Freesound Forums

I, like many other users, find this site invaluable! Would be an absolute shame to see it go. You should charge a small amount yearly or monthly for people to use it. Maybe 3-5 free downloads per month and then charge membership if people want to use it more?

This seems really reasonable to me. As a teacher who regularly asks students to download audio here, I feel responsible for helping it stay free and sustainable; it's only right. I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

I just donated, you guys have been instrumental in my project, when I sell it for $$ I'll make a much bigger donation <3 https://www.behance.net/gallery/44648075/Lair-of-the-Lizard-Queen

This a very valuable site! Would donate rather than loose it!

Is it hard to decentralize the data in some torrent like fashion to offload the storage cost? Also it would be nice for backup.

Accept donations in Bitcoin (and perhaps some other crypto currency). That could boost your capital with the valuation that crypos get these days (sometimes even 100% per month). Yes it's not certain and certainly some of that is unsustainable longterm. Yet in the case of Bitcoin I'd say longterm valuation could make this work. If the projections are correct we could have $10000/bitcoin in 2020 and that would work pretty nicely for this site.

Seriously, research what the bitcoin is and what it could do for you. In my opinion it fits the nature of freesound really well.

Also there is potential to create something like freesound coin or something like it. So people could invest in freesound on the crypto market. It seems like a popular thing these days and some of these get insane valuations in a couple of days. It's a very risky thing because it seems to be some kind of bouble. Many greedy people trying to make big money on anything that goes up. Many scams in the space. Though perhaps it could work for freesound. I don't know... just pointing at possible ways to get financing.

Be careful and thanks for your hard work over the years. Much appreciated!

Yes how to fund things like this. I'm a filmmaker - I have no solutions! As an individual all I know is you have to be bloody minded and persistent and even then a project that needs a budget can fail very easily. I have a project up for crowdfunding and it's not going well...Crowdfunding would not be a good idea for you as the sites set up for it take a cut of the money raised and the chances are that the people donating would be the same as the people who would donate to you anyway through your site...
As it is €10 a year sounds very reasonable! I've been giving €20 a year plus the occasional T shirt for a few years now because I value Freesound! Hope more users come round realising that they should contribute something to the site however small...

Very happy with freesound.org, we've been using it almost exclusively for our YouTube videos for over a year now. We get false copyright infringement claims all the time, and it's always been easy to fend those off with a link to this site.

This is what we'd love to see on every page:
- Paypal Donation Button: for easy, safe and impulsive donations
- Patreon Button: for users who want to contribute regularly
- Targeted advertising: from what I understand it should be easy to have Google's AdSense only serve ads that are interesting for this site (i.e. sound hardware/software)
- Non-targeted advertising: again from what I understand, if you don't configure AdSense it directs itself at the browsing history of visitors
- You could also start an advertising program to attract sound hardware/software vendors directly to the site, this would potentially make you more money but may take up a lot of time as well...

Concerning Ad Blockers:
- Only a minority of visitors use them (up to 30%) so you would still be making money
- Ask visitors politely to turn them off; they will if ads are non-intrusive
- Only use reputable ad companies to avoid fear of malicious use
- Avoid trackers as much as possible for the same reason
- Further reading: http://uk.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-report-2017-1?r=US&IR;=T

We hope to see freesound.org continue and get even better, our money is in the mail!

Hi Freesound Project!

Are we talking about future sustainability or future growth?

I've been using Freesound since it first started and love it. The focus on copyright freedom and reuse is a huge benefit and not something I see on any other site in the world.

If it's a matter of just sustaining the current level of service, than I'm all in for whatever you need to do to make ends meet. I hate advertising, but I'd be glad to donate.

However, when you start talking about "growth", I get wary. I understand the desire to have Freesound be more useful for researchers, but I fear that "growth" means Freesound will actually cost more to run, leading to future sustainability problems. For example, if Freesound starts offering new services that presume there is full-time staff to support it, then it will be difficult to ever go back to not having full-time staff.

Growth can be good, but if it causes an insatiable hunger, the entire organism may die.

What can be done to ensure that — even if the growth gets out of hand — that the core services of Freesound will survive?

Thank you,

—b9

P.S. Is there an option to "do nothing"? That is, can Freesound continue to exist as it is, without growing new services and without seeking out new revenue streams?

the2Jesters wrote:
Very happy with freesound.org, we've been using it almost exclusively for our YouTube videos for over a year now. We get false copyright infringement claims all the time, and it's always been easy to fend those off with a link to this site.
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I LOVE reading this, and you wrote a very clever comment as a whole. You obviously know what you are talking about, I fully agree

Cheers

D

What we can do? Ads, donations, I dont know

Please "grow", please do stuff, please enable a Paypal option, and I will transfer money to you immediately.

