Lemmy advertising model - thoughts
We should think about the advertising model before its too late and it gets shoved onto us. I think each community should get its own advertiser and they get a stick post on each post which is limited to 300 chars and one url.
Its simple, non intrusive and we can make it a bidding. 80 % of the proceeds should go to the maintenance of the instance, 20 % should go to the moderators of the instance.
Would warner brothers want this for 100 $ on movies ? I think so ..
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I hate ads like the rest of us but can community donations sustain the instance ? If they do why dont we have that model yet ? Why we still keeping using YouTube and Gmail etc ? What percentage of community would donate ? Will be donating to the community or the server instance ? Will there be push back from users of small communities who are paying if the money goes purely into the maintenance of large communities ?
A lot of Mastodon servers are run like that. It generally works if you run a instance as a community and not a catch-all general purpose one as then you will have a smaller dedicated group of members willing to subsidize the un-avoidable lurkers and free-loaders. This is like those "Free2Play" games that are massively profitable despite having no ads and are free to download if you want think about it in capitalist terms.
In the end it isn't terribly expensive to run a Lemmy instance or any online service. Facebook and the other ad companies spend most of their revenue on user tracking and advertisement infrastructure which is super wasteful as it is just done to attract more advertisers... basically a snake eating its own tail.
I think Reddit gold was a brilliant way to support the platform and get something in return. I’ve been thinking of supporting various FOSS projects, but getting nothing but a a warm and fuzzy feeling in return just feels inadequate. Getting a Debian/Inkscape/Firefox hoodie sounds much more appealing to me, so recently I’ve been lookin for those sorts of donation options.
Lemmy.store to support lemmy.world, the community can design and sell custom community themed merch.