ermac

Hello all, this is a combo introduction / question thread.

So, about 2 years back I inherited a niche fetish website, bbw-chan.nl.
It's a fairly standard chan-clone with a focus on, of course, bbw / weight gain.
In the past, it had a pretty standard community. Amateurs posted themselves, discussion was just as frequent as content, and some original creators posted stuff in the bbwdraw section. And all was well. The last admin tried to monetize via scummy popunders / popups / etc, but never really made a dime. After awhile, he essentially gave up and that's where I came in. The mods basically handed me the site and said please save it.

I think I've done pretty well. We're in the top 10,000 sites in the US, we have a good amount of traffic for a site our size. The problem is, the culture has changed. One of the first moves I made was to move to a DMCA-immune host so that Do-Not-Post lists and DMCA notices were a thing of a past. This was a double edged sword. While the userbase and interaction soared after the change, it also changed the culture. Original content producers left, and users essentially made the site the pirate bay of fatty porn. Content flows freely, but this also introduces a problem.

I pay for the site anonymously via bitcoin. I've never once exposed my personal information to any part of the hosting process. We've taken donations via bitcoin in the past before, but it was never steady enough to even pay the bills.

So we come to an impass. WTF do I do with this site? If i institute DMCA again so I comply with US law and can take traditional payments from traditional advertisers, user participation will plummet. If I stay DMCA-free, I can only ever accept donations.

Do I just give up like the last guy? Any ideas? I'm not looking to make a profit, I just want the site to sustain itself and make back the $120/month it costs, which I know it can do based on the traffic we get.