3 replies to this topic

[eorgeburns7]

I have wondered this for awhile. I have read how the Scanulation groups make money, but I have yet to read how Batoto pays for there costs. Is it just out of pocket? or do they have ads for the home page? also how much does it cost to keep Batoto up and running?

sorry if there is already an answer I just can't seem to find it.

[Grumpy]

Well, I guess I'm most suited to answer this one. Bit of history of Batoto involved because it has changed over time due to unfortunate circumstances.

Originally, Batoto was made to give the participating groups 100% of the ad revenue by hosting their ads directly. That allowed 100% transparency in what we do since we do not handle any money exchange. The key is "participating", we certainly can't give ad space to groups who simply doesn't want to participate and we cannot give give the ad space to no-longer existing ones either. So, we used to put our ads there. So, regardless of what the remaining percentage if "inventory" is, we use that to pay for the servers. Because with good ad prices which we directly controlled and provided by google adsense, and current bandwidth costs, this was perfectly viable in the long run. Though, of course when Batoto just started out, I paid from my pocket since with tiny amounts of traffic, the ads did not bring enough to offset the costs.

Then comes the google's algo changes, a time when all manga readers stopped using google ads (well, sorta). They pretty much kicked us out, likely because we don't generate great profit margin for them (you can see the full story in the announcements from a while ago).

Switching to another ad provider was a huge issue. Because other ad providers doesn't offer the type of application interface (API) like google does with ads. It makes hosting multiple ads on a single website really difficult. To make it worse, it's impossible to do quality control of the ads and also exposes huge security vulnerability to Batoto as the participants can add any ambiguous code they like and there'd be no way for me to check them as it could change at any given time. Also, as Google hosts roughly over 2/3rds of the internet banner market share, they are the only grade A when it comes to pricing (with few exception, won't bother getting into). So, we're now at a much lower paying ads and unable to put others' ads. ( <-- double frown. That's why we've (more like I've) tried to create additional methods to increase revenue so that there's more to share and more viable ways to support scanlators financially. Though, much have been futile.

So, in the end, the ads that are running support the runtime of batoto. If the ads are insufficient (I would honestly like to avoid 4x + ads we're seeing on other sites now. I think that's a bit too much. 2 banners are maximum in my opinion to keep the site fairly clean.), we'll likely switch or add a donation campaign (which we did for extremely briefly when Google ditched us [without paying], putting us in the negative -- which I just paid from my pocket).

[eorgeburns7]

Thanks Grumpy that answerd my question

[FakeHero]

Very insightful Grumpy. And I really appriciate you answering and not keeping it hidden like some super dark secret.