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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

$120M in annual revenue from server boosts and nitro subscriptions? That seems crazy.

I'm in a couple of mid-sized servers and nobody pays for that. Granted, they aren't gaming related, and we may not be the target demographic for buying status.

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As someone who is not by any means a discord power user, and who doesn't generally pay for skins, even I have been tempted to buy boosts just so that I can use emojis from some servers on other servers, because I think they're funny. If discord can tempt even me to buy, I have no trouble believing they can close the deal with many others.

Yeah, cross-server emoji are shockingly valuable to me as well. Some servers just have terrible custom emojii, and having a choice of some non-terrible emoji is worth the price.

I blame Slack for my custom-emoji-response addiction; Discord just weaponized it.

I wish Slack had better portability of custom emoji. There's no blessed API for adding/exporting emoji.

It's 2020 and I can't believe we're paying for emoji.

I'm not blaming you. I get it. I'm blaming the world we live in.

Emoji are not innovation.

No one said they're an innovation. Just that people value them.

What I find irritating is the absence of what Chinese/Korean/Japanese apps have: a curated sticker market where the platform takes a cut of money that goes to the IP holder (brand or artist).

well - looks like you're in luck https://www.engadget.com/discord-stickers-135019389.html

Is art not valuable? Is it not worth paying for?

Obviously random emoji is not the Mona Lisa, but having pictures of your friends making funny poses or faces etc. certainly increases the value of a conversation. It's also completely optional; not being able to use such emoji won't negatively impact your experience. It will however make you really jealous of all your friends that can use those emoji, and FOMO sets in until you too join the club just so you can be the first to react with a funny emote for the situation at hand.

I also like having GIF profile icons.

Paying for cosmetic features has been, traditionally, one of the monetization models in gaming (which discord is inherently intertwined with) that ends up the least scummy.

Emoji are in the sweet spot where if you can’t use special emoji you don’t really care, but some people find them shiny enough to pay for. It’s not innovation, but it’s definitely a perfect target for monetization.

You're not paying for emoji, your paying for an incredible product that provides a lot of value. Emoji is just one feature they hold back to tempt you to pay for the amazing thing you have been given for free.

It sounds greedy when you word it "paying for emoji" when in reality they are incredibly generous for holding back no core functionality from free users.

It is nothing compared to the money that flies around inside Twitch broadcast chats. Someone buys everyone a subscription to gain the favor of the host. Someone else donates $xxx to get their name on-screen. And it happens pretty far down the long-tail.

This reads to me as a B2B play.

Discord's customers are those Twitch broadcasters, who give "flairs" and other digital goods to their customers ("subscribers").

I would say its more organic than intentional, but many streamers encourage fans to join a Discord if they have one, as a higher level of engagement. A chat channel is 'sticky' whereas the chat linked only to a broadcast is ephemeral.

There are probably several other monetization strategies in play, unless a tiger (Jason Citron) can change his stripes https://archive.org/details/OpenfeintComplaint

Generally, any highly polished service with glowing media reviews that’s also free is something I regard with great suspicion.

Nitro is a status symbol in some teen circles. Things like animated avatars make you stand out.

In some other teen circles it's a negative status symbol. In the "you wasted your money on that?" sort of way.

That's an equalisation, a way to keep people humble but still acknowledging the status to keep the community happy

The free service is really featureful, and people really like the "accoutrements"† that you get from Nitro as well as supporting the server(s) they like.

Linguistic tangent below if you are interested:

------------------------------------------------

† I know that "accoutrements" isn't the right word to mean "add-ons", and "accompaniments" would technically be the word you'd use to metaphorically describe the benefits that the user gets from Discord Nitro as being similar to add-ons to dishes of food. But, words change in meaning over time, and I have only ever heard "accoutrements" being used metaphorically in this way, and so "accompaniments" didn't seem to match the linguistic milieu present today.‡

‡ I don't know if there is a term that means what I am intending by "linguistic milieu present today", and that's the best guess I came up with that sounded good and somewhat conveyed the concept. To precisely describe what term I'm thinking of, I need to lay a baseline.

Language change is something that has happened, will happen, and is happening now. [0] Given that that is the case, there exists a relationship between time and language change, and thus, specific languages and time. The language as being used ("sending" and "understanding" both happening), not the language as described by teachers/books on that language.

The concept I mean above, that I tried to describe as "linguistic milieu present today" is, "the current state of The English Language As Actually Used By Speakers/Writers, and Not Necessarily The English Language As Taught/Described In Books/Schools".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change

Discord has 300+ million users (based on the forbes article). Even if everyone were paying for the cheap $5/mo nitro classic (which is worst case scenario for revenue, but best case scenario for # of paying customers) subscription, that's 24 million paying subscribers, which is less than 10% of their user base. Seems pretty reasonable given that the free tier includes so much.

What does the 300+ million refer to? Yearly active users? Monthly active users? Those two metrics are much different.

Looks like there's only 100+ million MAU[0], the Forbes article just said "300 million registered users".

0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Monthly%20activ...

Your number seems off by an order of magnitude.

24M users * $5 / month / user * 12 months / year = $1440M / year

>$120M in annual revenue from server boosts and nitro subscriptions?

Are you sure that's not also including the data they are selling of its users?

Discord does not sell user data. We've stated this many times, unequivocally. Our monetization puts the user as the customer, not say, the product to be sold to advertisers (read: other social networks.) We think that this alignment of incentives sets us up to do the best by our users. Our monetary success depends on how great an experience we can build for our users, such that they convert to a paid subscriber - while not gating everything behind a paywall. Hence why our premium subscription service generally includes cosmetic incentives, that are optional to the core experience of chat, and as well, and unlocks stuff like higher quality streaming (since it costs us more to run, we unlock higher quality once you pay us.)

As for where it's stated that we don't sell user data, it's in our privacy policy: https://discord.com/privacy

> The Company is not in the business of selling your information. We consider this information to be a vital part of our relationship with you.

> No Sale of Personal Information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell personal information. We do not sell the personal information of our users.

> Because Discord does not sell the personal information of our users to third parties, this is not applicable.

And also in our safety center: https://discord.com/safety

> We do not sell your data, nor do we share it with third parties for advertising purposes.

It's common in gaming discords, mainly for hi-res streaming. For other communities I suspect the status of boosting and the feeling of "supporting the community" is popular, in a patreon-like way.

I don't think Discord has ever even tried to get me to pay them money. Granted I only use it very casually, but the tab is always open.

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