When NationalZero went online last year, we wanted to build a community of people who could enjoy reading and commenting on politics and news without having a crapload of “opinion” pieces from lobbyists or ego columns.  We did that, we think, and we’ve only gotten larger through the growth of our readership, particularly with the people who left Mediaite.

We’re experiencing growing pains, though.  Our bandwidth use has exploded, and the costs of keeping the site running continue to grow as the number of page views goes up.  We don’t want to put NatZero behind a paywall, but we have to raise revenue because the PayPal donations aren’t cutting it.

So we’ve come up with a new way to generate revenue:  starting at 8 p.m. ET today (Thursday), we’re implementing a pay-per-comment system through disqus.  After you use three free daily comments, you’ll be charged 10¢ for each comment after.  You’ll have to link a PayPal account to your disqus account and each approve the charge for each comment, which will come out of your PayPal account ($5 minimum deposit).  

We’ll also have a “swear jar” fee:  any comment with “shit” “fuck” “twat” “cunt” or any variation of the words including with $ instead of “s” will have a 3¢ charge, and gifs and video clips will have a 15¢ fee.  

Hopefully, this will also cut down on the troll accounts who plaster the boards with crap.  The pay-per-comment charges will be in place while we develop other revenue streams–like advertising, a NatZero shop, and sponsored content–or until disqus crashes, whichever comes first.  

Again, we love our commenters and we hope you’ll continue to support us.