Ask HN: What kind of revenue alternatives to advertising can websites employ?
Whenever I see a popup that says "We see you're using an Ad-Blocker, would you please disable it?", I immediately think "Nope!", and if they don't let me to the webpage, I entirely lose interest in what I'm doing there. No offense to the website folks, but keeping intrusive ads away is high priority to me and many others. I wish I could send you an email describing my utter distaste is advertising and targeted marketing, but I also understand their need for revenue. So the question is, how can these websites get paid without relying on advertisements? Can we brainstorm?
25 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 40.3 ms ] threadI disagree, actually. The point of advertising is to sell, and advanced selling requires manipulation. I don't believe advertisers will resist this tactic to the degree I want.
Potential methods I see:
- Offering users something that's actually worth viewing ads for, such as not only original words, but original artwork (I'd enjoy seeing a Paint rendition created by the writer, even if it's no-good).
- Making ads more subtle and less offensive (thoughtful artwork, interesting games that describe the product, other valuable media)
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- Could create a third party 'guild' of sorts, where members would offer simple but free assistance to the webpage clients. Within the guild you could say members earn points based on the work they do, and points are rewarded with things like stickers (more advertising), moderator access and controls, easy or less impacting content creation, etc.
- Allowing the website to accept donations in other forms besides money, as in a trade offer of some kind. Such as content creation, editorial help, comment moderating help, or something even less impacting such as general tips to the real employees.
- Here's something fun: imagine an Ars/other article printed out on real paper and posted on bulletin boards. Coupled with a ref.number, the poster could get online points.
- If I got a personal phone call from someone working at a website like this, and they said "Hey friend, thanks for viewing, would you mind telling someone about our website?", I'd probably tell many people about it.
I totally agree with you on the distaste or advertising and targeting. I never liked it and never will. The question for you is, if you’re using this website service and getting a value/benefit from it, why don’t you benifit them as well by simply removing your ad blocker.
People usually feel obligations for others who have helped them (Them providing you the service) and will thus try to give back.
I like to think that Facebook has too much of a desire to make money to employ less lucrative models of revenue. Maybe that's a point we should talk about. Is there a model that might generate less-but-enough money for the website?
> why don’t you benefit them as well by simply removing your ad blocker.
I'm trying to understand a model that works for both parties. Targeted advertising doesn't work for me.
> People usually feel obligations for others who have helped them (Them providing you the service) and will thus try to give back.
I agree entirely, which is why I'm donating time and effort to brainstorming a better solution. I mention in another comment something about a third-party members club, entirely voluntary (with minor perks), where members would subtly assist the vendor to help mitigate some kind of cost, somewhere. The kinks have no been fully fleshed out.
But have they (Facebook, Twitter or even Google) tried though? FB has billion plus users last I checked - if 10% of them pay $3 a month for no ads/no tracking etc, that is 300M a month. They can also charge businesses a lot more ("official" pages or whatever else they can cook up) and that can be even bigger revenue stream. I am not on FB anymore, so I don't know if they charge for anything - I won't be surprised if they didn't even bother to try
Why don't people just have a 'friends' page made up of free local advertising? This could be a) voluntary for the user and b) generate traffic to partner sites.
> And then he realizes partnership is easily swayed by lame bs politics
...
for my side project namelix.com I have 4 separate monetization channels:
- sales of my own logo product
- affiliate revenue from premium domain sales
- affiliate revenue from domain registration
- affiliate revenue from squadhelp.com (crowd sourced business names)
What about a system where I give you temporary benefit from my mining rig?
Let's assume having a mining rig is very easy and everyone does it.
the problem with mining is that it only rewards time on site, rather than the value you derive from visiting the site.
2. Don’t track. Period.
3. Basically you might not want to handover ad space on your sites to ad houses that serve ads based on tracking and surveillance.
4. Decide whether your website and its content itself are the purpose of doing it, whether it’s a blog or an e-commerce site, or the ads you show on it.
Don't track the users and advertise the companies you like.Say, if I have a website, I will advertise Patagonia-because I like them, in a non-obtrusive manner. Again , this assumes that most of my readers are in a $x income bracket and are out-door loving techies.
This is coming from a tech loving-i think great products also should have great interfaces, but not a programmer person.
A system where we buy energy credits for our home, and we can trade energy credits for services. Acceptable at all major energy providers.
Both Seth Godin and Leo Babauta have talked about this on their blogs quite a bit.