HN Explorer

Ask HN: How would you monetise a social network without ads?

9 points by have_faith ↗ HN
I'm building a social network, part experiment, part serious, mostly as a learning exercise for now.

The one sticking point I haven't been able to solve in my head is monetisation and so I thought I would ask you guys for ideas.

Thoughts I have had: Donations, premium subscriptions, ask people to pay a small subscription if they say they can afford it (with nothing given in return over a free account), charge for specific features (ability to upload lots of photos for instance).

I've ruled out ads for now as it doesn't work with my current concept but I'm open to an ethical way to use ads if possible without any data mining users and without being intrusive, but then at that point what use are the ads?

8 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] thread
fiiv
Apart from what you have already said, there is not a great way I think.

Perhaps one way is that if instead of harvesting user data for advertising profiles, you could instead sell anonymised user data for things like machine learning purposes. For example if you base your platform around music, you could provide a dataset of favourite bands split across various demographics.

have_faith
Anonymised data can be de-anonymised, but more importantly I want the trust of the users with handling their information. If I have to explain to people that I'm selling their data but with caveats then I've already lost that trust.

I should mention that the social network I'm planning has a focus on being ethical, slow, meaningful, anti dark patterns etc which is why ad monetisation feels like it won't work. The site is explicitly being designed to not encourage people to waste or spend too much time on it which makes ads less effective just from a pragmatic perspective.

breekee
Ads enabled by choice -> User gets credits to use on the site -> You get ad-revenue
matt_s
You could make people pay upfront and the more friends they enlist to join and stay active then the more money from their monthly/annual cost will go to charity, up to some limit. They pick the charity from a list.

Or be blatant about it like some mobile games are. Watch up to 30 second videos (aka ads/commercials) to earn credits. Earn enough credits per month and no membership cost at all (have CC info captured for automatic payment though). Let users select topics of interest and let advertisers bid on their commercials.

Rjevski
Premium plans, or non-tracking ads (that are personalized based on the content you see instead of your profile).

Read The Docs does that - they have a single, static ad spot (just an image and text, no JS) and they’re chosen based on the content of the page you see (so instead of tracking you, they’re tracking public content, which is totally fine by me).

They also seem to have only quality ads, I haven’t seen any shit or spam there ever, presumably because they’re human-reviewed. You should do the same to make sure the ads actually have some value (if you let shit ads through your users will just learn to tune them out if they can’t adblock them, and you’ll loose out either way).

rthomas6
You could have a "super-vote" that readers could apply to other peoples' posts. It wouldn't boost visibility of the post, but it would reward the poster in some way.

Some ideas for rewards of being super-voted: * Show some kind of badge or extra customization on their profile page

* Add a star or badge to their username's comments so they stand out as important (kind of like Twitter verified)

* Give the poster a percentage of the money

mabynogy
I'm on a project like that with few folks. It's a social network for programmers (like github but more social and less code-centric). The idea is to propose programmers (if they want) to commercialize their project with a custom license. The license is limited in time (one year) and tuned to target only some professionnal users (like companies with a revenue over 16M$ per year). The license tell those users to pay a small fee (like 1$ per year/user). The code of those projects remains open source for everyone.
hcho
Snapchat meets Dropbox. Every post and upload gets deleted after a while. If the OP wants to keep them alive after that, they need to pay.