Well, all the Russian locomotives we had data for are entered, and we're busily cleaning up the data. A number of new things are planned for the site over the next month, but I'll address those later.

The reason for this posting is to let you (those who visit the site) all know that we will be adding a 'Donate' button to the front page of the website. It is costing me about $40.00/month for the site (bandwidth and storage charges) and given our family's current situation, I really cannot afford this. I hope that the Donate button will help to defray those costs (and allow me to add other things). We're NOT a non-profit, and any donations are NOT tax deductible, but any donations will be used to help defray the cost of running and adding to the site.

The button should be present about 8 p.m. Central Daylight Time. Thanks for any support you may be able to offer.

Thanks,
Doug

Have you considered running Google Ads on the site? They don't have to be obnoxious with pop-ups and flashing banners. You can use simple graphic and text based ads.

For an example, check out this page:
http://www.railroadforums.com/forum/

You wouldn't need as many ads as I run, I get a ton of traffic and thus my bandwidth and hosting fees are significantly higher than yours (to the tune of 10x)

We did run Google ads for a bit more than 2 years. Our traffic levels at that time were about 60,000 visits per month and about 16,000 unique visitors per month. In two years we earned $78.44 from the ads, and received 178 emails complaining of the ads.

I may yet resort to the ads again. I have a much thicker skin than when I first ran the ads, and could probably handle all the complaints.

If somebody complains about the ads, simply respond with a link to the Donate page.

At one time I considered plastering obnoxious ads all over the site, and suppressing them for people who bought a "membership". Then I thought about trainorders and got a bit queasy and decided that was not maybe an idea I could live with.

I wouldn't suggest a "membership wall" a la Trainorders isn't a good one in my opinion. Neither is Railpictures.net "blast folks with popups, pop-unders and generally annoy the heck out of them approach.

With 16k uniques per month, you should have been earning a lot more. Either the stats are off or something is wrong, since you should have easily done better than that if you have that kind of traffic.

As for people who whine about ads? If they're done in a "polite" way, they don't really have a reason to complain. As others have suggested, tell them to donate or subscribe if they don't want ads. Heck I pay for Trains Magazine, and last time I checked it had ads...

Another option is to ask a larger web site to take it under its wing. Maybe Trains, Trainorders, or Railroad.net would host it. You could work a deal where you retain the ownership of the content, but they host the data. They win because they get the increased web presence, and you win as you no longer have to host/manage the site.

I set up a deal for my employer to host a private collection of historical topographic maps. This has worked out well for everyone. (Alas, they would not be interested in hosting steamlocomotive.info, however.)

Unfortunately steamlocomotive.info has some relatively special hosting needs: Coldfusion 9.0 or later, SQL Server 2008 and a few other minor requirements. The hosting company where steamlocomotive.info now resides is doing a fine job.

Regards,
Doug

The stats were accurate, unfortunately. I'm not sure why clickthroughs were so low. Google Ads did an incredibly lousy job of selecting ads to show on the site. Some of them were downright offensive.