Donations

I've added a donation button to the home page.

Since Microcosm failed, I've been focusing on other things and not worried about donations. There was a surge last year which put us a little ahead and that saw things through.

However in the last 8 months donations have reduced every month and affiliate revenue has been almost wiped out.

The drop in donations is probably due to multiple reasons:

• Debit cards expiring
  
• People forgetting that they donate, seeing it happen and cancelling
  
• Fewer people choosing to donate (no replacing those that stop donating)
  
• Less visibility of donor status
  
• Removal of donor perks (unless people ask, only 1 or 2 donors have)
  
  

The drop in affiliates is due to several reasons:

• Change in terms with providers like eBay
  
• Change in % with providers like Amazon, Wiggle, etc
  
• Adblockers (the rise of uBlock) more aggressively blocking affiliate cookies (sales aren't attributed to us when they do happen)
  
• Less guest traffic from Google, in part because fewer pages are indexed by Google (no sitemap.xml file)
  
  

Together this has led to income dropping to a couple of hundred per month, sometimes a few hundred.

Which again... is OK.

Microcosm has actually been our saviour in many ways, the key one being that it has reduced costs from £1k per month down to only £350-£500 per month (range varies according to exact traffic served and currency exchange rates).

The reason I added the donate button to the home page is that the donations are on a downward decline and already take revenue below costs. Like many cycling sites I was hoping for uplift when fair weather kicked in, but that hasn't really happened. So I've again been helping LFGSS a little each month, but this time I want to call it before I get 6 months into doing this and rack up some credit card.

One-off donations above £20 are appreciated, but regular donations from a larger number of people for only £3-5 per month are preferred. Regular smaller donations help make income more predictable, and reduce the risk of us relying on a few individuals to cover the costs.

I am working on the code again, and have a ToDo list that includes Google sitemaps to try and help affiliate revenue recover (less reliance on donations), as well as donor perks and donor status being added again. But those things take time, I still have a lot of code to clean up so I can change things faster.