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Ask HN: Internet without ads – how should content be monetized?

11 points by rayalez ↗ HN
My dream is to create a perfect platform for writers to share/discuss fiction and earn income from it. I want this project to be beautiful and elegant and awesome, and I will never run ads there. So I am thinking about the right way to monetize it, that would be the most convenient for both writers and readers.

Given that more and more people will be using adblock in the future, this is a question many content creators on the internet will need to ask. I think it is a big problem that internet will be facing, and solving it would make for a great startup idea.

So I would love if you could share your thoughts and ideas on this topic - what is the best way to monetize content such as blogs, videos, comics, fiction?

- Micropayments?

- Patreon?

- Paywall and subscriptions? (monthly/yearly?)

- "Pay what you want"?

What are the other possible options?

How in your opinion would the perfect system look like?

8 comments

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VLM
Some things cannot be monetized. Such as content. What I'm getting at is what is your strategy to fight competitors and copyright violators who prefer to operate at a lower price, such as free? Especially in an era where everything gets cheaper over time, hosting, storage, bandwidth, etc?

If you can't monetize content, monetize verbs / activities / actions. So kickstarter-ize it? This author will not upload until $100 of total donations or $1 or $1K or whatever. Of which the middleman gets a cut of maybe 10% or whatever.

echo272
ad blockers have a tough fight to gain widespread usage, specially because ads are the de-facto monetization strategy, plus they are so easy to use.

A service such as yours offer the value of not showing ads, which for some niche is something worth paying for, so a subscription based service seems natural.

joshuapants
> ad blockers have a tough fight to gain widespread usage, specially because ads are the de-facto monetization strategy, plus they are so easy to use.

The fact that ads are easy to use and ubiquitous is what will make ad blocker usage skyrocket.

echo272
Think of ads as spam. There are a ton of spam filters, nevertheless spam cannot be eliminated completely. Ads are even harder to remove since they represent a revenue stream. THE revenue stream online.
wodenokoto
Before the iPhone, the cellular carrier 3 actually tried to sell internet content.

No phones had wifi and most content needed to be reformatted for your 3G flip phones, so they sold subscriptions for Youtube, their own programming and music services. I even think they had a Facebook option.

In a way it was kind of cool, for $5 a month you got all you could stream Youtube videos - in a time when people where often billed a dollar for 10 megabytes!

vixsomnis
Micropayments are not an option right now due to the friction: no one is going to give you their payment information. It requires a large amount of trust.

One particular advertising model I like is internal advertising. I've been brainstorming a business model to compete with a webcomics ranking service that removes the need to rely on external advertising services (Project Wonderful, Google AdSense, etc.). In my opinion, this is the least intrusive monetization strategy.

Since your ideal users would be generating content, with the intention of having as many people as possible view and interact with their content, you should use this to your advantage. Instead of advertisements, you have "curated content". Since you have a wealth of internal data (from, say running Piwik analytics) and can categorize the content on your service, content creators can pay to have their stories presented to users, beyond whatever free presentation they get.

Meanwhile, you can return some of that overall money to reward content creators based on the number of users they've generated, or perhaps users returning on a normal basis. This should incentivize better content.

The downside to this model is that you already need a sizeable viewership for any creators to pay for sponsorship. You'd have to invest heavily in your service before you get any returns at all, especially since you have to attract quality content creators.

In the first 6 months or so, I'd imagine any "rewards" would have to be given out of your personal finances, since you won't have people throwing money at you until the rewards for purchasing sponsorship are tangible.

Advertising isn't much better in terms of income, however. You make almost no money when your userbase is small, and the adverts tend to make users think less of your site (and not come back).

(Disclaimer: I have never tried this before, although I intend to. I also doubt I'm the first to think of this model.)

joshuapants
I think Patreon is a good model. Micropayments and "pay what you want" are also attractive, but probably harder to bring customers to.

We're in an increasingly "app-ified" world, so I could see mobile/desktop apps that connect to a service and pull down articles in exchange for a subscription (this could also be done in-browser, but I like the idea of a native application so you could ideally keep articles offline easily). Netflix (or Steam) for text, in a way. This has already been done by a variety of publications, but I think the biggest issue is that they all have their own separate subscriptions to manage. If there were an open standard for this kind of thing, it could all be integrated into one app where you can easily subscribe and unsubscribe to each service on a monthly basis. That would also make a la carte articles easy to serve; get a headline and a snippet with a price next to it as well as user reviews of the author and the article.