Ask HN: How HN-like community websites get monetized these days? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How HN-like community websites get monetized these days?

11 pointsurahara9 comments

Is a community website model like HN, growthhackers.com, Product Hunt is easy to drive revenue from? What are some ways these sites are got monetized these days?

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They don't and shouldn't. Communities can't be monetized outside of ads and I've never seen that work long term. It won't make anyone rich or pay back investors either. At most it'll cover server costs.

A common problem is that communities where you can say whatever (after moderation of course) will say things advertisers don't want next to their ads. An extreme example is 4chan, but another one is YouTube. A lot of advertisers pulled out of YouTube because their ads appeared before a video of someone making a racist joke[1].

[1] In YouTube's case it mostly hurt content creators, not Google.

StackOverflow has monetized their community by providing a best-in-class service the community needs/uses (jobs).

> A common problem is that communities where you can say whatever (after moderation of course) will say things advertisers don't want next to their ads

I wonder if this is just something old fashioned ad companies will have to grow out of. Internet advertising isn't like e.g. advertising on TV before hand chosen shows.

My general, hand-wavy understanding it that HN is not directly monetized. Instead, it serves various business objectives for YC and the company makes enough money to be able to afford to keep doing this without ad income or any of the usual other ways that community sites try to monetize.

I am not personally familiar with growthhackers.com nor Product Hunt.

From my observation it's:

1. Promoted posts, inline but called out to some extent.

2. Job posts. In HN's case, these are combined but there is also the "Jobs" page in the nav up top.

3. Regular ad network stuff as well. (Example Adsense, Carbon, etc)

4. Merch for sale

5. Paid mobile app

In the case of Reddit, they also do: Gold status which unlocks a few non important things

I've seen a few posts on HN that don't have all of the normal operations one can make on your average post. They are usually for YC startup job posts. So in some aspect, YC is making money by targeting job advertising for their startups directly to the hiring pool they wish to pick from. If they help their startups hire top talent, they are more likely to profit from their investments.

In general though, most of the sites have some kind of semi-hidden posts among the others that are actually advertisements.

There is one currently on the HN front page for "Etleap Is Hiring Data Engineers..." No submitter, no upvote arrow, no comment ability, but it's at #6.

Sure, but this only works for HN because of its reputation. I think OP is asking for new communities.

Also, HN is a special case because it's probably cheap and could be funded by any YC member's pocket.

Reddit does something similar. I think most sites of this sort do that. It's just that obviously you want to build a community, web traffic, and reputation, before interspersing advertisements.

I think if you are going to build something like that, the strategy is to build a site that has value first and monetize later.

Job posting is a nice way to monetize HN like community.

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