Freesound Forums
The future sustainability of Freesound
Started May 12th, 2017 · 197 replies · Latest reply by tonytitani 10 months, 3 weeks ago
I agree with Timbre.
I love freesound and most of all, being part of a community that keeps fighting against paid material and is willing to share for a bigger purpose. Like many others I'll gladly do a yearly donation but if the site could have a great income using other tools, I'm all favor. It's a win win situation. Not to mention that freesound will gain a lot more advertisement.
In the other hand. Technology change rapidly and I personally think that's time to re-design the website or simply make it responsive.
Timbre wrote:
How about a trying a monetized YouTube-channel as a source of income ?
Consisting of the most popular, non-commercial, Freesound samples,
( maybe add an animated visualization of the audio on each YouTube video ).You would then be competing with those currently repackaging Freesounds on YouTube,
who make thousands per year in advertising revenue, e.g ...
https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/soundeffectsfactory [minimum $2K per year]
see ... https://www.youtube.com/user/SoundEffectsFactory/search?query="freesound.org"
This is very interesting idea.
I would support donation, but also think, that especially people, who don't upload any sounds (and there's many), should be advised to give back donating or even be displayed a note asking to give back after exceeding certain thresholds (you define). Bit like Bandcamp, which points regular just-listeners to the fact, that the music there is for sale (and not for rent).
Maybe a mixed profit concept like this could make sense for you guys as well.
Let the uploader decide, whether they want to sell their sounds, and take from the proceeds. Bandcamp takes 15% and performs very well.
I do enjoy freesound oftenly, it helped me out of work troubles before, so i'd be willing to pay for good sounds myself, but i also give back by uploading quality recordings.
So another option maybe is to give credits to people who upload, which could enable those to download for free in other places.
On another note i am perfectly content with the feature set and design of freesound, nothing to invent there for me. Thank you to the programmers for having made such a low profile, easy-to-use thing.
Thank you for having started this, and let's invent a low-profile sustaining concept together.
If you had a Patreon page I'd donate monthly, it would be automated so I wouldn't have to remember, and it's a great platform for reaching people who don't already know about freesound.org. The way to approach any crowd sourcing isn't "help us", rather "let's do this together". Crowdfunding is easier to promote and yields higher results because of the community aspect and social media algorithms. Just my 2 cents.
Hi
I'm a songwriter and so I don't often use freesound but I have downloaded thunder and rain sounds for a song about a Louisiana Voodoo Queen and I just downloaded sounds of seagulls and waves, which is funny because I live right on the ocean in Salem MA. These seagull sounds are now integrated into a tropical island song. But even though I don't need many of these sounds, still, I've felt that I wanted to give back in some way. So, I'm more than willing to donate or pay per download. But I like the donating better because then it still feels like freesound.
Cool Crow
Dear all,
This message is to inform you that today we will start with our donations "campaign", meaning that we will start to actively request donations. Donations will be requested in two ways: 1) a modal that appears after clicking in the download button, and 2) email.
The "after download modal" will only appear when certain conditions are met (e.g. a user downloaded more than X sounds in Y days), and only with a specific probability to avoid being too insistent.
Emails will be sent only to specific users that download many sounds. Also, if someone makes a donation, we'll send an email reminder in a year time asking for a new one.
Users that made a donation within the last year won't be shown any popups or be sent any emails. Similarly, users who uploaded sounds won't be requested donations.
Finally, I'd like to mention that we have initially adjusted the parameters for deciding when to show or not to show popups/send emails in the way we thought it was more sensible, but we might need to adjust it in the future if, for example, we're showing too many popups or too few.
We're very excited to see the user response to this campaign, we'll let you know how it goes.
Thank you all for your comments and discussion in this thread 
frederic, on behalf of the Freesound Team
the freesound team
I haven't donated straight, but I ordered your T-shirt from the shop after reading this thread. This was my kind of supporting the great site. Hope it helps a little. If user buys shirt, is it same as donation?
frederic.font wrote:
.
.Users that made a donation within the last year won't be shown any popups or be sent any emails. Similarly, users who uploaded sounds won't be requested donations.
.
.
Seems like a lot of effort to not sound exacting. Come on guys, don't be shy, ask and it will be given to you! Just kidding. I believe you're going the right way, merciful is better than ignored.
D
frederic.font wrote:
Dear all,This message is to inform you that today we will start with our donations "campaign" [...]
Thank you, Frederic! This sounds like the perfect compromise. I like that the end result is careful to respect everyone who comes to this site and is especially designed to not annoy people who have already donated or who have uploaded sounds. The idea that more downloads increases one's chance of being prodded for money is a good one.
And thank you for having an open discussion about this before implementing it.
I'm donating right away.
—b9
If I had any money myself to donate/if I was old enough to donate(?) I would!
Mudkip2016 wrote:
If I had any money myself to donate/if I was old enough to donate(?) I would!
It wasn't so long ago I was in the same place as you, Mudkip. I see you've already uploaded some sounds and that's a great way to contribute. Even if you didn't have that talent, I'd still recommend you go ahead and keep on enjoying and using freesound.org. You can always pay it forward to the next generation when you have the means.
—b9
Just made my donation. Not because I use freesound a lot, but because I really want to support websites that are user funded.
Patreon does pocket five percent in addition to transaction fees. The "helping" sites are managing to make their system look like they are helpful, and sometimes they are, but . . .
A small local MeetUp site in my town wanted those-who-could to chip in a little for the moderator's $180 yearly cost for Meetup Moderation. One very agitated member was outraged by the thought that voluntary donations might exceed that amount allowing our moderator to profit from her work. Not much chance of that, based on history. The agitated member thought we should go through member-funding, with each of the 1,737 members to pay $15 annually. That would be $26,055 total if everyone paid, with 7.5% plus .50 per transaction to Meetup. Alternatively, the annual moderator's fee could be got using GoFundMe for 7.5% plus .30 per transaction. So much unnecessary drama!
I hope Freesound users will donate in their own interest without panicking over the thought that others might benefit. Some users will be unable to donate, some will be free-loading jerks. And we all will benefit by not going to the dark side with advertising.
Just curious, why am I sent to a Spanish PayPal site when I click the donation link?
I'm in Ireland, so EU PayPal would make sense, but the Spanish language version made me feel as is I'd been Phished.
I'm happy to donate, but need to be sure my donation is secure.
Thanks,
GK
Timbre,
Do you have a link to the donation page? It was originally a pop up that I clicked on, and now I can't navigate back.
Thx.
-GK
gdkaufmann wrote:
... a link to the donation page?