But a lot of niche forums - games, hobbies and so forth are unlikely to monetise any other way. Should they die too? Or have to rely on a rich benefactor deciding to host a motorcycling (or whatever) site?
Few are going to pay a subscription to chat on a Civilization or fishing forum a few hours a week. Advertising should be the appropriate model for this. Trouble is it's being poisoned by the greed of Buzzfeed and Wired etc.
If no one pays for them, then they should die as hosting is not going to pay itself. However, launching a small forum and running it costs pennies.
The people launching it normally does it because they are passionate enough and paying 2-5$/month/admin is totally feasible.
The problem with adding a profit to niche sites is that then people start launching them JUST to get money and people land on frankenpages with malware.
If your users are from poor countries, you'll also get pennies from ads. TAANSFL. If you have an actual community, it's more efficient to simply ask for donations.
If you read my post history, I'm a constant dissident in the "let's ban all web ads" movement exactly because I think they act as a redistribution mechanism from wealthier societies to poorer ones.
That said, if you're running a hobby site that only targets people from a poor country, the money has to come from them anyway, be it from ads or from donations. In that particular situation, why would ads bring more money than donations compared to sites targeting people from richer countries?
Another totally fair point, love to get proven wrong (:
I am from Spain where the minimum salary is around 700$ and has 40% of young people unemployment, however it's not poor compared to most other countries and the hosting cost is considered cheap.
I don't know what could they do where the hosting cost is significative. Do ad networks scale prices depending on the country served?
I think that's the ugly side of global capitalism as the answer is they shouldn't launch sites then.
Maybe they could try to join several groups to share the expenses. Any other ideas (besides advertising)?
I run my blog with a custom domain name on Azure for $10 a month. I run some ads and Amazon affiliate links, but I've honestly made more from random people clicking my Paypal donation link.
Not that I really care about making money on it - as with most things, measuring my hosting costs in terms of Starbucks coffees puts it nicely in perspective. I should probably go pull my adsense ads.
> Trouble is it's being poisoned by the greed of Buzzfeed and Wired etc.
No, that's exactly wrong.
You tell people that you can get paid for having a URL called, someone will cheat- they will find the most power-and-cost "efficient" way of having that URL called.
Now there are people trying to be "efficient" and there are people trying to monetise content, and the advertiser can't tell the difference, so the mean price of that traffic goes down, and as a result, Buzzfeed (heh) and Wired make less money so they have less to spend on good content.
Eventually, all we get is recycled reality television.
If you really want to blame someone for this, consider that Google is laughing all the way to the bank, because they make more money as demand increases, not when their publishers produce better content. They could stop this, but don't.
OK fair point. Google has long had a split personality on this - spending more effort telling people how to maximise adsense displays than improving SERPs. At a time when SERPs were ruined with those little 5 page adsense sites and ebay scrapers.
Come on, hosting a simple website/forum is really cheap nowadays. Some websites (wikipedia being the main one) simply ask for donations at the end of the year.
Wikipedia is in different position than other sites.
Every time someone posts a link to paywall, everyone discusses how to bypass it. And the people reading HN are wealthy Silicon Valley people. Well, not me but you get the idea.
Everyone talking about charging people instead ads - have you ever tried it? Tell me your success stories.
My forum runs on yearly donations. The shared hosting plan and domain cost $48/y, so about six people usually cover the costs for the whole year for the price of a fast-food lunch.
If you're trying to pay salaries, good luck, but hosting costs are very low nowadays.
Yes it is, but plenty of sites have struggled to get donations, and disappeared as a result - Wikipedia is a bit exceptional on that score.
I don't begrudge people trying to make a bit of pocket money from their sites either. They often put quite a few hours of admin after all, but as is, advertising is fairly broken - for everyone it seems.
Few are going to pay a subscription to chat on a Civilization or fishing forum a few hours a week. Advertising should be the appropriate model for this. Trouble is it's being poisoned by the greed of Buzzfeed and Wired etc.