How will this site be making money?
As the site grows I feel this is something that needs to be talked about. Some will say this is for the site owner to worry about, however as other sites have proven this can greatly effect the community depending on how it goes. Reddit and Digg have shown us that investors can easily be the downfall of a website because their one goal is to make money, and will implement things even if they don't know what is making a community good in the first place.
I feel like we could make some suggestions on directions to go. Personally I think making some money off the users is the way to go. Taking donations is a good start and offering something special to people who do. Badges, special patterns, etc. In the long run as traffic builds I don't know if this can support it however.
Does anyone else have ideas? Do those who run the show already have plans on how to start making the site pay?
Also sorry about not tagging the post. I don't know what category this would fit under.
Join the Discussion
[This comment was removed]
I wouldn't be opposed to some sort of sponsored post system (kind of like the ads on Google search). For example, you could pay to have every n th post on the "trending" page of a tribe of your choice (cost depending on tribe popularity) be a post of your choice. I don't think it would be intrusive provided that n was large enough, although I do think these posts would have to have some sort of indicator to show that they're ads.
(Obviously there would need to be some basic restrictions on ad content to stop people putting NSFL stuff on random tribes.)