Ghost Recon.net

Introduction

The extraordinary success and growth of Ghost Recon.net has never failed to amaze me. From a few hundred visitors each week in the build up to Ghost Recon's release, to the many thousands of visitors that come here every single day now. And the growth took only a few months.

While that's great in itself, it carries with it a financial burden. Hosting an extremely popular and busy website like this is costly. How busy are we? We are busier than some pretty major sites, infact our current host was so surprised that he remarked we were the "busiest non-porn site" he had ever seen.

The Net Economy

Many sites are finding that it is an impossible balancing act to fund a busy website, there is no easy way to create income from a site to cover the monthly costs.

The list of sites shutting down due to this imbalance grows by the month. From busy OFP fan sites to hugely popular games news sites like Stomped, and even massive portals like Excite, sites are dropping like flies, or taking drastic steps to keep afloat.

Options

Options can include making sites, or parts of sites, subscription access only, or bombarding visitors with pop-up windows, or using a voluntary "honour payment" system. Subscription fees, or pop up windows are the very last thing I would invoke.

How much?

Because of some valuable associations I have secured, and the way this site is organised, we have managed to keep costs far below some other sites, who do not get anywhere near our number of visitors. However, I meet our costs fully out of my own pocket, and always have done. For a family man with other responsibilities this is a situation that cannot carry on.

How You Can Contribute

Since we launched, our frequency of news postings, exclusive news and unique articles have made us a prime resource for Ghost Recon news, but to keep it up we need your help. If you visit us regularly, if you find our exclusive content valuable, enjoyable, or even entertaining, help us to stay afloat.

You can contribute by using our affiliate links. Every sale made at Amazon from this site earns us a small commission. If you shop at Amazon, try to start your shopping spree from any Amazon link on this site - any purchase will go some way to helping our cause. We recently started showing banner adverts, only one on selected pages. If you see an ad that may interest you, please visit the sponsor . Note though that multiple clicks do not count, if you want to help, click once a visit, or once a week, thanks.

Conclusion

Hopefully the new adverts and Amazon links will go some way toward reducing the site running costs. If this does not pan out, we have other options to try, as listed earlier.

Remember this is a necessary step towards keeping GhostRecon.net on-line. The 40+ hours a week I personally spend on this site I give freely, as is the time given by the rest of the staff, but the financial burden is now too great. To stay on-line I must now be pro-active and take steps to ensure it does not become a victim of its own success.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Rocky