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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Reddit would be a good candidate for experimenting with tiny fees: namely, $12 per year just to use it. That’s one (moderately priced) lunch in total, a dollar a month, for a site that provides a huge amount of content and discussion or just distraction. Far less than one crappy movie in a theater, too. And if everyone paid this, they’d have tons of cash.

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>And if everyone paid this

"If I just capture ONE PERCENT of this nine figure market, I'll be rich!" -standard entrepreneurial slide deck

The paid rate would be well under 1%. Potentially an order of magnitude lower than that.

1% seems like a huge number here.

This would work out horribly for Reddit because it would make them vulnerable to any competitor that markets itself as "Free Reddit". Like most social media, Reddit's moat is its user base not its feature set. Anything that would drive away users would be tantamount to suicide.

Not all Reddit users are from the U.S. or Europe you know. Not all countries have access to online banking or Bitcoin.

Also, good luck getting r/Frugal to pay for that. This would be a horrible business model for Reddit.

You'd probably be suprised to learn that for large chunks of reddits demographics 12 USD is a large sum of money.

Like teenagers. Source: Am a teenager.

I was thinking more along the line of people from a non-rich country. A standard salary in the parts I live is 220 USD a month for 60 hour work weeks.

I don't think that would work out for very, for a number of reasons:

1. Reddit already has competitors, and lots of them. By putting a 'pay to join' barrier up, they just send said competitors more users which gives sites like Voat a huge boost in popularity.

2. It's also competing with online forums and community sites, the vast majority of which are free. Will people really spend money to talk about say, video games or R/Gaming or R/Games when tens of thousands of forums for the same topic exist and are open to join for free? Perhaps not, which would give the likes of IGN, Gamespot and NeoGAF a huge boost among many others.

3. $12 is a lot of money for some Reddit users. For example, people in poorer countries/where the local wages are lower, people without a steady job or career and kids/teens in general.

4. Reddit's entire popularity is dependent on the work of its users. If they can't afford it or leave, then the site will lose out on future popular content, and likely enter a popularity death spiral.

That's basically what Reddit Gold is, I can't see them making much more from that than they already do.

I think paywalling reddit would kill it. It's not like Reddit Gold is very expensive ($30 a year). But I do think that simple friction (needing to hand over one's credit card information) is a barrier, combined with the fact that the Gold benefits are far from essential.

It's almost funny how much your comment is out of touch.

If it were made by an AI bot though it would be really impressive.

No. Humans don't do that (pay for stuff they can get for free).

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