Ask HN: What kind of revenue alternatives to advertising can websites employ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What kind of revenue alternatives to advertising can websites employ?

31 pointsdgzl24 comments

Whenever I see a popup that says "We see you're using an Ad-Blocker, would you please disable it?", I immediately think "Nope!", and if they don't let me to the webpage, I entirely lose interest in what I'm doing there. No offense to the website folks, but keeping intrusive ads away is high priority to me and many others. I wish I could send you an email describing my utter distaste is advertising and targeted marketing, but I also understand their need for revenue. So the question is, how can these websites get paid without relying on advertisements? Can we brainstorm?

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Most likely, they can’t. Advertising is the main business model technology companies were built on. If there was any other revenue stream, Facebook would’ve used it (of course, except from charging users for the service since the majority of the people won’t sing up for this).

I totally agree with you on the distaste or advertising and targeting. I never liked it and never will. The question for you is, if you’re using this website service and getting a value/benefit from it, why don’t you benifit them as well by simply removing your ad blocker.

People usually feel obligations for others who have helped them (Them providing you the service) and will thus try to give back.

> If there was any other revenue stream, Facebook would’ve used it.

I like to think that Facebook has too much of a desire to make money to employ less lucrative models of revenue. Maybe that's a point we should talk about. Is there a model that might generate less-but-enough money for the website?

> why don’t you benefit them as well by simply removing your ad blocker.

I'm trying to understand a model that works for both parties. Targeted advertising doesn't work for me.

> People usually feel obligations for others who have helped them (Them providing you the service) and will thus try to give back.

I agree entirely, which is why I'm donating time and effort to brainstorming a better solution. I mention in another comment something about a third-party members club, entirely voluntary (with minor perks), where members would subtly assist the vendor to help mitigate some kind of cost, somewhere. The kinks have no been fully fleshed out.

majority of the people won’t sing up for this

But have they (Facebook, Twitter or even Google) tried though? FB has billion plus users last I checked - if 10% of them pay $3 a month for no ads/no tracking etc, that is 300M a month. They can also charge businesses a lot more ("official" pages or whatever else they can cook up) and that can be even bigger revenue stream. I am not on FB anymore, so I don't know if they charge for anything - I won't be surprised if they didn't even bother to try

1. Ads are not the problem. Ugly, out of place, spammy, intrusive ads are. Serve me curated ads with nice visuals and I’d be definitely checking it out.

2. Don’t track. Period.

3. Basically you might not want to handover ad space on your sites to ad houses that serve ads based on tracking and surveillance.

4. Decide whether your website and its content itself are the purpose of doing it, whether it’s a blog or an e-commerce site, or the ads you show on it.

Trust. Good content. Good products.

Both Seth Godin and Leo Babauta have talked about this on their blogs quite a bit.

The point of advertisements is to occupy your brain-space with their product, so that you think about them the next time you're trying to buy xyz. I don't know what kind of money they give to websites, but the goal is the replace some of it.

Potential methods I see:

- Offering users something that's actually worth viewing ads for, such as not only original words, but original artwork (I'd enjoy seeing a Paint rendition created by the writer, even if it's no-good).

- Making ads more subtle and less offensive (thoughtful artwork, interesting games that describe the product, other valuable media)

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- Could create a third party 'guild' of sorts, where members would offer simple but free assistance to the webpage clients. Within the guild you could say members earn points based on the work they do, and points are rewarded with things like stickers (more advertising), moderator access and controls, easy or less impacting content creation, etc.

- Allowing the website to accept donations in other forms besides money, as in a trade offer of some kind. Such as content creation, editorial help, comment moderating help, or something even less impacting such as general tips to the real employees.

- Here's something fun: imagine an Ars/other article printed out on real paper and posted on bulletin boards. Coupled with a ref.number, the poster could get online points.

- If I got a personal phone call from someone working at a website like this, and they said "Hey friend, thanks for viewing, would you mind telling someone about our website?", I'd probably tell many people about it.

Advertising doesn't have to be intrusive or based on surveillance of users. Maybe one answer is that people running websites shouldn't be trying to maximize and optimize advertising to the nth degree when a plain old ad will make some money, even if not as much as the latest ad-tech tracker-based in-your-face pop-up take-over ads.

> Advertising doesn't have to be intrusive or based on surveillance of users.

I disagree, actually. The point of advertising is to sell, and advanced selling requires manipulation. I don't believe advertisers will resist this tactic to the degree I want.

I keep hoping Brave will be a success in this regard; their browser has a wallet built in for micro-paying the sites one visits: https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#what-is-brave-rewards

Not at all bad, if they can deliver something quality. I'll give this a look.

Advertising, without tracking.

Yes!!! No targeted advertisements means no need to track. Let's go back to the way it was. This might even be in advertisers best interest given how much traffic is fake. Doesn't work for the dark data market, but that is really what my gripe is about, not the advertisements so much.

If we can throw voluntary in there...

Non-obtrusive advertisements. Theoutline.com has amazing ads. Its a marriage between native ads. and snap chat style cards.

Don't track the users and advertise the companies you like.Say, if I have a website, I will advertise Patagonia-because I like them, in a non-obtrusive manner. Again , this assumes that most of my readers are in a $x income bracket and are out-door loving techies.

This is coming from a tech loving-i think great products also should have great interfaces, but not a programmer person.

for a website owner, the main value that visitors bring is their attention. Unless you're mining monero you're going to be advertising something, whether it's your own products or someone else'. The important thing is to make the experience non-intrusive and feel like a natural part of the ux.

for my side project namelix.com I have 4 separate monetization channels:

- sales of my own logo product

- affiliate revenue from premium domain sales

- affiliate revenue from domain registration

- affiliate revenue from squadhelp.com (crowd sourced business names)

> Unless you're mining monero

What about a system where I give you temporary benefit from my mining rig?

Let's assume having a mining rig is very easy and everyone does it.

depends on the niche. For high volume, low commercial interest sites (eg. video game blog, torrent site) this might be ok. Direct sales/affiliate/patreon income will still be more profitable for smaller niche sites.

the problem with mining is that it only rewards time on site, rather than the value you derive from visiting the site.

I don't quite understand your last paragraph there...

if your site is for example, one of those curated design tools popular on producthunt, a successful interaction would be your user quickly leaving the site because they found what they needed. With mining this behavior is not rewarded, and website owners are incentivized to provide a convoluted or rehosted ux (eg. outline.com) so you don't leave the site. This is possibly worse than intrusive advertising.

Sponsorships - a company pays you to advertise their products and services in a simple, plain-text and non-intrusive banner at the top of every page. For tech sites especially, it seems quite effective.

And if it's a local product, then I'd do it for free.

Why don't people just have a 'friends' page made up of free local advertising? This could be a) voluntary for the user and b) generate traffic to partner sites.

> And then he realizes partnership is easily swayed by lame bs politics

...

... What about energy?

A system where we buy energy credits for our home, and we can trade energy credits for services. Acceptable at all major energy providers.

Subscription or some premium version. Like many news outlets. And Medium, the blogging platform, doesn't even do ads for its free version.

An outlet has to not only be premium but it would also have to be alluring for me to even think about giving them money.

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