cavneb

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The Beginner’s course is joining the ever growing Egghead.io “Community Resources.” I’m totally amazed by Egghead and all the free stuff they sponsor. Thank you Egghead!!

The Advanced course is free for now and will eventually be used to fund Egghead’s community resources by converting to pro content. And now’s the best time to get a pro account. Egghead very rarely does sales, but it’s running one right now! For a limited time, you can get an Egghead subscription for 30% off. See egghead.io/gifts for more information.

The personal cost it would be for me (time from family) to continue to grow Code Sponsor on the side is not an option. I love open source and want to see it be sustainable for developers, however, I can't do so anymore at the expense of my family.

True sustainable, scalable funding for open source will never come from donations. It must be approached as a marketing win for companies. This is the only way they can (and will) scale their funding paving the path for true financial sustainability.

See this article: https://medium.com/@codesponsor/fighting-for-open-source-sus...

Here's an example of what it looks like:

https://github.com/erikras/redux-form

> Community recognition and extended network, better chances of hiring, or attribution from projects

This has been the case since day 1. It is a great motivation for people to get into open source, but there gets to be a point where this is no longer a motivation. As their projects become more and more popular, they are having to work nights and weekends to keep the project alive and maintained.

> May be open source development is just fine with corporate sponsorship + people doing it in their free time

Again, this is how it’s always been. Most open source projects do not look for corporate sponsorship because they don’t know where to start. Working in free time is great until it isn’t.

> Maybe developers are repelled by ads...

This is true. Some are repelled. But ask yourselves if the Code Sponsor banner looks like an ad? It was crafted in a way to look enough like the documentation to not distract developers from the README, but different enough to not be considered deceiving.

> Maybe charity and donations work better

Ask Kent C. Dodds this question. He had the charity buttons on every one of his repos and he received $0 in donations. Scalable funding cannot come from charity, it has to come from marketing funds.

This is also part of what Code Sponsor offered. We are currently sponsoring many amazing websites.

A lot of people are saying that Github is shutting down Code Sponsor. This is not the case. Github is not forcing Code Sponsor to shut down. They are only forcing us to remove all banners from their README’s. The decision to shut down is because the impact Code Sponsor could have on sustaining open source is minimal without Github’s blessing.

You make some great points. I do have one correction though:

> Most of the previous sponsors were drawn into the social cause but not necessarily the practical effectiveness of the ads themselves

This is true for a few of the sponsors, but not the majority. The majority were drawn into Code Sponsor because it can be as effective as Google Ads, while 40% of the marketing funds go back into developers pockets.

Code Sponsor was never presented to sponsors as a charitable organization, nor did we try to present ourselves as such to the community.

Here is the gist that I shared with sponsors to explain how Code Sponsor worked:

https://gist.github.com/cavneb/a86a668063328de2f063ba9c7d078...

Yes, we are a way for sponsors and developers to connect. We do not tell developers where in their code to place the banner. In hindsight, this may have been part of the problem. Perhaps we should have been more rigid in how we allow developers to present the banner.

TAForObjReasons is exactly right. Github has to be a part of the equation.

Carbon Ads is a wonderful company. They provide an excellent service. However, per Rollbar, Code Sponsor performed better than they did at about 1/3 the cost. What does this mean for the developer? Scaling. Rollbar was able to scale their budget because Code Sponsor provided more interested developers to their product along at a much lower rate.

What Code Sponsor is is a mashup of Carbon Ads, Open Collective and Read the Docs (with a hint of grassroots marketing demonstrated by Wesbos). The 40% was enough for developers. I paid one developer last month over $600. Two others earned over $400.

Finally, Code Sponsor was available to every open source project. The popularity of the project is what self-governed the amount of money they would receive.

Carbon Ads also does not provide any visibility into what is going on. I have taken extreme effort to give sponsors and developers full visibility into their traffic patterns. Daily statistics and charts. This allows sponsors to immediately know how their campaigns are doing and shift if necessary.

Carbon Ads is great, but they are a black box and sponsors want more.

Thank you so much for this! :hugs:

Thank you

This was a manual process, but we do have several projects like this sponsored.

60% of all traffic through Code Sponsor came from Github. 15% came from ad blocked traffic (I have no idea the referer). About 15% came from websites and then the remainder came from different repository websites (dockerhub, npm, etc).

I agree that this is a good idea, but open source exists on Github. Without their support, it just won’t happen.

Donate buttons don’t work. They are asking for money from other developers. Imagine 100 developers in a room and each one takes out their purse or wallet and hands a dollar to the left. It’s not scalable, and it feels like begging.

Code Sponsor took the approach that scalable funding should come through marketing budgets, not charity. Companies pay developers to place a non-obtrusive, relevant and ethical banner on their repo or website and the developer gets paid on a per-click basis. The larger the repo, the more clicks they get. It is self-normalizing.

