I got an email asking if I would donate to Lernu this coming year. I probably will donate some money soon. Lernu is definitely worth a few dollars considering how much I have benefited from the website!

I have a few questions for the admins:
1 - what are the operational costs of running the website?
2 - how much revenue has been generated by advertising?
3 - have you considered affiliate marketing (such as Amazon), or directly marketing a product or service? Affiliate marketing is supposed to be the best way of generating income.

It's also the best way to get embroiled in losing your independence. Not everything has to be marketised and monetised.

I no longer have a credit card or paypal, so donating is rather difficult, even though I think it very much worth it.

Vestitor:Not everything has to be marketised and monetised.

How will they pay the bills?

I was surprised to read the email today because it said that the organization, which is funding lernu, is pulling their funding. I was really shocked that a website like this needed funding in the first place, which made me very curious about the expenses.

There used to be a really good website in the past that everyone was fond of. I never saw it myself but I hear that it was awesome. It disappeared because of funding issue. I would hate to see that happen to Lernu.

I no longer have a credit card or paypal, so donating is rather difficult, even though I think it very much worth it.

So how do they pay their hosting bills if people don't donate.

If they ever decide to shut down lernu because of cost, I hope they seriously consider letting me take over the domain.

Yes yes, I know that in this world everything has to be paid for and funding is not often forthcoming. However archive.org doesn't have to advertise or prostitute itself to Amazon and neither does Wikipedia. They have to press for donations though. True also that they have a wider user base and thus a better chance of securing donations.

I'd like to donate, but the options (international paypal and credit card transaction) prevent me. Perhaps I can get someone else to do it for me and give them the money.

One thing I'd hate to see is Lernu.net become Lernu Corp.

Vestitor:I'd like to donate, but the options (international paypal and credit card transaction) prevent me. Perhaps I can get someone else to do it for me and give them the money.

One thing I'd hate to see is Lernu.net become Lernu Corp.

I wish they had other options. I brought this up before but they said it is too difficult to cover all the possible payment options.

One thing that could increase donations is this:
There could be a link that says "Click here to send an Esperanto dictionary to a poor Esperantist in Vietnam". Then add a suggest donation to Lernu when they pay for that to help cover the cost.

But really, Amazon affiliate links will probably work well. But, I don't know.

Vestitor:Yes yes, I know that in this world everything has to be paid for and funding is not often forthcoming. However archive.org doesn't have to advertise or prostitute itself to Amazon and neither does Wikipedia. They have to press for donations though. True also that they have a wider user base and thus a better chance of securing donations.

I'd like to donate, but the options (international paypal and credit card transaction) prevent me. Perhaps I can get someone else to do it for me and give them the money.

One thing I'd hate to see is Lernu.net become Lernu Corp.

FYI bank transfer is an easy donation option within Europe. lernu uses a bank account in Slovakia. Also UEA account, if you are a member.

Aha! So I do have some options. All is not lost. A modest donation can indeed be given.

erinja:FYI bank transfer is an easy donation option within Europe. lernu uses a bank account in Slovakia. Also UEA account, if you are a member.

It is probably easy from anywhere in the world. Thanks for the tip.

Do you know how much it costs to run Lernu per year?

erinja:Also UEA account, if you are a member.

Could you refresh our memories on how to donate via UEA? (This info could be put in the panel asking for donations, if the text there were condensed a bit).

The main donation page has information on UEA account donations, and also an address for mailing checks (recommended only if you are in the US or Canada - checks from outside those countries can be cashed but it's not cheap). Write to teamo@lernu.net, or PM me to get the bank account information for a bank transfer. Bank transfer is only convenient within Europe, due to Europe's easy system of transferring between banks. If you are transferring from a bank outside Europe, international transfer fees usually run $15-$30, so the transfer fee may be greater than the value of your donation and it isn't worth it unless your donation is large.

Cost to run the site - it's not an easy question. Our advertising revenue is enough to cover the server. The bottom line is that the site can OPERATE on advertising revenue alone, in the sense that it can run and be online. But for site maintenance and keeping the site fully operational - updating the technology of the site as technology changes, repairing the database when errors happen, etc. - advertising doesn't come anywhere near covering that, we actually need the donations.

ESF put a lot of money into the site over the years as simple grant money, and a few years ago they gave a large sum of money which was more of an investment, and for which they hope to be paid back, so that they can give money to other worthy causes. We are working on the site reconstruction, paid for by this investment, as we also try to pay them back.

It's been slow going and it is taking frustratingly long, but it is impossible to program a new site quickly with a small group of people who have other day jobs, when money and time is also spent on keeping the old site operational (this site!). Things fail and things break and things stop working with no clear reason. Obviously it would be a non-starter to take everything totally offline for a year so we can focus full-time on the new site and forget about the old.

We have no choice but to redo the site, and it has to be reprogrammed and modernized from scratch, it is a complete mess in its code, the product of multiple programmers working on it over the years, not all of whom were experienced at programming. It's actually a miracle that anything works at all. The new site will look and feel much more like slovake.eu or deutsch.info.