We wanted to thank everyone for their participation in the Water Polo Exchange message board.
When we started in April, we had no idea how quickly we would grow and we are now over 400 users. Also, during the recent NCAA Men’s championships we had our biggest day ever with over 17,000 views and we are averaging around 260,000 page views a month. We are hoping for more growth as the NCCA Women’s season starts next month.
As we grow, our hosting costs continue to increase. My fellow co-founders and moderators are all volunteers, so we are looking for donations to help with hosting fees.
I wanted to publicly thank everyone who has contributed to this. If traffic and costs remain consistent, we have enough funds to cover our costs until this summer.
The team and I are amazed by the generosity and will continue to improve the experience for our community.
Stay tuned for updates as we prepare more exciting things to share with all of you!
Is there room for ads? I am sure many on here own or run companies and would be glad to pitch in a couple hundred dollars to have a banner showing support for the water polo community with a link to their website. Similar to how Futures gets sponsors to cover the cost of the live streams. Does not have to be overly expensive but could cover the costs to sustain this key aspect of growing our sport.
Ads are definitely under consideration but we want to be thoughtful on how it appears on the page. One of the things that people seem to like about our board is that we put the content front-and-center. It’s important to us that we keep that focus.
At the risk of tipping our hand on workstreams that are a few weeks from being ready for public consumption, our initial efforts lean more torwards providing some token of value for contributions (think merch, fancy icons on profiles, other perks/services).
