)

Yep, that's correct! It sounds like we have a good deal from Hostmonster then! :)

The only thing I would say is that if we start getting massive amounts of hits, it may be that this site would need to be upgraded to a server where it was sharing less space with other websites, otherwise the amount of traffic that we'd be getting might cause the site to run slow or crash. :)

To explain this a bit further - every website is sitting on a hosting provider's server. The speed and performance and amount of bandwidth you're allowed basically depends on how many websites are sitting on that particular server - e.g., if a server is hosting 100 websites, and each of those websites receive 100 visits per day, that's 10,000 calls made to that server per day. Whereas, if a server is only holding 10 websites, and each of those websites receives 100 hits per day, that's only 1,000 calls made to that server, meaning there are less issues with performance lag! :)

With some hosting companies, what package you have can influence how many websites are hosted on one server, and sometimes when websites get a lot of traffic they do need "upgrading" from one package to another to keep performance speed and "up time" optimised. :)

For example, I bet you anything you like that He-Man.Org is sitting on its own dedicated server, which is why their hosting bills are so high - the reason for this being the amount of folks who visit their forums every day, they must get several thousand hits per day and, even if they had an "unlimited bandwidth" package, the amount of calls made to their server would ultimately cause the service to grind down at certain times. :)

There's some really good information in this article: http://www.findmyhosting.com/bandwidth-explained/ . :)

"blackiecats, post: 44291" said:

The only other add on I can see is 'Dedicated IP' which is $30 per year... I'm not really tech savvy enough to understand what we'd need to pay extra for if the site suddenly went crazy with visitors?

The hosting cost page is here:

https://my.hostmonster.com/cgi/help/price

A dedicated IP address basically means that, whereas several sites hosted on one server all share an IP address, a dedicated IP address gives your site its own unique IP address, independent of all other websites. I must confess my knowledge of this side of things is pretty limited, but I believe I'm right in saying that a dedicated IP address is an essential component of an "e-commerce" site with a secure checkout, etc. :)

Reading about it, I don't think this is an upgrade we need to worry about - a bit more info in this short article: http://help.godaddy.com/article/1053?ci=5668 . :)

I realise that was quite a wordy response, but hopefully it was helpful, LOL! ;) :D

Take care... :)

So worse case scenario would be us paying $30 more per year then? If so that isn't that expensive is it? It would be just $2.50 a month.

That is good news!

So He-man.org can't be 'THAT' expensive to host really? $30 isn't that expensive in my book.... sometimes when JVS3 pleads poverty at the running costs of that site, I do wonder if he's exaggerating....

Chris here...

"blackiecats, post: 44302" said:

So worse case scenario would be us paying $30 more per year then? If so that isn't that expensive is it? It would be just $2.50 a month.

That is good news!

Not necessarily - an extra $30 per year would give us a unique IP address, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this site would be sitting on its own dedicated server. It's highly possible that Hostmonster could assign our site a dedicated IP address without actually moving our site onto a server all of its own. :(

So, we could still be talking about a jump up in money - but, at the moment I'd say this site is coping well with the traffic we're getting and ThunderCats is really buzzing across the Internet, so, I've got my fingers crossed that we should be OK! :)

"blackiecats, post: 44302" said:

So He-man.org can't be 'THAT' expensive to host really? $30 isn't that expensive in my book.... sometimes when JVS3 pleads poverty at the running costs of that site, I do wonder if he's exaggerating....

To be honest, I've never been convinced - when they were asking for donations to upgrade He-Man.Org, and saying that to do it they needed every member to donate a minimum of $10, that came out to a total of nearly $35,000. Allegedly hosting was nothing to do with that - that was entirely to upgrade to vBulletin's own Content Management System (i.e., vBulletin's own version of WordPress), including getting someone to set it up for them...

To be blunt, there is no WAY that that would've cost even 10% of that money, so my own opinion is that that was a con to try and at least recoup the lion's share of the hosting fees Val had invested in the site! ;)

Take care... :)

"He-Fan, post: 44304" said:

Chris here...

Not necessarily - an extra $30 per year would give us a unique IP address, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this site would be sitting on its own dedicated server. It's highly possible that Hostmonster could assign our site a dedicated IP address without actually moving our site onto a server all of its own. :(

So, we could still be talking about a jump up in money - but, at the moment I'd say this site is coping well with the traffic we're getting and ThunderCats is really buzzing across the Internet, so, I've got my fingers crossed that we should be OK! :)

So where would I find the cost, should we need our own server? Hostmonster doesn't mention that on that price list page :confused:

Chris here...

"blackiecats, post: 44308" said:

So where would I find the cost, should we need our own server? Hostmonster doesn't mention that on that price list page :confused:

Truthfully, I'm not sure. I think the best thing would be to wait and see if our site starts to experience any performance lag once the new series hits, and if it does then contact Hostmonster to ask whether anything can be done... :)

I just did a Google search for a company offering a Dedicated Server (what it means when your site is running on a server all of its own) and could only find one off the front page that quotes a fixed price. Brace yourself - for their basic package (which would, in fairness, be ample for us), the cost is $174 per month! :(

Take care... :)

"He-Fan, post: 44312" said:

the cost is $174 per month! :(

It's a good job I read this while sat on my bed..........:eek:

Out of interest, what kind of numbers would require us our own server do you think? (I know it depends on how many sites share a server with us) but give me an average guess of when we'd start to experience the site being slow....

Chris here...

"blackiecats, post: 44316" said:

It's a good job I read this while sat on my bed..........:eek:

Out of interest, what kind of numbers would require us our own server do you think? (I know it depends on how many sites share a server with us) but give me an average guess of when we'd start to experience the site being slow....

I wouldn't like to quote a figure as I'm not really an expert on the hosting side of things, but I would say you'd be talking about bloody big numbers! ;)

The only time I've known this site start to run slow through hits was when dr_slump broke the world's first-ever blurry look at the new ThunderCats on our forums - even then our site didn't actually experience down time. However many hits that was, if that's as many as our site gets at any one time, we should be OK. :)

The reason He-Man.Org is almost certainly sitting on its own server is because of the massive amounts of traffic that it gets on their message boards, literally thousands of hits per day - the irony of the new ThunderCats series is that we're arguably the largest and highest-profile ThunderCats site on the Internet, but a lot of folks will just talk about it on the Other forum of He-Man.Org! ;)

The good thing about us having unlimited bandwidth is that worst ways round it would just mean our site had periods where it went offline briefly - I wouldn't envisage a scenario where Hostmonster would be able to say we have "unlimited" bandwidth and then tell us we've exceeded it...or at least, I hope not! :)

Take care... :)

"He-Fan, post: 44318" said:

The only time I've known this site start to run slow through hits was when dr_slump broke the world's first-ever blurry look at the new ThunderCats on our forums - even then our site didn't actually experience down time. However many hits that was, if that's as many as our site gets at any one time, we should be OK. :)

Can you remember when that was? I could then look up the stats for that day ;)

Chris here...

"blackiecats, post: 44323" said:

Can you remember when that was? I could then look up the stats for that day ;)

I think you'll find it was 25th January 2011! :)

Take care... :)