You're out of cash, and your glorious Web site--your pride and joy, the last bastion of intelligent thought on the Web--is tapped. You spent your last drachma on design and hosting fees, you have a voracious and engaged pack of readers howling for more, and your money is evaporating faster than spilled acetone. How will you survive?

If you're Slashdot, you guiltily announce your intentions to start allowing larger banner ads, and you follow that up with an apologetic introduction of a subscription service that lets furious readers opt out of receiving the ads--for a price. You do this with sorrow in your heart, and your readers beat the drums of outrage in your in-box. After all, ads represent the bitter pill that all growing, popular, content-filled Web sites must eventually choke down.

Unless you're Kuro5hin, that is.

How to say no to ads
Rusty Foster, founder of the three-year-old dot-org dedicated to "technology and culture," announced this week that he would turn K5, as Kuro5hin is known, into a nonprofit organization. In fact, he plans to form an endowment to help similar Web sites. Turning K5 into a self-sustaining nonprofit is a lofty, altruistic goal that involves a lot of time and paperwork, but it's also an intriguing, left-of-center solution to a common problem: cash-strapped Web sites.

"I don't like to make decisions on my own," he says. "I generally do end up making a decision, but I try to ask everybody first."

Rusty posted a letter on Kuro5hin last Monday, announcing that the company, because of a combination of all-too-familiar circumstances, was out of money. He wrote a remarkably incisive essay about the politics of running a Web site or company devoted to presenting content, and he weighed his options. He could, he said, get a job; sell K5, the company he's built; cajole more readers into buying paid memberships; or "sell you to advertisers."

"I was frustrated with the situation as a whole, the feeling that the way we were was untenable," he told me. "I didn't see a way for it to be self-supporting. I couldn't figure out how to make it work the way it was."

Readers to the rescue
Concerned K5 contributors turned to PayPal in droves, sending $10,000 in just 24 hours, Rusty says. They also suggested alternatives, and the nonprofit idea was among them. Thus, a plan was born. Rusty launched a weeklong fund-raiser to raise money for the site's $70,000 operating budget for next year, then decided to end it early and shoot for half that amount, saying that he wanted to end on a high note and get right to work. He easily succeeded.

Rusty says he hopes that someday, once the newly nonprofit K5 is up and running, he can hold a capital drive to raise money for a planned endowment, then help out other community-based sites that simply don't, as he says, "fit into the media economy."

Will it work? Who can say? Rusty admits that a major element of the nonprofit plan is turning over control to someone else. After all, his board of directors may not choose him to run the operation--an unlikely bet, I think. "Basically, one idea is that there will be an organization that can outlive me," Rusty says. "I may not always be the guy in charge, but I want there to be something there to take over. A succession plan."

Whether or not K5 succeeds, Rusty's succession plan may be to boost the next community-based Web site trying to break the mold and survive with high-quality offerings. You can bet that a legion of cash-strapped community Web sites will be watching his every move. (Thank goodness he plans to post articles detailing the nonprofit application process.) Here's hoping his plan leads to a Web-wide public-ownership model.