Talking Money

This is ridiculous. I hadn't realised this until it came to the crunch, but I have a complete aversion to discussing monetary figures. I may have to ask someone else to write the sanitised (and more detailed) version of this for the Smashwords Tools blog.

The issue is the referral links on the Smashwords widgets. It's actually causing a few disagreements on the team, and some users wanting to know why they can't add their own - with varying degrees of politeness.

The hard truth: 500Mbs of bandwidth per day costs money.

While the developers are volunteers and donate dev time, and the processing power and server space are provided by a publisher, the bandwidth is an ongoing cost. And the tools aren't even out of beta yet.

Since we want the widgets to be free to use, we can a) put an ad on the website (which doesn't cover the costs) b) ask for donations (creating legal and tax issues) or c) add a referral link. At least with a referral link a user only contributes when the widget actually gains them a sale.

The worst current offender is the store - which doesn't take a referral link - but some of the widgets in the pipeline are larger (and fortunately faster). They are going to have to have hardcoded referral links, because otherwise the hosting cost will be prohibitive.

Oh well, away from these depressing thoughts and back to work on a search box for users who have webhosts who only take basic HTML - links and images only. I love a challenge.