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Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

Is there really no other way to monetize except through ads? Sure, there needs to be more regulation in this space, I agree with that. But the idea that ads are the best monetization has never sat well with me.

I understand that it's convenient because you get money without asking your end users for it. But I've always thought of it as "if it seems too good to be true, then it probably isn't" and stories like yours just keep reinforcing that feeling.

And all that's without considering how ads degrade the user experience or help erode the privacy. Every time I have to browse the web without an adblocker, I get freshly shocked at how awful it is.

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Sure there is, but most people don't bother for a few reasons:

-Slapping some ad network's code into your site is comparatively easy, and monetizing almost every other way is hard (i.e. "I just want to create awesome content and get paid for it, I don't want to be my own sales department, too, that's boring") -Even if you do monetize other ways, slapping some ad network's code into your site is, effectively, 'free money' on top of what the site's users are willing to pony up for -Users have been inured into believing and accepting that covering every possible square inch of civilization with ads is an unavoidable consequence of modern life. So much so that the absence of ads in something that isn't otherwise monetized is suspicious (there's no such thing as a free lunch)

You're forgetting a major one: there's a whole gulf of things that people just aren't willing to actually take their wallet out for. People even scoff paying $8/mo to Netflix while spending hours watching it daily. Good luck taking payments for your little project.

For all sorts of reasons, too: we have been conditioned to think ads = free, none of your competitors ask for money (they use ads, so they're "free"), the modern payment flow is still cumbersome and doesn't support microtransactions, there are all sorts of things like HN that I simply wouldn't use if it wasn't free, your users can't afford it, etc.

One of the worst aspects of ads is how they've mutated our society's relationship with paying for things that we value, but ads definitely fill the void outlined above. Your creation's value to society doesn't have to breach the high threshold of getting a user to take their wallet out.

But just think of all the things you have done on the internet today, all the things you enjoyed doing or thought were worth even a tiny amount of attention, yet how unwilling you'd be to actually send money their way in the current system.

There is probably an even bigger one:

If you take money, you are (in some countries) legally bound to reimburse if shit happens.

And this is something I'd like to see for products that make their money less directly: If it would be legally the same if you paid with personal data, by watching ads or paid with money like any other product Facebook and the likes would be forced to quality management AND stuff like random blocking wouldn't be possible bcs of customer rights.

This sums it up really well. I could get $400/month easily from thousands of users via ads, by just putting a simple piece of JS on the website.

But getting those users to use a debit/credit card or paypal to give me some money, even if it was less than $1 would’ve been very difficult.

As I explained to the parent commenter, on top of that this website became very popular in India, which made that option even more difficult...

I wish there was, and I considered charging users but it becomes a lot more complex at least from a technical point of view.

The other big reason for not trying was that the biggest user base was in India, where my website was fairly popular for a number of years. This meant that most of the users didn’t have as much disposable income as average users in western countries.

Ads are annoying, but they are an incredibly easy and effective way of monetizing a popular website really. If they are placed correctly they shouldn’t even impact the ux that much.

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