Today I noticed that the CouchSurfing 2008 finances have been updated for the whole year. I whipped up a graph to show where the money goes.
Employee related expenses account for 62.8% of total expenses. In that figure I’ve included salaries, tax, payroll fees, rent, travel, food, and staff development. Admin expenses includes anything not in hosting / verification. Hosting is server costs plus telephone / communication. I suspect most of the telephone / communication expenses belong in Employees, but I left it there to be on the safe side. Finally, verification, the source of 99% of the income, costs only 6% of total expenses. I included printing and mailing in the verification cost.
The numbers are:
Employees: $405’440.59
Admin Expenses: $116’901.33
Hosting costs: $86’723.33
Verification: $36’589.83
It costs more than $400k to staff CS Inc with how many employees? Five? That would be a cost of $80k per person per year.
Hopefully this helps to understand where the money goes.
Have you heard of their Collective model? They currently have around 25 people putting full-time effort into this project through it and that’s what that $405k goes into, making the average $16k or so invested in each person running the site instead of the $80k you are hyping through your bullshit propaganda.
Grow up, kid. You may not like how they do things but you don’t need to blatantly lie to people in order for them to hate CouchSurfing along with you.
ha!
sure 126,495.56
sure 89,820.27
sure 37,684.68
sure 12,136.88
sure 117,580.57
keep on kidding yourself, first of all we see the awesome efforts of permanent downtime day by day.
second, take a look at the numbers above, learn about the people that are only interested to organize and administrate their private orgys and then try to think about something sensefull to post here.
everyone
CS exists as kind of a cosmic favor bank: you pay in and you withdraw, but not reciprocally…which hopefully increases our understanding of human altruism (why?…because) and true desire to tip the scales for good in the world. and yeah: I don’t trust the business sense of the CS leadership either, not because they’re bad people, but because they have no experience with this…so I keep an eye on them…but I would never disrespect them, or any other person.
Try to communicate respectfully with Callum and the Blehs, and anyone else who posts under a pseudonym, because they are here, present, human, and communicating respectfully with you.
I appreciate your sincere analysis Callum:)
Where is the $50,000 in bank tranfers registered?
Should it be under verification?
Under ‘employees’?
Under ‘Cayman Island bank accounts’?
More info please.
Madness….
Don’t any of you feel for legitimate hostel owners who employ people and are suffering at the hands of this communism inspired lunacy?
Walter
Walter, I’m presently employed in a hostel. It does better year after year, even with the popularity of Couchsurfing. Tourism is increasingly much faster than Couchsurfing could keep up with it.
So the fact there are 20,000 odd couch surfers in Paris or 8,000 in Melbourne for example is not affecting the industry?
The global crisis combined with this marvellous ‘invention’ (or should I say socialist push into the tourism market) is going to cost the jobs of people like yourselves.
The hostels that gave so much to the development of backpacking and travel and now are getting stabbed in the back by a new generation of thoughtless free-loaders.
Very sad.
To the hostel owners:
Perhaps if your places were CLEAN, well taken care of and were staffed by decent, friendly LOCALS and not a bunch of white-bread, cooler-than-thou trustafarians or else some lecherous perv of an owner, CouchSurfing wouldn’t be as successful as it is. In short, you people got greedy (some hostels are as expensive as a hotel…wtf?!), and now you’re being removed from the marketplace for offering a crappy product for way too much money. Boo hoo. You brought it on yourselves. For every person who has had a pleasant stay at a hostel, several more leave with lice, bedbugs, or having been assaulted by some drunken yahoo “employee” or another guest for their troubles.
To everyone:
However, with that said, the business practices at CouchSurfing are as lame as they come. Sure, they’ve got a number of people working on the site for a low salary (16K-25K per year), but these people (there are 10-15 staffing any given collective) get free room, free board in a beautiful and expensive “collective” location that changes every few months or so, all the free alcohol they can guzzle, plus free pussy courtesy of the people who donate money and time to keep the thing going, as well as the ability to keep the job they had when they arrived if they like.
Newsflash: CS has no real mission, and only developed one when some suit told them they had to do so in order to qualify for nonprofit status. “Oh, like, we have to have a mission and stuff?” They’re cynically manipulating the public in order to gain more donations and to keep detractors at bay (way to fail!), nothing more, nothing less, and the only “cultural exchange” most of these boneheads care about is in the form of bodily fluids.