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 ..
Or users could toss a few bucks to their instance and the instances get way way more than ad revenue would bring.
And then they use PayPal Payments which doesn't support paying as guest in your country. Would optional ads work? You know, you could enable them in profile settings. I've seen that in some app already.
There are tons of ways to get money moved around. Heck even crypto works.
I think the issue with ads is that the only one winning is the company selling the ad. They give the instances a $100 to have show up on every user's feed for a month. You're talking about a couple million views for almost nothing. The instance gets $100 which doesn't necessarily offset much and the users get ads which they need to optionally block. Too many get blocked and the ad seller stops selling ads to this instance.
Or everyone sends $5 a year to their instance. For even the smaller ones you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars which can pay for keeping the instances up and running on good hardware.
The 100$ was an example but I get your point. It feels like every option leads more or less to some billion dollar company becoming richer.
Yeah I'm sure you can get more from the ads if you get a bunch of sponsors but honestly if people just paid an anual fee it would be better for everyone.
Would people pay ? Wiki barely gets by, we have so many models that are ad based but very few subscription based(am I wrong ?)
you're not wrong. People think that the internet doesn't cost money. People think that apps sell for $0.99 because its quick and cheap to build. If you're leaving Reddit and Twitter because you don't want to be connected to a corporate monster that is selling your data and flooding you with ads...you need to pay for things.
Honestly I don't know how you get people to snap out of that mindset. Especially when its a community project like Lemmy and Mastodon. Wikipedia is kinda different as its still a company running it and they just open up mod suppot to the public. The Fediverse is literally users running the services other users use. Maybe pay to remove ads?!?! But adblockers exist so probably not.
Why have ads at all? It's just wasteful and annoying.
Recently, Louis Rossman made an excellent point about advertising. When was the last time you saw and ad and suddenly felt like buying something? How often does that happen? Most of the time, the money spent on ads doesn’t actually do much other than annoy the people who are exposed to the ad. Providing good experiences to the customers is a far more effective way to advertise products or services.
So I can tell you from experience that there's a huge difference in terms of how much of your products you sell by doing advertising versus doing nothing. It's very rare that advertising is designed to take the person who's observing it from "IDK what this is" to "Holy crap I gotta go buy that" -- but building brand recognition, making people aware that your stuff exists, and yes sometimes having them see an ad for something and click on it and buy something, is 100% worth it when it's done right.
I actually do agree with you as to as lot of advertising on the modern internet, though. I think like a lot of areas of human endeavor, online advertising has been overrun by people who genuinely just have no clue what they're doing. Someone works at a company that has a river of money coming in, their job is to buy online ads, so they direct some of the river of money at buying obnoxious ads that do very little except piss people off (and, enable the site where they run to keep operating and paying their people, which is nice). It doesn't accomplish anything for the company they work for and no one notices, and that persists for years, and the internet as a whole is crapped up for everyone in general. :-/
I’m willing to buy the argument that advertising done right is effective. It’s just that I seem to be in none of the target audiences of any company that does any amount of online advertising. I guess I could try living without an adblocker and allowing all the tracking cookies to see if it makes a difference. Actually, I’m pretty sure that would cut my internet usage a lot, so at least that would be positive.
In fact if I see a product being heavily advertised I am less likely to buy it. Not only because it is annoying, but also because I know a significant percentage of the purchase price is just paying for more advertisement instead of actually relating to the quality of the product.
I make a mental note to avoid a company and their products whenever I see an ad. If I want your thing, I will seek it out. You wanna entice me to buy it? Go make your blogpost demonstrating why yours is better than the alternatives I'm looking at.
I kind of hate that the greatest minds on earth are working on creating products on monetizing around the current advertising model.(Ex: Google/Facebook/Amazon etc).
If the advertising model useless or less useful why do we keep doing it ? I think we hate it and that's why we are on Lemmy but most people suck up to ads do buy useless shit. Check out the rise of Temu and Shein.
Honestly the best "ads" I've received have been YouTubers reviews on products. I follow people and they tell me about products related to the subjects I specifically follow them for.
And I don't mean influencers. I follow retro gamers and they occasionally get a product in the mail to review. I follow Amateur Radio operators and they occasionally get radios and antenna products in the mail to review. Foodies and cooks get stuff for the kitchen. Etc. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw an ad and bought it.
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.
Alternately, we can not have advertising, and just donate to our instances... Personally, I'd rather pay a few bucks a month. It's very refreshing to have somewhere on the internet that isn't full of marketing BS.
Really, this is going to come down to individual instance decisions, but at this stage, I'd definitely block any community that had advertising on every thread.
If an instance needs to make money, they may run ads. It’s between them and their local users. I block ads and would rather donate than be on a server forcing ads on their users.
Any federated communities running their own ads I will unsubscribe in a heartbeat.
We could have an instance solely dedicated to advertising and see who signs up.
Just create advertising community and let all advertise on that community alone ? Thats a good idea, kind of like 'deals' but you pay to post there.
I guess my comment was facetious. I don't mind if someone would try to implement it. Of course getting people to stay federated with such a place may be a challenge, but maybe some will want the money.
Ads are up to server admins, as they should be. I imagine most users of lemmy would not be cool with ads though.
We should not think about an advertising model.
you imply that it needs to happen but there are other ways to get the funds. I think it's better to have some 'title' for donnors that also makes it easier to identify bots.