I need a bit of help and I know I can count on the AGSers.
I'm building a website in the hopes to form a community. Of course I'd like to be able to make enough money off of this site to cover the hosting costs and if I get some extra on top of that to pay for the time that I've spent making the site, so be it.
So, I'm trying to find as many sites of a similar nature to see what kind of business plan they have going on (subscription fees/ad revenue/donations/merchandising/corporate partnerships, etc). I'd like to learn from their mistakes and successes and use that knowledge to help form my own business plan.
The site that I am building is along the lines of Deviant Art (http://www.deviantart.com/) or Great Writing (http://www.greatwriting.co.uk/) where you create your own personalized page where you can showcase your creative or intellectual work, except that my site is aiming at a different creative target audience -- one that I believe is not represented properly on the web.
So if you know of any "post your {insert creative work type here}
on your own personalized page and recieve c&c from other members of the community" websites... post them here.
Thanks for your help.
Sites listed so far:
- Deviant Art (http://www.deviantart.com/)
- Great Writing (http://www.greatwriting.co.uk/)
- Elfwood (http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/) (currently down)
- Art Conspiracy (http://www.artconspiracy.com/) (also currently down)
www.elfwood.com is another good one. It's specifically for sci-fi/fantasy related artwork or stories, and has a lot of great tutorials as well.