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Comment by aiilns | Hacker News Reader

Right now the top reply's first sentence is this: > Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space.

I have noticed that people in hackernews generally tend to look things from a, excuse me for saying so, narrow business "make money" perspective. Or maybe it's somewhat US related, I'm not sure.

There are thousands of sites that don't live from advertising. Government, universities, and every public or even private institute has a site to provide information, news, announcements etc. There are also hobbyists' sites who are never going to make money from adverts.

Not everything should be reduced to a Facebook page.

Not everything should be about money.

First and foremost I think there is a need to recalibrate what matters and what actions that requires.

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I do a lot of things for free because I have the luxury of a job that pays well. Not everyone has that kind of freedom and if someone wants to put food on the table, then money has to be a factor. Otherwise you'd lock a lot of things to only people who have extra time to take risks on activities that won't get them anything in return. Saying not everything should be about money is a pretty privileged position.

This threshold has been measured. Everything stops being about money when household income hits about $70k-90k. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-much-m...

Not every activity needs to be a viable way to make money. If you're struggling to put food on the table, maybe you should explore other avenues for making money besides blogging. If you want to write, there are lots of ways to get paid for writing.

Everyone has activities they enjoy that don't produce any income. Just because people enjoy an activity doesn't mean that there has to be a way to make a living from it. People enjoy playing video games, riding horses, sailing, painting. For most people they will not be able to support themselves with these things and we generally don't think that we have to go out of our way to make it possible for them to, so why is blogging different?

The general order of business goes "Here is something people are willing to pay money for -> You can do this and make money" not "Here is something I want people to pay me money for -> Pay me money for this"

Not only this, but blogging can also be a marketing tool, where you (or a company you're writing for) publish articles not as an end in themselves, but as a way to show you're an expert in a given domain. For SEO reasons, but not only. These blogs don't need advertisement to make money, they are the advertisement. I'm pretty sure nowadays, this is where money is in blogging. If you want to make money as a blogger, I think it's a way safer road than the advertisement-centered approach.

I agree, I think good thing to point out is that incentivizing and monetizing is not the same thing. If you would excuse a tangential argument, I notice that in Eastern culture 'social cache' is much stronger contender to monetary benefit than west; and in Western incentivization = monetization is more stronger. (my theory is that with more individualistic society with less strict societal norm money is one thing most can agreed upon)

The blog itself seemed like an example of content marketing, As is evident from "I challenge you to signup for Feedly" at the end of the article.

Yeah, I can't decide if that was a "this is convenient" or "I'm getting paid to hock this service." Either way, there are other ways to get RSS feeds; I run my own FreshRSS server, but there are apps for your phone/tablet that can use instead.

This website was started by a venture capitalist firm and its original name was "Startup News". The user base certainly reflects that.

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