Confessions Of The Professions Mandatory Fee Requirement
June 25, 2018 — With a recent post marking our acknowledgement of 2,000 confessions, and over a million words published on this website, we really cannot thank our contributors enough for submitting great articles and topics about their jobs, careers, and workplaces. From everyday rants to professional articles to really informative and awesome infographics. Confessions of the Professions began in 2013 and started out just accepting rants about bosses and co-workers but has since evolved to be a knowledgeable source of information about jobs, careers, and the workplace. We honestly cannot thank you enough for helping to keep this website going.
When we first began Confessions of the Professions, the time commitment was welcomed, but many hours were spent perfecting and personalizing every article and ensuring its uniqueness for better quality SEO and engagement. It became a full-time job to ensure the website was running perfectly with very little downtime. We feel that having mostly quality articles and less #fakenews was going to prevail over everything else. No matter what, no matter what trends we faced, we were going to come out on top. We may not always be #1 in a search engine, but eventually, everyone usually comes across at least one article that stands out and keeps them coming back.
As we progressed, so did the server demands of bandwidth and the ability to handle the traffic load. With a slower server, we were losing visitors. Since we have moved to a more powerful and faster server, our visitors are now increasing once again. Currently, we receive around 300-500 visitors a day and in our peak times, we can receive up to 1,000 visitors. Confessions of the Professions has been visited over 3 million times.
Our greatest viewing day was 10,000 visitors in a single day. This was definitely not to be taken for granted, as the first visitors happened to be — my mother and my girlfriend who is now my wife — both whom supported my vision to keep it going. Thousands of hours have gone into making this website possible. Very little money has been accepted for any articles save for a few sponsored articles and donations.
We asked for donations and even put a button up top for people to donate, but very little has actually been donated. We tried selling Confessions of the Professions pens and other merchandise, but not much has happened. The money this website has brought in has mostly been made from the ads within the articles and the text ads up top, but the ad revenue is very mixed, and up until now, it has been enough to support a small VPS.
Since we have moved to a dedicated server, the pricing has gone up to keep everything running. While we have tried to keep our ads unobtrusive — with very little annoyances to not have popup ads or ads that require you to actually “opt out” and click the X, we have stuck to ads that are intertwined with our articles. A few ads appear up top and then several are snuggled conservatively between few paragraphs within the article.
We have tried to figure out other ways to monetize because as the site has grown, with over 2,000 posts, including offloading all of our images and infographics to DreamObjects CDN. We were on Shared Hosting for just a few months before we moved to DreamPress. DreamPress worked very well for almost 2 years, but there were limitations on what we could do in regards to enhancements on the server itself, which caused the website to slow or go down randomly at times and we had to wait for support to help get it back up.
We then moved to our own private VPS on Vultr for over a year, but soon began to realize how slow things were and the backend was just a miserable place to be for a long time. Doing anything was always with hesitation, for the “server errors” may come. Finally, we upgraded to a Dedicated Bare Metal Server with enhancements made possible by WP Bubble. Since this move, the website has been faster and has experienced no downtime at all. This all comes with a higher cost that cannot possibly be sustained by ad revenue alone.
While we will not be taking down the website or stopping it even if there is no demand for anymore articles, we must give this method a try. We are not asking for a lot of money. We are asking for a small fee to help publish your articles and keep hosting them on our website. Therefore, starting on July 1, 2018, we will be charging for submission & publication on Confessions of the Professions.
We understand this may cause us to lose our contributors and we’re willing to take that chance because if we continue on the free model, ultimately all of us will lose everything on Confessions of the Professions. This small fee will cover the cost of the server every month. This is not to punish any of our contributors or future marketing companies, but free does not pay the bills and relying on charity — we have only ever received a very small amount in actual donations over the course of the 5 years of our existence.
We understand there are other free sources out there that you can publish on, but this website can no longer sustain itself with the current free model we have stuck with for so long. Between time and money, this is a website that demands server resources and we have tried to exist without any financial help at all. We really appreciate any financial help from our contributors. Contributing to the Resources page will still be free.
Confessions of the Professions has always been labeled The People’s Website. While I — Matthew Gates — have attempted to support and maintain this website personally for as long as I could, I am asking you for help. Several contributors have been helping to support this website by purchasing sponsored text ad links, which cost money, located on the top of every page and the home page.
We feel that we have built enough community in the past 5 years that hopefully a few of your businesses out there, who wish to contribute and keep this website going, will help continue to support it by submitting articles along with a mandatory $5.00 – $10.00. We are not asking for a lot! Of all of your budget, we do not want to be something that breaks your bank, but we feel that asking for $5.00 – $10.00 can go along way for you and us. We just need some help maintaining the hosting costs! Pricing subject to change at our discretion.
We definitely understand that you are providing free content, but this is a last resort for keeping Confessions of the Professions running in order to continue to be a source for understanding jobs, careers, and the workplace. It can no longer be sustained on Shared Hosting, VPS, or a Cloud server. We held off for as long as possible, but unfortunately, it is affecting traffic in a very negative way, which is not fair to you, our contributors.
From now on, you must click the link up top to submit your article. You can include your article as a message or upload it as a document. Along with the submission of your article, Paypal will be used as the method of payment. While we do reserve the right to publish any articles we choose — payment or not — until payment is received, your article will not receive priority. In other words, paying for a submission is a guaranteed publication within the week. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us.
After July 1, 2018, we will only be accepting new submissions via the website. Any emails will be met with auto-reply unless absolutely necessary for us to respond.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for supporting our website. We look forward to seeing your articles and infographics!
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