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 …

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)English
    -1•1 year ago

    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.

    • jecxjoEnglish
      7•1 year ago

      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.

      • @architectOPEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        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.

        • jecxjoEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          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.

          • @architectOPEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Would people pay ? Wiki barely gets by, we have so many models that are ad based but very few subscription based(am I wrong ?)

            • jecxjoEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              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.