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>There are ways to make money online without ads begging you to click on them, and they involve real-world goods and services that your website can help connect

>There are ways to make money online without ads begging you to click on them, and they involve real-world goods and services that your website can help connect people for? Not every website is in a position to sell something directly. That's how ads work in the first place. I run a collaborative writing forum that is predominantly used by teens. I make so little money off it that I'm running it as a charity because forums like it were a valuable part of my youth. And there's very little I can do to make money from my userbase these days, though it used to make a couple thousand bucks per month and got me through uni. People on HN and the like love to scoff and go "if you can't make money, then you don't deserve to exist" which is awfully short sighted. Like the only consequence they can think of as they Mr Burns their hands together is The Verge, operated by a billion dollar company, shutting down. Ads service the middle of the bellcurve of sites that aren't 100% charity but also not in a position to peddle you merchandise. The internet is going to lose out if society doesn't find an alternative. Just more centralization.

maxxxxx 9y ago
The question is whether your ads really need to be targeted to individual persons (requiring a huge surveillance infrastructure) or if you can just sell ads to some sponsors and everybody sees the same ads. I prefer the second option. Nothing wrong with ads per se.
- nopriorarrests 9y ago
  It's just not feasible for the sites like parent commenter described to look for sponsors, sign contracts, etc. We are talking about, say, $200-600 per month in advertising. You can spend more time searching for next sponsor then you will make from ads. They can monetize by working with 3rd party, like SSP, who will sell the inventory programmatically. But to monetize effectively, that 3rd party will do tracking, that's true.
EGreg 9y ago
I totally agree that your forum should exist. My main question would be, what exactly are you providing as a service ti the teens? Custom software? A server? It seems to be quite cheap to just download something and run it on a server. I’d like to see a self-configuring, end-to-end encrypted decentralized thing that people can literally just run on their own machines and let servers act like dumb hubs. Something like SAFE network. Then the forum software is just a client side thing like SourceTree for git. And that can be open source and free for the teens.

maxxxxx 9y ago

The question is whether your ads really need to be targeted to individual persons (requiring a huge surveillance infrastructure) or if you can just sell ads to some sponsors and everybody sees the same ads. I prefer the second option. Nothing wrong with ads per se.

nopriorarrests 9y ago
It's just not feasible for the sites like parent commenter described to look for sponsors, sign contracts, etc. We are talking about, say, $200-600 per month in advertising. You can spend more time searching for next sponsor then you will make from ads. They can monetize by working with 3rd party, like SSP, who will sell the inventory programmatically. But to monetize effectively, that 3rd party will do tracking, that's true.

EGreg 9y ago

I totally agree that your forum should exist. My main question would be, what exactly are you providing as a service ti the teens? Custom software? A server? It seems to be quite cheap to just download something and run it on a server. I’d like to see a self-configuring, end-to-end encrypted decentralized thing that people can literally just run on their own machines and let servers act like dumb hubs. Something like SAFE network. Then the forum software is just a client side thing like SourceTree for git. And that can be open source and free for the teens.