In a way the problem is inherent in the type of festival it is.

If you have a campus-type festival, where everything happens on a field, like Cambridge, everybody coming pays towards the cost. But when you have it distributed around a town, with a fringe that is so big and varied thta you can have a great time without buying any tickets at all, a lot of people are not going to buy the tickets.

However, without the ticket events, much of the fringe would just evaporate, because it is largely the same performers involved in both, and manybokfvthe others woudl not be there without the main festival.

Some way of channeling money from the non-ticket buyers to the festival is needed. Collecting boxes doesn't really do the job. Asking local traders, and the local council, to stump up, is an attempt at another way to achieve this. Whether it will work is open to question. Basically it's a case of TANSTAAFL (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch).