Hi everyone,
I'd like to poll the collective minds of this group on something that I've been planning to do to help the Drupal community (and me).
I'm the maintainer of the adsense module with about 12K installs, and I'm now wrapping up the D8 port. Ever since Google introduced responsive ads, the ability to do revenue sharing is again a technical possibility, and I was planning to rewrite the respective module in the adsense package to take advantage of that.
Seeing that this module generates money to the site owner and to the content author, I was planning to introduce a very small revenue sharing percentage back to the Drupal community. This donation would be built into the base module of adsense, and not only the revenue sharing module. The plan is to make it generate ads with my Adsense publisher ID in 1% of the time that an ad gets displayed. I would then donate 50% of that to the Drupal core team on Gratipay (see note below).
The plan is to make this feature an opt-out, and to display this donation prominently in the following places:
* In the module page at http://drupal.org/project/adsense
* In the install process, a warning will be displayed saying that if the user wishes to opt-out he should change the setting.
* In the update process, I will create a hook_update_NNN that will clearly indicate that starting from that update, the module includes donations that the user can disable.
* In the status report for the site, the module will display a "REQUIREMENT_INFO" (blue backgroup) message stating that the donation is active.
The reason that it's an opt-out instead of an opt-in, is that I trust that most people are generous and lazy enough that they'll not turn off the 1% donation, but most of them will not specifically turn it on.
Please tell me what you think of this in the comments below, or in the poll I created in this group.
João Ventura
Note: I'm not sure how much I'll be tax liable for this if this becomes successful enough, so it may be that during the first year I'll donate only 25% back on Gratipay. I estimate that it it should still be enough to double or triple the current donations received by the core group. I'll keep the other 25% in reserve until the tax situation is clear, at which time I may be able to make a large one-time donation of all or part of that money.
Comments
Fair enough!
I'd say go for it! The fact that you include an opt-out in the module's options means I'm fine with it, I think it's fair since it is easy to turn off.
And you're right, people can be way more generous if we don't ask them to opt-in.
Thank you for maintaining this module, even if I don't use it, I do adsense revenue sharing by using the old adsense code which still works fine, but I can't use the new ad units.
I didn't know responsive ad units now change this situation, I'll look into it.
Why responsive changes this situation
Well, the reason why responsive changes is easily summarised in the following points:
Old code: to do revenue sharing you need:
New code, for each ad unit size that you want to support:
Responsive:
It's should be simple to understand that you can't really live with just 2-3 ad sizes forever, so you'd need your users to insert a slot ID for all the ad sizes that you might want to support in the future. With responsive, you don't have to guess, nor do you have to ask them for multiple slot IDs. Just one slot, and the adsense module will make sure that the ad is either truly responsive or it will create a fixed div to make sure that Google is able to place whatever ad sizes they want, without breaking your site's layout.
Gratipay team
I wrote this before the great Gratipay crisis that forced them to turn off donations to individuals, which seems to have also disabled the Drupal core team.
At the moment, the only avenue to directly support Drupal development that I know of is the Drupal 8 Accelerate fund. Now that we're getting closer to the Drupal 8 release date, this may disappear.
I'm not sure what could follow. Maybe have the 'Drupal adsense module users' sponsor some higher-level camps like the European Dev Days and Frontend United, or BADCamp? Clearly, one single place where I'm not forced to judge the merits of the donation would be preferable.