New corporate sponsorship offer for tiddlywiki.com

#1

Somewhat related to the discussion in TiddlyWiki's OpenCollective Funds, I have been approached by an IT company with an arm that sponsors open source projects, enquiring about sponsoring TiddlyWiki. There’s some information about the programme here:

The company sells website monitoring services. I’d never heard of them, but they seem to have high profile customers and be well established. In their words, the offer is:

We could sponsor the home page, and from there have a text or logo mention (up to you). Perhaps at the bottom of the page or inside one of the items that gets revealed from the sidebar when it’s clicked like “Community” at the bottom and out of the way with a little note that says “TiddlyWiki is supported by Dotcom-Monitor, LoadView” etc.

If the home page, we could do $250 per mention per internal brand, and we have 4 internal brands that could donate, for $1k total.

We could also sponsor an internal page at a slightly lower amount, say $150 per internal brand, and we have 5 brands at that number ($750 total), perhaps spread across a couple internal pages like Tagging.html or Links.html.

Those figures are per annum. I think it’s a no brainer to accept their offer; whatever we end up deciding what to do with the sponsorship money, we will have more options with more money in the bank.

It is very, very common to see sponsorship sections fairly prominently on the websites of open source projects. It sends positive signals that people are willing to sponsor them.

Another benefit of adding one to tiddlywiki.com is that it would surely increase the chances of attracting further sponsorship. To that end, we could also add a heftier tier to our Open Collective that grants the opportunity to add a logo/link to the sponsorship section.

I think that doing this is another step on the road to establishing ourselves as a properly organised open source project. The offer gives us plenty of freedom, and amongst other things we need to discuss the details of how we’d present this new section. I’ve got some ideas, but I’d welcome the thoughts of others.

#2

I think sponsorships are absolutely fine for open source (rclone offers a good example), as long as they can be relevant to a good portion of TiddlyWiki users.

TiddlyWiki can run on websites and even act as a web server, so this sponsorship seems reasonable.

There would need to be some ground rules:

  • The ad should behave like a regular link would. That is, it can be just an image or link, but if you wanted to enhance it with JavaScript, it should still behave like a regular link on the web
  • The link may have a tracking parameter to show the user originated from tiddlywiki.com, but should not pass additional metadata beyond what the user’s browser provides
  • The sponsorship should be limited to tiddlywiki.com (and associated properties they may want to sponsor on), not the software itself.

As for where to place it, I don’t have many good ideas at the moment but I’d add “TiddlyWiki on the Web” as a candidate, partly because it currently lists Open Collective. I reckon that Tiddler should be re-thought in general to match the layout of the “Community” tiddler better, but that’s another story.

Doesn’t have to be that specific tiddler, but that may give a starting point to identify other locations on tiddlywiki.com and its default tiddlers.

1 Like
#3

Perhaps getting some other open source groups that have this relationship to tell us how they have found it, would be a good idea. Finding our own referees rather than accepting those they give us is wise.

Sponsorship drives advertising drives revenue. We should be cautious as these are sometimes misused or misleading, otherwise its a great idea.

#4

If there is sponsorship, will there also be tracking? Currently we don’t even have basic demographic information about visitors, because analytics have been removed.

Will they need cookies or other trackers, and will visitors now be presented with those cookie choice banners whenever they visit?