Funding: advertisements, donations, subscriptions?

[joelparkerhenderson]

Discuss ideas for funding, such as advertisements, donations, subscriptions.

Please read the funding page.

Quotations to consider:

• "The incentives created by an advertising business model are to essentially addict people psychologically to your product, and then to cause outrage cycles. You want to feed them stuff that either makes them afraid or angry, because when they’re excited by low level emotions like that, they share more stuff, they’re more active, they spend more time on the site, and see more ads, and they’re just more valuable to them."

• "Subscription sounds like it might be a good idea because it seems like it would remove the incentive to monetize personal information, but in practice it creates a barrier to adoption and makes the social network kind of useless."

[rollcat]

• Self-hosted, with federation? You either host it yourself (which should be made easy), or get into an agreement with someone who can - tech-savvy family member, pay someone, etc.
• Non-targeted ads? Ads relevant to content on the page, as opposed to tailored to the viewer? Like DuckDuckGo does.
• Subscriptions, donations, all sounds good.
• Hybrid model, with a mix of any or all of the above.

[prologic]

I'm very pro Self-Hosted here; but for this to be successful it has to be as simple as possible to spin up an instance. Federation and Decentralisation here are a must have IHMO.

For those that aren't tech-savvy enough to host their own, they can opt to pay for a SaaS version.

I quite like the way Writefreely has done this.