Comment by Androider | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Androider | Hacker News Reader

Look at https://webpack.js.org/ and https://github.com/webpack/webpack

See all the company logos? Webpack is great for sure, but why does it attract so many sponsors? There's loads of other great projects not receiving a dime despite having Patreon pages or whatever.

It's the logos (and links) themselves! Because by putting my logo on your Github and project page, I can both mentally and practically claim it as a marketing expense. Marketing being an established bucket of money you can use for things that increase your company's visibility.

But if you simply offer a donation system, or feel-good sponsorship, how would I even classify that? Sounds complicated from a business point of view. Even a support contract is a harder sell than just pure marketing.

Heck, if I know my customers are using projects X and Y, I'm willing to pay just to put my logo in front of those users even if we as a company are not using X and Y ourselves! And by payment, I don't mean a $50 one-time donation, companies are willing to pay $X00-$X0000 per month for that kind of targeted exposure. And if you do this for your project, please note that companies value direct links to their chosen landing page much more than to some generic "sponsorship aggregator" page for the company.

> but why does it attract so many sponsors?

Sean Larkin busts his ass to advocate for companies supporting the development of webpack.

Are we seeing the same page? The sponsor page hardly lists anybody noteworthy and nobody is going to click through those links. It's wasted marketing money (developers are the worst segment you can try to sell to).

I think it is pure imagination to think marketers throw 100k for this.

Also thinking of funding opensource as a marketing fund is really not the right approach. The companies are then coming to you for the wrong reasons.

Webpack sponsors: Capital One ($12K), ag-Grid ($7.5K since March), Hubspot and Rollbar. Those are some great names, with Webpack offering some not that great logo placement and linkage.

The StdLib logo on http://vuejs.org/v2/api is $2k/month. It's probably under-priced, and entirely unnecessarily limited to a single sponsor.

For a comparison: it costs $2K+ to get a one-time ad entry into a weekly developer newsletter like JavaScript Weekly (http://javascriptweekly.com/). And JS Weekly has a much smaller audience than most prime open source project pages.

Wow, I'm really surprised at the $2k/month figure for a logo on the Vue API page. How do you go about finding sponsors for such a page? Or is it a case of being visible and lucky enough for sponsors to come to you?

> The sponsor page hardly lists anybody noteworthy and nobody is going to click through those links.

Uhhh... Please tell me you're joking?

There is a lot of developer targeted companies in the sponsors list for Webpack.

I can understand your point. But here is our belief at webpack: The community owns us, sponsors and backers are our shareholders, yet at the same time, they are all candidates to expense and fund the time they sacrifice contributing to our community. Until Sokra (Tobias Koppers), went full time (thanks to our continued growth in support) we have expensed more of this sponsor and backers funds to our external contributers than to ourselves as the core team.

Our community is growing so rapidly that there is no reason why any person shouldn't be able to receive the same recognition and appreciation for their work, than we should as a core team.

I have been in charge of finding sponsors, backers, and partners for our organization and I always focus on this first: don't for funds but instead relationships, opportunities, and ways we can use their contributions (whether it is man hours or funds), as a vessel to mutually benefit those individuals through increased learning, mentorship, marketing value, support, and more.

An example of this would be our application to the MOSS Grant board to support an initiative dear to Mozilla to add first-class module support for WebAssembly. This not only allows us to potentially be awarded over 100k in funding, but also helping Mozilla support their initiatives, and finally, putting a feature such as WebAssembly in the hands of Developers in an accessible and pragmatic way.

As a project when you focus on money and who is sponsoring your project, you lose sight of the true beauty of open source.

In the end the only thing that matters to us is that you give a shit about our mission and want to find any way to give back to the organization, contributors, and users.

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