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The existence of Patreon and similar services gives me hope that we can one day have a viable way to fund websites besides advertising. It seems like at present
by jetrink 8y ago
The existence of Patreon and similar services gives me hope that we can one day have a viable way to fund websites besides advertising. It seems like at present, one or two person teams (e.g. small podcasts and YouTube channels) can survive or even thrive on Patreon donations, mid-sized entities (e.g. major podcasts like Serial, most websites) rely on advertising, while large organizations like newspapers use some combination of advertising and subscriptions with mixed success. It would be great if Patreon-style donations could become a major revenue source of the mid-sized content producers as they have for the small.
- microdrum 8y agoThere’s actually a company doing automated “pay to remove Google ads and support the site” — http://subscriptions.publir.com http://subscriptions.publir.com — uses Stripe and proceeds go to the publisher.
- fatjokes 8y agoActually Google itself does it: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI'd like to use Google Contribute, but to work, it would require me to be logged into Google all the time, and I don't want to do that...
- microdrum 8y agoIn addition to the obvious disadvantage of the Google login requirement, Google Contribute doesn't remove all ads –– just Google ads.
- lazyjones 8y agoPlenty of websites don’t rely on ads for funding: e-commerce, product listings, yellow pages, price comparison websites... Flattr is a good system for smaller content producers, who in turn could pay large content distributors like Youtube for being listed there. No ads needed, but who would want to burst the web advertising bubble?