There is no danger of us shutting down SawMill Creek. We may have to eliminate visitor access though which would free up the majority of our resources. I am not a fan of this approach but since the majority of the people here (Members and Visitors) who use free access are using blocking software there is no gain for our advertisers and they pay for the free access. Let me explain how bad the situation is...advertiser banners have dropped from over one million views per month to just 40 thousand each month per advertiser. Access here continues to grow but banner views have dropped to the basement.
Obviously we cannot sustain these kinds of numbers any longer. I promised to keep SawMill Creek online for everyone to enjoy as long as I have your support. Free access has been supported by advertising up till now but that is changing based on the majority here using blocking software preferring not to see any advertising which was not what people told me in 2005.
There is another option. I receive offers from companies who offer to monetize our advertising who offer very attractive rates. The down side is that I doubt anyone would like this change, you can imagine what a professional advertising company would do here if they had control. I delete these offers immediately, just don't like the idea and I don't do this for the money as my income from The Creek is minimal. You donate 6 bucks per year via PayPal, they get their percentage, then state and federal taxes take a bite so there is very little left to pay the bills and save for hardware, software, bandwidth and pay our monthly maintenance costs.
If you review the threads from 2005 when we discussed how we would pay the bills here an overwhelming majority wanted free access via advertising....and I was against the idea because I preferred that we remain self funded. The majority won the argument so here we are today facing another change that I have not caused.
You see the red text below....that is something our Moderators and I are investing a huge amount of time to create. We hope that this will be a very popular attraction, you will enjoy the presentation and it will help us maintain a reasonable number of advertisers. I am working for you, believe me after 15 years I am still willing to go the distance to keep The Creek alive and well but I cannot do it alone.
I did did not realize things were tight. There is an option to turn the ads on in account settings. I have turned mine on, and will be renewing shortly.