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Comment by code_scrapping | Hacker News Reader

I have to ask - what's the revenue model? I didn't see a payed account option (which is nice), but I do wonder how you're going to sustain this without deciding after 5 years that maybe selling a carefully selected subset of information would not be privacy invasive (just projecting my worst fears here)?

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This is in the air but there are a couple things we are keeping in mind. Ads are still on the table, just not hyper targeted ones. The only targeting being to people who follow certain subjects on slyde (cars, weather, etc). Outside of that, not much more. This will limit the amount of advertising revenue for sure, but this leads to the second point. We want to also allow creators of premium content to create premium channels on slyde, which would be a way for content creators to fund themselves, similar to how YouTube does it. Ultimately we have to accept the fact that we just aren't going to be able to monetize users to the same extent as facebook or google does, and that's okay with us.

Has anyone at Stackexchange written open about their revenue model? Seems similar.

You do also need to keep in mind that you need to make sure the ads themselves aren't serving tracking garbage or outright malware, even if you do not offer precise behavioral targeting or even store behavioral data.

You can maybe also sell fun premium features like Discord does with Nitro.

Our idea at the moment is to act like reddit ads do. Advertisers essentially make a post without anything more than a title, description, image / video and a url, with the image / video hosted and scrubbed by us. This will most definitely take careful design but your point is valid. Right now it's a delicate balance of not getting ahead of ourselves but also not setting ourselves up for failure due to poor planning.

Premium things is something Snapchat tried out for a bit with bitmoji, though to be honest I haven't looked deeply into any available data on how that worked out for them.

The problem with ads is you start optimizing for engagement which is basically the big issue with FB.

There couldn't be more truth to this. Ads are such a slippery slope. If for arguments sake Slyde grew to be something, it would be due in no small part to the "take it or leave it" approach to ads, if they ever become a thing. Any deviation from this would essentially be biting the hand that feeds you. I can't say we have all or many of the answers to combat this problem but I can say we are weary of it and is the primary reason we want to develop other monetization strategies that are a win-win for us and the users.

Have you considered 2 revenue modes:

1) Free with ads that may be targeted to varying degrees.

2) Paid, with zero ads and zero data collection and zero targeting.

A YouTube premium but without the data collection type model is something we've talked about. Hopefully the users will guide us in the right direction with this. We have to worry about fighting the stigma that there is even a paid option for it, and would that stifle growth? Not answers we have but something we've questioned.

Perhaps Spotify offers a good example. Free tier is funded via ads. Premium tier, no ads + other benefits.

I expect you'd find that there is a significant segment of users who would be willing to pay for the service in order to not be targeted with their specific characteristics and use patterns. Brands can build trust, perhaps make that an objective to support subscription sales.

Using ads will destroy the privacy and trust for sure. The ad networks will track anything and it all starts again. I think users will need to pay a very small fee. That gives them control to be a legal owner of their account and data's. That is actually the argumentation of most other platforms to use and sell user data's, because they have no legal rights on their data's. By paying they have. If you would offer an additional email address in a paid model, that would also secure the path from the platform to the user. Like 1$/month for Slyde. 2$/month Slyde with email address. Second can be a an option to receive funds or donations. Third users and platform keep fake accounts under control when users need to pay something. Also you should allow users optional to ID themselves by a third party service. That is very important for some public persons and many others. Later you can offer services between these users which bring you some extra income.

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