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

It turns out that in Russia a free Internet service is quite capable of existing on donations from loyal users. As the example of Diary.ru shows, this source can bring much more revenue 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 an extra month or two to live. 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 has expressed doubt that numerous users are able to donate a more or less significant amount, so one way out - the service will have to be closed.



Having published this letter, Eugene went on vacation to Africa, and on his return he was shocked by the number of remittances. In just a few days, he received 4567 transfers in the amount of 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 fill the budget voluntarily, 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's estimates, 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.



The businessman explained roughly what the donations would 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 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; we are earning money with this;
2. 22.91% of pages are shown without banners (these are views of paying users, 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 advertising, in the future you will always and in greater volume 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.