Financial situation of the website (not very good)

I'll give you some background, I currently have a negative balance of just over 50 € on the website and affiliates have come to a screeching halt in the last year to the point that I have not received any money in the last 5 months. Affiliates used to feed mainly on Humble and Fanatical bundles, but these bundles have declined considerably in quality, they are repeated ad nauseam and they have also raised their prices in the last year. I am the first to admit that I have bought many fewer bundles this year and I fully understand the slowdown.

To make matters worse, web traffic continues to grow every month despite the fact that I have gradually implemented anti-bot measures since June. In January of this year the website generated traffic of 474.54 MB, in November and without finishing the month it is already at 1.86 GB. If I exceed 10 GB of traffic per month, it will cost me extra. It is true that it is still a long way off, but at the rate that traffic is going, it is reasonable that it will happen next year and I should take that into account.

As long as web traffic remains within the limit, I have everything paid until December 2025, but I find myself in the situation of how I am going to pay future bills for the website. Surely the first thing you will think about is putting up ads, but I didn't even consider it when I saw that Google Adsense pays a sad 30-50€ per month for about 20,000 unique visits (from humans). Data collectors are another option like the ones used by GG.deals and Isthereanydeal, but I don't think they are ethical to use, and if you use ad blockers, they will block them.

So I'm going to try a mixed solution between affiliates and Patreon, integrating the website with their API shouldn't be a problem and it would be enough if at least 4 users paid 3€ per month to cover costs and not worry about bills. Even so, it would take me some time to program the integration because I can't dedicate 8 hours a day to the website, so don't expect the benefits of paying me a few euros on Patreon to be ready tomorrow.

But with Patreon comes the dilemma of what incentives to offer premium users without scaring away the poor user. The first coding ideas I have in mind would be clean navigation without affiliates and to derive the rewards for visiting the website daily to them, so spend the pepecoins you have left now because when the games are over I will change the code for Patreon users and do a coin reset when I have it ready.

For now I have opened this page on Patreon, since I can't offer you any benefits for paying yet, I have put the code 604BC that should apply a 90% discount to the first tier:

https://www.patreon.com/pepeizqdeals

I will keep you informed gradually of the progress I make as I integrate it into the website with Patreon. And I am aware that a negative balance of 50 € may not seem like much, but I am concerned about the negative trend and frankly I would code much more calmly knowing that I do not have to put money into keeping this project alive.