Well, I'm beginning to wonder if I own this or not. I guess technically, I do, but the real work is done by all the volunteers.
JavaRanch is huge, so JavaRanch has lots of bills. I pay those bills. The money the comes in from amazon helps.
Currently JavaRanch has earned about one fifth of what it has cost, so it is still in the red. But! If I do nothing for a month, the income from the book sales at amazon does it exceed the day-to-day expenses. Naturally, there's lots of stuff that we want to do to expand the ranch and some of those things cost. Soon (probably Januaray), we'll upgrade the forum software. The upgrade is free, but to have it professionally installed so we have a minimum of down time will cost a few hundred bucks.
We're opening up a new section to the ranch this month that has already cost a few hundred dollars. More about that later.
A few weeks ago, our volunteers (mostly Bill Bozeman and Stephanie Grasson) set up the General Store which is nothing more than cheesy links to money grubbing companies that will kick a buck or two our way if you follow the link and spend money. Hopefully, this will help.
I have found out that if we get those really obnoxious banner ads, JavaRanch can make $20,000 a month! As much as that is some very serious money, I think I might even stop coming to the ranch just to avoid those banners.
We're trying to find some industry related banner sponsors, but no luck so far. JFind is doing a banner
exchange with us, so that doesn't really help our finances.
I think the ranch is very lucky to have such a great group of volunteers. Without them, this would be a very stagnant site!