Author: Sal and Simon
Support VentnorBlog With Donations
Monday, 28th April, 2008 at 6:47 pm, Isle of Wight
The sharp-eyed amongst you may have noticed a new button at the top of the right hand column of the site. It’s called Donate.
Don’t take it as an order, think of it more as an option that’s available if you feel the urge.
Why ask now?
As you know, we’ve been running VentnorBlog for over 2.5 years now and we’ve tried to cover the stories that the people of the Island and its visitors find important, digging into stories to find out the details that the other media sources on the Island choose to ignore.
VentnorBlog is taking an increasing amount of our days up and with your support, we hope to continue and hopefully expand our coverage.
From time to time over that period, people have suggested that we give them a way to let readers Donate. Each time, we thought, what a jolly generous suggestion! Well, finally we’ve remembered all of those times and done what’s been asked!
How much to Donate?
We didn’t feel it was right to decide for you how much would be the right amount if you felt the urge to Donate, so we’re leaving it up to you to decide.
It can be as little or as much as you like, but bear in mind that there’s a limit of £1,000 (!) … but if you want to exceed this, you could always donate again next month 
How to Donate
We’ve made it as easy as possible. Simply click on the Donate button on VentnorBlog, you’ll be taken to a page when you can enter the amount of money you’d like to donate (1), click the Update Totals button (2) and if you’re a signed up for PayPal already, it should only take a couple more clicks to finish the process.
If you’re not already a PayPal user, there are a few steps to sign up, then you can use most credit cards to Donate.
If PayPay really doesn’t work for you and you’d prefer to use good, old-fashioned cash or cheque, get in touch.
What’s PayPal?
If you’ve not come across PayPal before, you’ll be assured that it’s owned by eBay (of online auction fame) and is just about as secure as you can get … we wouldn’t expose you anything that wasn’t would we?
What will Donations be spent on?
As to what your hard-earned donated lolly will go on … well it costs us a couple of hundred pounds a month just to run the server that VentnorBlog operates on, so that a good place to start.
Perversely, as we become more popular, the number of people visiting VentnorBlog goes up, so the costs we have to pay increase.
Beyond that base level cost that we need to cover, there’s always the vague chance that we might make a couple of quid out of this some day
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April 28th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 7:36 pm
There are Websites with far fewer hits that are funded by advertisments, have you folks considered this? Failing that I would have thought that if the Council can afford to pay £200K per annum for some jobsworth to drive a gravy train, they must have some of our money available to fund such a worthwhile community project as the Blog. I’d wager that if Newport had a Blog it would be our money paying for it!
April 28th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 8:09 pm
Count me in. I waste at least a quid a week on the competition, so I might as well give it to you instead.
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 6:46 am
Small voice of caution. Although PayPal is ’safe’ there are lots of scams that are associated with it. If you do sign up be aware of targeted emails purporting to come from PayPal when they are actually from a scam site after your details.
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 7:00 am
can you d.d. with pay pal ? wont be much but if everyone puts a little it can only help you , the blog has been so kind to me and mombasa i will look up paypal asap .
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 8:22 am
some people don’t like payapal
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 8:35 am
Stick a block of google ads on your site to get some revenue too.
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 9:50 am
Tried that before we did the re-design, over 2 years it earnt us about $2 in total
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 10:05 am
another problem with going down a google-ads route is that one might have to start battling sploggers!
…”Splogs,” or spam blogs, are the latest way for spammers to manipulate the blogosphere for profit.
The phenomenon hit an all-time high recently, when Google’s blog-hosting service, Blogger, was inundated with more than 13,000 fake blogs spawned by a script (all have since been taken down)…
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/10/69380
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 10:14 am
We’ve been hit by sploggers already, they steal your content, without crediting you and earn the income off the ads. It’s happened many times before.
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 3:46 pm
Well done VB on your success in becoming THE most popular online publication on the IW. I’ll be supporting you for your efforts and hope you keep up the good work. You definitely deserve something back from your readers. Hope others will follow suit.
April 29th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 4:12 pm
Hear Hear. You’ve got my support Ventnor Bloggers. Excellent work on the schools campaign and really impressed with your work to publicise the fate of the Ventnor Skate Park. Keep it up.
May 1st, 2008 (2 weeks ago) at 12:55 pm
I use Pay Pal for buying smaller items on line. I have never had a problem with this system.
I do understand the concern of some people though as PP do get bad reviews at times.
Anonymity is of concern to some people too when donating to various sites. PP details are normally only available to the payee and payer.
Would anonymity be assured for anyone wanting to pay a donation by say cheque ?
May 9th, 2008 (6 days ago) at 4:01 pm
The reason Ebay users have trouble with Paypal is that although Paypal is very transactionally secure, the user has publicised their transaction by virtue of making it through a public online auction - namely Ebay. This allows target specific phishing to occur.
This problem doesn’t occur with VB - unless of course the phishers target the entire members list. Somehow I think VB would be wise to that very quickly.
Oh yes, and as usual, brilliant job Sal and Simon.
How about local community paid advertising?