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That's not totally true. They don't just decide to start putting ads up because one day they woke up and thought "holy shit, we have a billion users! how are we

That's not totally true. They don't just decide to start putting ads up because one day they woke up and thought "holy shit, we have a billion users! how are we going to support this? Quick! Pull out the ads!". It's more like they intend to monetize in the future no matter what but the only thing stopping them is adoption. They need users to adopt the service first before its even monetizeable. I'm sure if ads or whatever model was profitable from day 1 they'd be using it. It's not a matter of purposely deceiving users, it's a matter of at what point do the different models actually yield revenue. Once they get to that point you start seeing the monetization happen. It can be from day 1 or 5 years down the road but all startups need to make money. Also, they didn't do anything shady here. If you're following you'll know that they both provided ample notice and offered to share the revenue and you can even opt out. I mean, what do we expect here? Are they supposed to have it be opt-in because that's how we like it and we can't be bothered to log in and tick the box to turn it off? We're not paying for anything here and on top of it we're going to tell them how to run the company like we own stock? This is a business, not an open source project or a charity.

miker64 14y ago
If you intend to monetize, perhaps it might be best not to do it in a way that alienates or upsets your user base. That's the take away we should be looking at. Not that Ads are bad, not that monetization is bad, but: If you want a service to grow and to be profitable you need to be aware of how your shift from growing the user base to monetizing the user base doesn't lose the user base.
wpietri 14y ago
That's ridiculous. Ads produce positive revenue from day 1. The cost of putting them in is negligible. We can't know why they waited until now, but "insufficient number of users" was not why they took 5 years to do it.
- GhotiFish 14y ago
  I don't feel it's unfair to call it a bait and switch. Even if they didn't intend for it to be a bait and switch, it's still a bait and switch.

miker64 14y ago

If you intend to monetize, perhaps it might be best not to do it in a way that alienates or upsets your user base. That's the take away we should be looking at. Not that Ads are bad, not that monetization is bad, but: If you want a service to grow and to be profitable you need to be aware of how your shift from growing the user base to monetizing the user base doesn't lose the user base.

wpietri 14y ago

That's ridiculous. Ads produce positive revenue from day 1. The cost of putting them in is negligible. We can't know why they waited until now, but "insufficient number of users" was not why they took 5 years to do it.

GhotiFish 14y ago
I don't feel it's unfair to call it a bait and switch. Even if they didn't intend for it to be a bait and switch, it's still a bait and switch.