Regards from a long-term grateful user,

dobroide wrote:

the2Jesters wrote:
Very happy with freesound.org, we've been using it almost exclusively for our YouTube videos for over a year now. We get false copyright infringement claims all the time, and it's always been easy to fend those off with a link to this site.
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I LOVE reading this, and you wrote a very clever comment as a whole. You obviously know what you are talking about, I fully agree

Cheers

D

Please don't make me blush lol, nine years in internet sales/marketing solutions left a mark I guess. Don't know much of the coding side though, I was just the messenger.

Besides that, a big THANKS to you and all other UPLOADERS.
Without you guys this great site would never have grown to what it is today.

I too am on board. Will donate.

This is a good wake-up call for me. I've been relying on this wonderful site for several years. It's past time for me to donate and I'm happy to do so.

I probably also need a t-shirt. Who doesn't need another t-shirt? Do you guys get some of the profit from the t-shirt sales? I hope so!

Hi, guys. I believe that Patreon would be a great option for free sound grow. It is a service that allows people to donate money on a monthly base. I have seen a lot of businesses succeed with Patreon and most have built their companies using that particular method. It doesn't hurt you to check it out and it may be the answer you are looking for to help you not only maintain this amazing website and expand as well. https://www.patreon.com/about
Keep up with the incredible work that you do.

Absolutely agree with donation campaign. Please, notify by email!! I use freesound on most of my shortfilms, I think it's a really great resource for independent filmmakers and creators of all kind.

Dear all,

Thank you very much for so many interesting responses!
We're really happy to see that you understand and support us

We'll look into how easy it would be to provide support for donations other than Paypal, and we'll certainly investigate the donation platforms that you have proposed like Patreon.

In response to the comment by hackerb9, we are talking about future sustainability and an improvement of the current platform (and research to be carried out to further improve the platform). This will also probably mean growth, but this is not our main goal (as in "the more users the better"). We don't want to grow all of a sudden in ways which might not be scalable or manageable for us and for the community. We are vey much aware that the costs to sustain Freesound should be kept at a minimum to make it really sustainable. With the promotion of donations we want Freesound to generate enough to have a couple of people fully dedicated to it, but the core of Freesound will still be covered with resources provided by the University.

Many of you mentioned the idea of having ads (either liking or disliking them). That's something we want to avoid as much as possible, therefore we don't consider them (at least for now). If we had nicely targeted ads that could be more or less ok but, as the2Jesters commented, it would require a lot of work on our side which we can't really handle.

Regarding membership-like ideas (see jepe007's comment), this is also something that we have considered. However, currently our thoughts are more in the line of "implicit memberships" like using a system "badges" or "points" to somehow reward users which contribute to Freesound in different ways (sounds, comments, posts, donations, etc.). This would be similar to the "number of sounds" and "number of forum posts" which is currently shown in forums, but we'd introduce more variables in the system and give it a bit more presence.

Anyway, we will be starting with the donations campaign in the following weeks/months, so we'll see how it all goes

Thank you all for your valuable comments!

frederic

I am a downloader and not an uploader at this point. I have used freesounds in many music compositions of my own and it is one of my favorite sources and communities.

I have contributed to freesound.

Frankly I think that getting to 100K Euros from 2000 is unlikely. Harvesting that kind of dough from even as well-known and valuable a website as yours through donations alone - I expect that it would take most of your team's time to do the marketing and SEO needed to keep those funds coming in - leaving not much for the site.

You have eyeballs (and ears), so some form of advertising would seem like a classic way to support consumers at low or no cost. It would not affect my experience too much, I don't think, compared to the value that I am getting. That said, the real value is in the uploaders, so if the community were to reject advertisements, they're just not a solution.

I don;t think advertising will get to 100K Euros either, but it might be a more steady income stream with little effort to maintain it. Dunno if it would beat 200 Euros a month.

tryint to promote donations a bit more sounds like a great idea. years ago I was active on this website: http://www.icompositions.com and they had the following model - they showed ad banners on each page, and if you buy a subscription (it was something small - just like your 10-15 eur donation) you don't see ads on the website anymore. The regulars who were spending a lot of time on the website loved that they had an option to turn off the ads. Not sure if this could work also for you, but it's an idea that worked in the past

I would so do $10 a year. If this would help keep this site going, it seems quite reasonable to contribute that.