One of the things that has always bothered me about searchcode.com was that it never generated any money. Not a huge problem in itself as a side project, but the costs to run it are not insignificant due to the server requirements. I had looked into soliciting donations but I considered this highly unlikely to produce enough revenue to cover costs considering that sites such as gwern.net was unable to make enough to cover even basic costs through patreon (although since a recent HN post this has jumped from around $20 a month to over $150).
This had caused me back in the early days to use buysellad’s to attempt to cover some costs. While this certainly helped there was usually not enough revenue due to the way the ads are sold. The issue with buysellads is that you have to pitch your website as a good place to sell ads against. This is not something I had any great desire to do. Simply put if I am going to spend my time marketing something its going to be something that is more directly marketable then an advertising funded website. The other issue is that buysellads does not work with HTTPS which became a deal breaker for myself once Google announced that they were going to use it as a signal for ranking.
This lead me to just a few months ago considering shutting down the site. However while doing some poking around I noticed a newish advertising platform called Carbonads. Invite only I decided to email them with my pitch. Being a developer/designer focused ad platform it seemed like a natural fit. After a bit of back and forth I can now happily say that searchcode.com is running carbonad’s. I have no numbers to report at this time but I am very hopeful based on some estimates made with carbon ads that I should be able to push searchcode to cover costs and hopefully produce some profit, all of which will be used to improve the service.