Bob Schroeck Wrote:The thing is, ATT is doing just fine without a corporate leash advertising revenue -- occasional downtime excluded -- so the only reason I can imagine that TVT is so hot for a revenue stream is that someone is lining their pockets with it somewhere, and doesn't want to lose his cash cow. Otherwise, I don't see how a cut in funding could really hurt them.
As for a tipping point... ATT is getting several new members a day these days, and a fair number of the ones who bother to make a user page say things along the lines of "I used hang out at TV Tropes until..." followed by their censorship incident of choice. As for the ones who stay there, well, as I said to the troper who emailed me, it's a foregone conclusion that TV Tropes is going to censor itself down to a site for kindergarteners sooner or later. If it's not the censorship itself that'll drive the serious folks away, it'll be the inability to have an unbannable discussion about anything more grown-up or controversial than the Teletubbies.
Anything that might have been an issue in the past was handled amicably and Wikia has generally been about as chill as Orain regarding what content can be presented.
As for TVT getting "The Nunnery" removed, not surprised at all. As Bob said, once you start approving of censorship (at least past what you are obligated to do legally) , you only invite more.
As for the effect that had on their advertising, again, no surprise. Despite it's obstensible status as a nonprofit, TV Tropes seems to be using advertisement money to generate an income stream, and every time Google has ever complained, steps were taken to preserve that income. Disk space and bandwidth are really cheap these days, and as I've learned via the Orain staff, it costs them not very much to support a wikifarm service without ads, and as long as you log into the Wikia version 99.99% of all the ads vanish anyway.
In short, I don't believe the ads are so much essential to the site funding as they are providing a revenue stream to the owner of TV Tropes, and since we don't have the same to be said for us or Wikia (the latter picks up the tab and is pretty chill about our content standards), that means we don't have to worry about profits clouding our objectivity and integrity, which I wanted to be the case from day one.