Diary.ru users donated to the site to save their diaries.

It turns out that in Russia, a free Internet service is fully capable of existing on donations from loyal users. As the example of Diary.ru shows, this source can bring much more income than banner ads.

On October 30, 2017, the owner of the diaries service, Evgeny Rudenko (pictured), published a farewell post on his blog: “C'est la vie, friends. Most likely, it was our last autumn. Almost no chances for the next one. Dear-beloved Natasha Autumn was with us the administrator for almost 15 years, but knowing about the life of the site from the inside, she voluntarily left the admins and refused to pay to give Dayry another extra month or two. For more than her salary is not enough, because the gap between income and expenditure for almost a year is constantly growing. "

Eugene explained that he was sorely lacking money. All employees receive pennies, since 2010 salaries have only decreased. There is no money, and the owner of the service expressed doubt that numerous users are able to donate a more or less significant amount, so one way out - the service will have to close.

Having published this letter, Eugene went on vacation to Africa, and on his return he was shocked by the number of remittances. Over the course of a few days, he received 4567 transfers worth 1 million 741 thousand 845 rubles .

Now the service takes about 480 thousand rubles. per month, as a result of optimization, you can reduce them to 400 thousand rubles. In order for the service to continue to exist, users will have to continue to voluntarily fill the budget, wrote Rudenko: “I don’t know yet how much - 1/2, 2/3 or 3/4, provided that we earn the rest from advertising and domestic sales.” According to the owner, the guaranteed lifetime of the site is now extended until the end of 2018, and over the next year, as new money is received from the owners of the diaries, life can be increased.

Businessman roughly explainedwhat the donations will be spent on. First of all, this is an HDD upgrade. Now, 13 11-year-old servers have 4 TB of disk drives that “breathe their last.” For normal storage, it was decided to buy 4 disks of 8 TB (16 TB in RAID) plus the same backup. Total 8 server disks of 25 thousand rubles. will cost about 200 thousand rubles.

In this story, interesting figures for income from banner advertising, which he called Evgeny Rudenko. It turns out that with the help of banners it is almost impossible to earn the amount that we managed to collect by donations. So, in October, the number of ad impressions was increased, but it was possible to collect a total of 240 thousand rubles. At the same time, Eugene writes, the number of users who use banner cutters has grown.

The result of saturation of the site with advertising is:

Advertising revenue in October is 20-30 percent higher than September (I’ll not say for sure now). As for the number of pages with advertising, the picture is as follows:

1. 36.23% of the pages are shown with banners, and we make money on it;
2. 22.91% of pages are shown without banners (these are views of users paying, disabled javascript, etc.);
3. 40.87% on these pages banners are cut out by AdBlock and other cutters.

“You understand that by depriving us of the opportunity to earn money on displaying ads, in the future you will always and in larger amounts have to periodically throw off the content of the site,” Rudenko honestly warned.

The project Diary.ru opened in 2002. In 2007, DST Advisors, later renamed Mail.ru Group, acquired a 50% stake. At the end of 2016, Yevgeny Rudenko bought out this share.