What other solutions do we have to provide scalable funding to open source projects? This comment really frustrates me. Do we put more buttons on our repos asking for money from other developers? Do we try to find corporate sponsorship and hope that they don’t try to influence the project? And if we did want to go that route, how do we do it?

Why is this not the right way to go about it? The “ads” were relevant, unobtrusive and ethical. There was never any click tracking, never any remarketing, nothing.

Code Sponsor provided the FIRST and ONLY means of scalable funding for open source projects. It was not depending on charity from others. It was a business transaction between sponsors and developers. The sponsors saw a return and the developers got paid to continue doing what they love.

If anyone else has a better idea, please share. Until then, I claim that it’s IS the right way to go about it.

Unfortunately, Github is where open source lives. The success that Code Sponsor saw was due to the minimal steps it took for a developer to start getting paid for open source. Asking developers to move their open source projects to Gitlab would not work.

Hi. This is Eric, the founder of Code Sponsor. I appreciate your concern here. Please understand that for the last four months, I’ve been getting up at 5am and working till 7:30. I then would go to my day job every day and then get back to Code Sponsor in the evenings. I also worked every weekend. It was a huge struggle for me and my family to put in the time.

The reason I had a 40% rate was in hopes that I could make the business sustainable enough to pay me. Not once did I take a distribution.

Hi Diemorz,

I’m very glad for your comment. This is something that I can honestly say I have not considered. My biggest fears were 1) making sure that the whole idea isn’t rejected by the developer community and 2) making sure I have enough money in place to give to developers.

I started off initially by doing a 50/50 split with developers. I also started by charging $1/click to sponsors. I quickly realized that it would take a very long time before I could get enough sponsors and developers to support myself full time. Because of this, I dropped the distributions to 60/40. It still is not making much money at all. Code Sponsor may take 60%, but I take 0%.

Now in the future, if it does continue to grow at a healthy rate and if Github will allow us to sustain OSS through README’s, then I would definitely consider a more developer-sided split.

All I want is to help sustain OSS and do it as a living.

For example, the sponsor pays $1,000 for 1 month of sponsorship. The developers gets 40% of that ($400). The remainder ($600) goes into building Code Sponsor.

Understand that this has been a side project since day one. I have not taken any distributions at all.

The split used to be 50/50, however I could not sustain myself with that split and still keep the CPA low for our sponsors. We are now setting a minimum CPC for all new sponsors to $1.50+. This means that the developer will get $0.60/click.

Finally, part of the 60% goes into the server costs and fraud prevention. We run every click through vigorous fraud detection prior to marking it as “payable”. By doing so, we provide much higher quality clicks to the sponsors. This makes them scale their funds. Remember, we are working with marketing funds, not sponsorship funds.

Depending on the project, we have seen between 0.4 - 1.2% click rate on average.

Oh.. it wasn't. I posted it in response to your query :-D Like I said, I'm an open book. I just want to help sustain OSS.

Thank you, Kent! Your OSS efforts deserve to be funded!

  October 2017

  Income from sponsors:  $ 7,437.20
  Paid to developers:    $ 3,413.20
                         -----
  Kept by CodeSponsor:   $ 4,024.00

This does not take into account the $6,000 we spent to become a sponsor for Github Universe.

This is great feedback. Thank you.

Owner here. Github is responsible for about 60% of the overall traffic. We support websites as well such as https://jsbin.com and https://codesandbox.io.

I don’t believe Github would ever want to buy Code Sponsor. The goal from the beginning was to provide scalable sources of funding. This has not existed prior.

We do not consider ourselves an advertising network. Here's why:

  * We do not display sponsors based on a bid system.
  * We only present sponsors that the developers choose.
  * Sponsors can select which projects they want to support and which they do not.

Owner here. I agree 100%. From day one I have been promised to never do any tracking or remarketing. I don’t sell data. I have followed the Ethically advertising guidelines established by Read the Docs. If you are a developer on the platform, you know to the second what your payout is. If you are a sponsor, you know to the second how much you owe.

This data comes from a talk given by Nadia Engbhal entitled “Consider the Maintainer”. This data originally comes from here: https://github.com/aserg-ufmg/Truck-Factor/blob/master/READM...

This is Eric, the founder of Code Sponsor. I assure you there's nothing sketchy with what we do. There is, however, something sketchy about this developers abuse of it. We have removed ourselves from their repository.

Even though GitHub may say we cannot do this on their website, it does not prevent developers from generate a healthy side income building OSS.

Here's a blog post we just released which includes links to different developer repos and sites (aside from GitHub) https://medium.com/@codesponsor/fighting-for-open-source-sus...