gryphoon94 wrote:Side question, is Eso-c mainly making money off donations? i feel there are so many other potential revenue streams (twitch subs, selling tshirts/other merch, in website features) that I do not see happening right now
YouTube revenue gets split between covering cost of hosting the site and prize pools. 100% of donations go to the prize pool. I am pretty sure our donations far exceed YouTube revenue. I'm not sure if there is any Twitch revenue, last I knew we were only a semi-partner that gave us quality options but not revenue.
Not sure what kind of website features you mean. We've never run ads (no need to degrade the web experience for a minimal income stream) and charging for premium site features would demand a higher standard of reliability than our dev team could realistically provide by developing as volunteers in their free time. If people want to contribute to the site, donations work great. What kind of feature do you actually think people would pay for?
Merch is a grey area at best with in terms of copyright infringement, all our logos and stuff feature AoE3 art.
Ultimately though, in my opinion, for a community our size, no fundraising initiative other than soliciting donations makes sense. If I were for example to spend time developing some premium site feature (I think you suggest this in your post), anything worthwhile would make ESOC far less money than I would make working freelance somewhere else. Thus, it would make more sense for me to do some freelance development and donate my earnings from that to ESOC than it would to work on something for ESOC with the sole goal of being a premium feature.