Thank you for being transparent about it. I still wanted to voice my discomfort over the idea of monetization.

Covering costs of hosting the podcast? I'm okay with this; equipment and software can get expensive and paying for premium accounts for SoundCloud so that you can upload however many podcasts you want is reasonable.

Targeted ads? Okay. I can see the point in that, though I think we've been doing pretty well through word-of-mouth already.

I don't like the idea of using that money to pay "especially distinguished guests" to do AMAs/podcast interviews. How do you determine who is "distinguished" versus "especially distinguished"? How much would they get paid? Would previous guests resent the fact that they gave their time willingly only to see that new guests get paid? Would future guests be upset over the idea that they could be getting less money for doing AMAs versus their colleagues? If we're paying people to do AMAs/interviews, that sets up false expectations, I think, if it was known that the person was paid to be here with us.

Scholarships/grants - how would this work, exactly? I assume the mods will be judging who would be worthy, but okay. Who qualifies? Can a moderator apply for this grant? Would you be forming a non-profit organization for this?

Reimbursement for academic conference expenses - I'm okay with that, so long as it's limited to the costs of travel and hotel.

If you are keeping account of funds and their disbursement, will you make this available to the community as a whole, and not just the admins? You don't have to put names or anything, just a line describing what it was used for.

Is AskHistorians going to be creating an organization with regards to the money you'd be receiving? Would the mods have to file taxes, if we get enough money to start doling out grants and scholarships?

Sorry. I just have a lot of questions.

I didn't want to make the original post longer than necessary, but to add to this slightly -- some of our newer users may not know that we have sent groups of people from our community to conferences, specifically the American Historical Association and the National Council on Public History. You can find the announcement thread about the AHA conference here; the podcast of the presentation at the AHA here;; the follow-up thread from the AHA panel here; and information about the NCPH presentation here, if you'd like to know more about those conferences and who presented.

(To be fully transparent, Reddit (the company) paid half our expenses for the AHA, and agreed to let us crowd-fund the rest. The moderators paid their own way for NCPH. I’m presenting both as an example of the type of conference that was successful for us, and would like to be involved in in the future.)

Being in the civilised world (/s), I use Amazon.co.uk, not Amazon.com. Do you still get a portion of that revenue, and if not is there any way to ensure that you do?

Also: will you be able to use this feature to encourage more AMA participants to plug new books here?

Thanks.

This seems reasonable to me, especially if you're very transparent about the accounting.

Could I recommend moving the disclaimer about affiliate links to the top of the page rather than the bottom to be more transparent and obvious? I was actually going to recommend that you add a disclaimer like that because I didn't think there was one at first. The disclaimer could also potentially link to a thread like this or an accounting report, though that may not be totally necessary.

By "revamping" the books and resources do you mean adding more? Certain sections (Notably Southeast Asia and Medieval Africa) are fairly bare and it would be nice to have some quality sources put up. As a browser rather than a poster, these seem resonable to me. I will hopefully to use the amazon thing when I next buy books. I didn't know about the patreon and will chip in what I can if it helps keep this sub's quality high.

I like the use of affiliate links. It's a natural way to support the sub, provides a carrot to incentivize continued maintenance of the wiki and increase historical knowledge.

A scholarship or grant for an undergraduate student.

I'm by far the least sold on this. Everything else here seems to be justified as basically a reimbursement for time/fees or advertising the subreddit. Giving an individual/individuals in the community money for their personal use/study doesn't strike me as the same thing and is primed to create drama down the line. Any discussion of this idea needs to consider how it potentially impacts the askhistorians "game" as /u/vertexoflife at the AHA panel mentioned re: the AHA panel. The possibility that someone in the community will get a monetary reward because of their participation is clearly an additional game layer and one that I'm not fond of. It's a zero sum game played with money and neither of those strike me as fitting the community very well.

Contrast this with "flair" which is basically a statement that a user has meet a threshold of community engagement and historical knowledge. As a result in both flair application threads and meta/free-for-all threads people frame their pursuit of a flair through a self improvement lens. If the flair application process was more akin to a knockout tournament it wouldn't create the same sort of feedback loop.

It also prompts questions like

Who will get the money?

