esctoday.com has launched our own shop and mall. In the shop, you will find over 750 Eurovision Song Contest related cds, dvds, books and more. The mall will enable readers to make their online purchases via esctoday.com, allowing the site to raise revenue to cover our costs of keeping the site online and for much needed development of the website and the server.
From today, you can visit the esctoday.com shop and mall on the following link: www.esctoday.com/shop or via the 'shop' button at the top of the website. You can also visit some of the important pages on these links:
esctoday.com remains a neutral website run by fans for fans. We have a policy of never charging readers for our services and do not require people to register in order to access our news. We do not accept payments or donations from any participating party in the Eurovision Song Contest, including broadcasters, participants, record companies, management companies or anyone else. Any free materials offered to esctoday.com are passed on to our readers through competitions. We do not currently have a site sponsor and the site is funded by reader donations, financial donations from team members, advertising through google and a small number of affiliate schemes.
We apologised for the site being unavailable for much of the 48 hours after this year's Eurovision Song Contest, and we are trying to avoid similar problems in 2008. This means that we need to urgently raise money to purchase new servers and put in place temporary measures to avoid the site crashing when too many visitors come here at once.
THE ESCTODAY.COM SHOP
The esctoday.com shop will showcase as many Eurovision Song Contest related products as we can. We hope that readers will purchase cds, dvds books and official merchandise, allowing the artists and record companies involved to reap the rewards that they deserve. Remember that they put a lot of time and effort into participating in national finals and the Euroision Song Contest and deserve to be rewarded. Without them, we would not have a competition to watch and many readers and people working on the hundreds of fan sites would lose one of their highlights of the year.
THE ESCTODAY.COM MALL
The esctoday.com mall is a place where you can find many reputable companies to make online purchases with. Shopping via our affiliate partners will enable us to raise money to cover the costs of the website and add some exciting new features for readers and members over the upcoming months.
Affiliate schemes allow readers to make purchases from links on esctoday.com at the same cost that they would find by going to the affiliate sites directly. By making a purchase through an esctoday.com link, the website earns a small amount of commission which goes towards the running costs of the site and will help us meet development and investment costs to improve the site for all readers. Without the introduction of these schemes, we could not remain online.
HELP US DEVELOP THE SHOP AND MALL AREAS
If you make online purchases, we ask that you visit the esctoday.com mall and see if your favourite stores are listed. If they are not, you can email [email protected] and we will see if we can add them to our list of affiliate partners.
This initiative has taken several months to set up and will be added to. We are also looking to add more companies from around Europe, making it easier for Eurovision Song Contest fans to shop internationally and make legal purchases of related products, helping to support artists that have given their time and effort to the competition.
