Great thoughts here, thanks everyone. I have to say I agree with everything you wrote, as impossible as that may sound, and thanks for the civilized discussion.
We will definitely limit colors for the wallpaper in the future, for all advertisers, as that's what the overwhelming majority has an issue with. Also I'll be stricter with the design language. Our wallpapers usually look great, because I keep nagging advertisers to fix even small things. This time I was slacking and thought "it's fine".
I've always hated "in your face ads", that's why we don't have any popups, autoplay videos or similar shit. I'm also working hard with advertisers to mostly show static ads, or with only minimal animation.
We have respect for your privacy, there's no tracking cookies, no external networks, we don't share any data (that's why no cookie notice either). We sell all our ads directly, which gives us more control, cuts out the middle-man and makes content more relevant to you. During COVID this has been making a huge difference for us. While ads on YT, FB, Google were just stopped with one click, we actually have good relations with advertisers, who kept their campaigns going, also because we are looking for long-term relationships, not just the quick buck. Business is better than ever, traffic and income almost doubled in one year.
Still, operating a site as big as TPU costs serious money, and people have to eat, too. (out of all the gazillion websites on the planet, only ~5000 are bigger than TPU
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/techpowerup.com)
On the topic of mining, yes I know it's controversial, you can see that even here in this thread. I believe that Nicehash is mining for the small guys, who already have gaming hardware and are just trying to make a buck, without messing around too much. I also had the thought that it could help some people make money to pay for their next GPU. Sure, there's big miners on Nicehash, too, I still don't think these guys are who steal the cards from us. Actually (at least for 2020, and I have no data on that), I don't think mining has been the big problem for these new launches. Supply was simply too low, and demand too high. Graphics cards (and GPU chips) are produced in batches, it's not constant production with daily output like in a car factory. So once your production run has ended, and you've sold the chips you have, it will take a long long time before you can get more from the foundry.
@Vya Domus made a great point that Nicehash could be the gateway drug into mining because it lowers the barrier of entry, I didn't think of that, possibly true.
@Vayra86 Patreon is absolutely not required, it's something purely optional for you to express support for TPU and get something in return. The income from Patreon is not even 1% of our total, financially it's a waste of time, yet I keep it going, because I feel like the benefits are interesting for the hardcore TPUers, and the coding is already part of the site engine anyway (coding time I invested is still bigger than the combined income of all Patreon so far). Just one wallpaper will bring in more in one 48h run than all Patreon for multiple years.
Personally I don't mine, my electricity costs 30 eurocents per kWh. Like many I think it's a waste of energy, but it's not my place to tell you what to do with your hardware or money. I also don't invest in Bitcoin or similar, it's more of a gamble than proper investing (imo)
@ZenZimZaliben
@Dragokar once again, I'm sorry for the warning that you got for posting in the technical issues thread. technically the mods were correct for enforcing "on topic", that's why I moved all the discussion to this thread and removed your warnings
@ThrashZone dont bother "clicking the ad just to support us", nearly all of our advertising is CPM, so paid by the impression/view, not by the click or signup action. Of course, if something interests you, click it, we do measure banner performance, and it's useful feedback to our advertisers too (all data is anonymized)
@yotano211 Our wallpapers run for 48 hours, efficiency goes down anyway after a while