It's not going to be a mod, but who are the mods going to give it to? Why does /u/ win the game? Is it because mods are favoring or penalizing users for illegitimate reasons? Unlike questions over moderation, this rabbit hole can't be resolved by an individual simply evaluating what they feel is the "state of the sub" since it's not really about the sub's historical content.

I like the motivation behind this idea but I just don't think it's a good idea. I think that if you're going to spend money on the sub it should be framed in terms of the general good as opposed to rewarding a small number of specific individuals (e.g. The whole community benefits from bringing in interesting guests to interact with in subreddit AMAs).

I honestly don't see why anyone would have issues with this. You don't pay to be here. Patreon is completely voluntary. It doesn't affect any of the average users, if anything it will make it better. Now the Reddit admins, I could see them having some guidelines and caring about this. Which it sounds like you guys are following.

But us users, completely unreasonable to have problems with this. It isn't any of our business. You guys do all the work, and don't owe us a SINGLE THING. You guys do what you need to keep this awesome community going.

Though transparency is never a bad thing! So thanks for keeping us informed!!

•Targeted ads for the AskHistorians subreddit on sites which are 'in the field' such as H-Net, as well as general interest sites such as Facebook.

We've actually been treading water in terms of flair recruitment for about 2 years now, losing through attrition roughly the same number we gain from applications, so ways in which to attract more potential flairs is actually been a very long running discussion both for the mod team, and occasionally with the flair community as a whole. It is an approach that might not bear fruit, so to speak, but it is one that we have discussed exploring, and having funds to do it with instead of asking a mod to pay out of pocket would be useful if we test those waters.

Curious about this bit, have you done any research or looked into how best to target your intended audience? I imagine sites like Facebook cast a pretty wide net and AskHistorians will probably only have limited advertising capabilities at first. Secondly, are you looking into advertising through sites like The Ancient History Encyclopedia or even some of the more successful YouTube channels and Podcasts (that are not poison)?

We will keep an accounting of funds and their disbursement, which we will submit to the site admins if they ask.

Yes, some sort of brief accounting can be made available periodically, especially in the case where we end up using it for something high profile like the Grant/Scholarship idea.

One other thing to add, obviously we aim to be as transparent as we can in what the funds go to

This doesn’t sound very clear. You say you aim to be transparent but will open up “periodically”, or if “something high profile” happens, or if “site admins” ask. This is really undefined.

Why not just post a simple Profit & Loss statement and Balance Sheet annually, for example every February covering the preceding year? Then everyone will know what you are disclosing and when, and you won't need to worry about undefined events triggering undefined disclosures at undefined times.

For what it's worth as a reader and non-contributer, this method of monetization seems fairly unobtrusive.

I do agree that the affiliate disclaimer should be at the top of the page (or maybe a pop-up is possible? I'm clueless about css).

And in terms of transparency, would a periodic financial report be realistic? Something as simple as a spreadsheet with income vs expense, with a note concerning any deficits/surpluses.

the permission of the Reddit administrators

Is this permission limited to affiliate links or does it include other forms of revenue?

New reader of the sub reddit. I don't see a problem with it. Anything to help cover costs or help bring more people into answer/ask questions.

Two things:

2. Is there any way we can maintain the booklist so it looks like a bibliography, and have the reviews separate? I've worked to keep the New Zealand section nice and readable, and easy to use for people looking for resources, but the example page you linked is now cluttered with large reviews and seems to be a lot harder to work through quickly if you want to find sources. The excerpts don't appear to be part of the monetization so I'm hoping that's a flexible aspect of this.
3. Where do I collect my flair payslip?

I don't like the idea at all and it's something that would cause me to not participate anymore.

If people want to do a podcast and raise money for that, that's fine with me. They are creating the content, they are putting in the effort, it's theirs. But monetizing the sub is someone else making money off of the work of others, including myself. I create the content that I do because I care about it, not for my own financial gain and not for the gain of others. That the money is going to spent on "noble ideas" is irrelevant to me - it's my work and someone else is getting the benefit. No thanks.

I noticed the monetization in the book list and was happy to see the upfront post about it. Like wikipedia, I'm happy to support such a valuable resource